January 26, 2017
Recent terror attacks in Indonesia and
Malaysia, orchestrated by local groups with ties to international terror
organization ISIS, have raised warnings of growing radicalization in both
Muslim majority countries. The risk is rising not only on the fringes of society
but also among the mainstream public, witnessed in the growth of Islamic groups
that have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, and a lurch towards more
conservative positions taken by prominent political parties.
The battle over religious interpretation is
not new in either country. In fact, it has been a constant since each country
gained its independence from colonial rule. In Indonesia, the world’s largest
Muslim nation, there has long been a fault-line between what the American
anthropologist Clifford Geertz first identified as the santri, who adhere to
orthodox forms of Islam, and the abangan, who practice more syncretic versions
of the faith.
A number of new factors, however, are
contributing to an increasingly intolerant trend. One has been the rise of
Salafism, a conservative, often puritanical, movement within Sunni Islam
originating mainly from Saudi Arabia. In Southeast Asia, despite certain
differences, the term is frequently used interchangeably with Wahhabism, a
branch of the Islam often associated with ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Despite Salafi movements in Indonesia and
Malaysia in the early twentieth century, the sect arrived with greater force in
the 1980s, when scholars educated in Saudi Arabia returned home to spread their
learning. This was fuelled by growing Saudi hegemony in the Islamic world,
boosted by oil riches and by the supposed threat posed by political Shi’a Islam
after the 1979 revolution in Iran.
This is, of course, not to say that all
Salafists endorse jihad or condone terrorism. But its influence has “over time
contributed to a more conservative, more intolerant atmosphere,” said Sidney
Jones, the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in
Jakarta. Indeed, the Jakarta Post reported in September that the Salafi
movement is gaining ground in the public sphere through strategic use of
Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, a professor of
political science at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, said that Malaysian Muslims
are “surely but slowly becoming radicalized”, highlighting the teaching of
Salafi-orientated curricula in schools as a cause. “People don’t realize it,
but this way of thinking has now become mainstream.”
The internationalization of Islam, and
specifically transnational terror group-inspired violence in the name of jihad,
has added a volatile element to the mix. That was seen on January 14, 2016,
when ISIS-linked local terrorists detonated explosions and ripped gunfire in
downtown Jakarta, leaving seven people dead and dozens injured. In Malaysia, the
first confirmed ISIS attack took place in June when eight people were injured
after a bomb exploded in a nightclub in the town of Puchong.
The attacks raised alarm that pan-Islamism
is working to transplant local identities with a commitment to a more puritanical,
cross-border approach to Ummah, the Islamic community. It is thus no wonder
that liberal Islamic organizations are keen to stress localized, nationalist
forms of Islam as a counter-narrative. Those moderate voices, however, are
often being tuned out by radical ideology spread over social media. Recent
research shows that ISIS supporters send an average of 2.8 million messages per
day to global followers over Twitter.
In 2015, Indonesia’s largest Muslim
organization, Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), launched a campaign to counter Jihadi
ideology, replete with films that underscored local traditions of non-violence,
tolerance and secularism. “The spread of a shallow understanding of Islam
renders this situation critical,” said Mustofa Bisri, NU’s spiritual leader.
Yahya Cholil Staquf, NU’s Supreme Council
general secretary, claims that Islamic teaching influences extremism, a view
rejected by some religious leaders who blame socioeconomic issues as the real
problem. He said that literal readings of provisions within fiqh (Islamic
jurisprudence) allow for acts such as slavery and executions, and that a
serious thoughtful debate must be held over how Islamic texts are read and
their place in Indonesian society.
Such debates are not new, however.
Intellectuals such as Chandra Muzaffar of Malaysia and Azyumardi Azra of
Indonesia, to name just two, have long argued that universal values like
freedom, democracy, and modernity can be compatible with classic Islamic
teachings. More conservative voices argue to the contrary. Open discussion,
however, can be difficult in Indonesia.
Irwan Johan, a vice speaker for the
Provincial Legislature of Aceh, said recently that despite a “silent majority”
who think the semi-autonomous province has gone too far in its imposition of Sharia
law – which it introduced in 2001, the only Indonesian province to do so – most
people are “not brave enough to say anything.” He said since politicians could
be voted out and individuals ostracized from communities, “Everybody became a
To be sure, other factors such as poverty
and social alienation are relevant to the debate. One long-held explanation for
Malaysia’s more moderate stance relative to other Muslim-majority countries is
its comparatively low poverty rate, officially at just one percent. Radical
groups have successfully used notions of social justice in their recruitment
drives in poorer Muslim countries. But with economic inequality rising in many
Muslim areas of Southeast Asia, such messages could gain deeper resonance.
In 2016, for example, Indonesia’s extremist
Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) established charity operations in areas where
people had been evicted from their homes as part of a drive to ‘clean up’
Jakarta led by governor Basuki Tjahaja ‘Ahok’ Purnama, a Christian of Chinese
descent. While the FPI have “no particular interest in social justice”,
according to Ian Wilson, who researches Indonesian politics at Australia’s
Murdoch University in Australia, “what is surprising… is how fast young people
in these neighbourhoods have become sucked into FPI ideology.”
Viewpoints often associated with the
radical fringe, however, surprisingly resonate more widely in both Indonesia
and Malaysia. In 2013, the US-based Pew Research Centre found in a worldwide
survey that 72 percent of Indonesians favoured the introduction of Sharia law.
In Malaysia, 86 percent of respondents said they did, higher than the
percentages recorded in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Egypt. Of the survey’s
respondents who favoured Sharia, 60 percent of Malaysians and 48 percent of
Indonesians thought stoning to death was an appropriate penalty for adultery.