Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia
Reviewed by Sadanand Dhume
Posted April 4, 2008
Two years after the brouhaha over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, the world is bracing for another round of Islam-related turmoil. The feared flashpoint: a film by the flamboyant Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders that links violence by contemporary Muslims with violent passages in the Koran. Mr. Wilders’ predicament—he lives under armed guard and can’t find a television station that will air his film—symbolizes the rapid inroads made by radical Islam, or Islamism, in Europe. To put it bluntly, thanks to an influx of immigrants from the Muslim world, the famously iconoclastic Dutch have less freedom to criticize religion today than they did a generation ago.
Half a world away, the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, faces not dissimilar troubles. Long synonymous with a gentle folk Islam that was remarkably relaxed toward non-Muslims, Indonesia has struggled since the mid-1990s with outbreaks of religious violence. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John Sidel, a professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics, sets out to analyze and explain the reasons.
Mr. Sidel traces the roots of religious conflict in Indonesia to Dutch rule. He contends that the Dutch system of pillarization, in which Catholics and Protestants developed their own religious schools, associations and political parties, was mimicked in Indonesia to a striking degree. A person’s religious identity—Catholic, Protestant, nominal Muslim or orthodox Muslim—determined his schooling and, ultimately, his access to power through the legislature, the civil service or the military.
Against this backdrop, the advent of General Suharto’s New Order regime in 1966 led to a deepening of Islamic piety and a gradual shift toward orthodoxy. Complicit in the slaughter of 500,000 suspected communists from 1965 to 1966, the New Order quickly took steps to inoculate the country against a communist comeback. It forced Indonesians to declare their religious faith, expanded religious instruction in state schools and banned interfaith marriages. Figures on religious education capture the scale of change. In 1942 Indonesia’s 1,870-odd pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) taught 140,000 students. By 1997, the year before Suharto stepped down, the number of pesantren had swelled to nearly 9,400 and their students to 1,770,000.
The combination of religious instruction in state schools and the mushrooming of Islamic schools helps explain what Mr. Sidel, quoting the scholar Gregory Starrett, calls the evolution of the Indonesian understanding of Islam from “an unexamined and unexaminable way of life” to “a coherent system of practices and beliefs.” To the casual observer, these changes first became apparent in the mid-1980s, in the profusion of headscarves on college campuses, in the prayer calluses on the foreheads of the devout, in the shiny-domed mosques that sprung up in villages, towns and cities across the archipelago. Over time these pious and newly assertive Muslims began to jostle for power with traditional secular Muslim and Christian elites.
There is much to commend in this book. It touches upon the link between Islamic piety, especially of a strictly scriptural sort imported from the Arab world, and outbreaks of religious violence. It emphasizes the importance of conspiracy theories in mobilizing mobs, and the pivotal role played by so-called professional Muslims: Islamic teachers in state schools, functionaries in the ministry of religion and the propagandists of the Islamist media. Mr. Sidel’s painstaking research shows how trivialities—say the sound of a motorcycle outside a mosque during prayers—can spark a full scale riot. His willingness to tackle something as inherently imprecise as identity is refreshing. His observation that Indonesia’s jihadists belong to loose networks of like-minded activists rather than to the strictly hierarchical command structures portrayed by some of the more enthusiastic terrorism experts is astute.
Ultimately, however, this book’s central thesis is unconvincing. Mr. Sidel accurately details the profound (and oNGOing) changes in Indonesian society over the past three decades. Nonetheless he traces Muslim-Christian violence neither to growing Muslim assertiveness nor to the birth of an Islamist movement dedicated to ordering both society and the state according to the medieval precepts of sharia law. Instead he plumps, somewhat bizarrely, for the notion that it is not hardened religious identity (to borrow his prolix term), but anxiety about a perceived threat to this identity that fuels the riots, pogroms and jihads of the book’s title. Overall, this theory, along with an elaborate typology to distinguish between riots, pogroms and jihads, feels forced.
In a similar vein, Mr. Sidel dismisses the idea of an organized Islamist movement in Indonesia and suggests that the worst of the country’s troubles are over. “Jihad in recent years in Indonesia should be understood not as evidence of an ascendant, insurgent Islam but as a symptom of the weakness of those who have tried to mobilize in its name.” This apparent profundity can appear plausible if you meditate upon it long enough, unless you happen to consider the obvious fact that the truly weak—Falun Gong practitioners or Burmese democracy activists or Pakistani Christians—aren’t typically in the business of shipping armed men to battle their opponents, or of organizing coordinated bombing campaigns.
Fortunately there is an explanation of both the upsurge in religious violence in Indonesia starting in the mid-1990s and the relative lull of the past three years that does not require a breathtaking display of mental gymnastics. Presidents seen as Islamist-friendly (Suharto after 1990, or his successor, B.J. Habibie) or weak (Abdurrahman Wahid) tend to embolden rioters and jihadists alike. Stronger presidents with nonsectarian credentials—Megawati Sukarnoputri and the incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—have the opposite effect.
The international stance toward Islamist extremism in general and jihadist violence in particular has also played a role. Before 9/11 and the Bali bombings of 2002, Indonesia and its Islamists were largely ignored. Since then, heightened attention from the international press along with arms and training for Detachment 88, the highly skilled antiterrorism unit within the Indonesian police, have broken up plots before they could be executed and diminished the prospects of large scale religious violence. Unfortunately, though, violent Islamism remains only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It is the nonviolent yet unrelenting pursuit of the same extreme ends—through elections, administrative fiat, and a sophisticated education and propaganda effort—that will ensure that Indonesia’s troubles with Islamism, like the world’s, aren’t about to disappear any time soon.
Sadanand Dhume is a Washington, D.C. based writer and journalist, and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist.
