Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (41 page)

Indeed, I witnessed throngs of Muslim Indonesian schoolchildren, the girls in
jilbabs
, flocking to Borobudur, a monumental, multi-terraced Buddhist temple complex in central Java built on the scale of Angkor Wat in Cambodia: its 1200-year-old gray stone blocks stained black and ocher with age, its very symmetry deeply mystical. The intricacy of Borobudur’s relief work bears testimony to the richness of a culture that long preceded Islam here, and one with which Islam is hard-pressed to compete. I saw the same experience repeated for Muslim Indonesian schoolchildren at the Hindu temples of Prambanan, close to Borobudur. The religious history of imperial Java cannot be defeated, only added to.

Thus, Aceh, although the most Arabian of Indonesian regions, completely lacks the hard atmospheric edge of the Middle East. This is helped by the fact that despite hundreds of years of often tenuous Dutch rule, there is little sense of mass resentment against the West: little sense of having been historically and culturally blighted by foreign intrusion. The age-old hegemony of this island chain was usually more Javanese
than European. Javanese imperialism was itself a protective armor against the European variety.

Yet “this could be the beginning of the end of our freedom,” worried Aguswandi, an intense and dynamic thirty-one-year-old intellectual and program officer for an Indonesian nongovernmental organization in Banda Aceh, who, like many Indonesians, has only one name. “Sharia law here is intensifying and hijacking post-tsunami Aceh,” he told me, explaining, “Why did the tsunami happen? The religious leaders have asked themselves this question. It happened, they have concluded, because the Acehnese were not devout enough. The women were not covered enough, and the foreigners were drinking beer. So the tsunami has had a reactionary effect, even though it brought here the cosmopolitan influences of Western NGOs.”

Aguswandi went on: “I first thought that the global influences would win out. After all, Aceh right after the tsunami was the counter-image of Iraq. How can there be a clash of civilizations when you had Jewish money given to Christian charities to build schools in a Muslim town? This is the future, I thought, an Islam with compatibility: a tropical Islam, where it is too hot and humid to be covered.”

Continuing in the same vein, Aguswandi told me that helping matters was the very nature of the historical conflict between Aceh and the capital of Jakarta on Java. “There is nothing Islamic about the conflict. It is all about the center versus the periphery in a post-colonial setting, so in and of itself the conflict works against radical Islam.” Aceh’s geographical situation at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra, jutting out into the Bay of Bengal toward India and Sri Lanka at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca—and crammed between sea and rugged highlands—makes it an easily definable region, distinct from the rest of Indonesia, which contrarily is oriented toward Southeast Asia and the South Seas. For much of its history Aceh was a wealthy sultanate immersed in the Indian Ocean trading system. Its guerrilla struggle against the centralizing hegemony of Javanese Jakarta under both Sukarno and later Suharto was very similar to the struggle it had waged earlier against Dutch Batavia (Jakarta’s former name).

But the tsunami brought an abrupt end to this seemingly age-old struggle, and with the newfound security, piracy was reduced dramatically in the Strait of Malacca. The tsunami “killed a lot of the bad guys,” one Western observer told me. Or as Yusni Saby explained, with so many
people dead and the whole dynamic of Aceh changed by the arrival of international relief organizations, there was, for the time being, nothing left to fight for. It was like the biblical story of the flood with Noah’s Ark. It wiped away the previous world.

The Acehnese guerrillas had fought the Jakarta government for nearly three decades, but a peace deal was signed in Helsinki only eight months after the tsunami. Now the former guerrillas, known as the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM), the Aceh Freedom Movement, have been elected in many Aceh districts through a democratic process operating within Indonesian central authority. This is all the more remarkable given that in 1998 when Suharto was deposed, following the Asian financial crisis of the previous year, many analysts assumed that the Indonesian state would break up with Aceh leading the way. But, improbably, the far-flung archipelago held together and then the tsunami gave centralization a boost by ending the war.

“Indonesia is not an artificial and failed state like Iraq or Pakistan,” Aguswandi said; rather, “it is a messy empire” of seventeen thousand islands, in which Islamic parties are incorporated into a weak democratic system, sort of like the way they are in Turkey, even as the system itself tries to grope its way toward an organized decentralization. In this way, regions like Muslim Aceh in the west and Christian and animist Papua thousands of miles away to the east are self-governing within Jakarta’s essentially imperial domain. “For centuries it was all about Java, where half of Indonesia’s people live,” explained Aguswandi, “but now it is all about Aceh, Papua, Kalimantan [Indonesian Borneo],” and so forth.

Whereas Indonesia a decade ago was going in the direction of a failed state, the tsunami was the catalytic event that pushed the Aceh peace agreement across the finish line. Banda Aceh now has little atmosphere of tension. There are no guns in people’s houses. But Aguswandi suddenly turned grave and negative as he told me, “The NGO economic bubble here is about to burst and a dangerous vacuum is being created that could be filled by Islamic radicalism and chaos.”

In the tsunami’s aftermath the United Nations, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development poured in, inflating prices, leading to a construction boom in Banda Aceh, a town of close to 300,000 that constitutes a vast sprawl of cruddy houses and storefronts. In 2008 inflation was 42 percent. “The NGOs provided disaster relief and built houses for people,” explained Wiratmadinata of the Aceh NGO
Forum, “but not enough was done in the way of infrastructure development. Emergency aid was given, but the building blocks for a local economy are still lacking.” Tourism is not the answer because of Sharia law. Meanwhile, the NGOs were dramatically downsizing in 2009 and 2010, and the region—where the majority of people are fishermen or farmers—could be left destitute.

In Pidie, three hours south of Banda Aceh, a region of banana and chili pepper farms in the shadow of volcanoes, I met a former GAM guerrilla, thirty-year-old Suadi Sulaiman, who looked strikingly like Barack Obama. He took me to his humble home behind a storefront and, with no prompting, told me that he was against terrorism and thought that the suicide bombings in Iraq were
haram
(forbidden by Islam). When I asked him why he had left school and joined the GAM in 1999, he spoke to me about the glorious independent Aceh sultanates of yore and the wars against the Portuguese and the Dutch. He went on about the lack of capital despite the presence of oil and mineral deposits, and about the injustice of the Jakarta government. But as I probed further, it turned out that his anger over the lack of freedom and development boiled down to his not finding a job in the crucial period when he enlisted as an Aceh freedom fighter. Now the economy was better and he was running for a seat in the local legislature in the upcoming elections. He supported “self-government, but not independence.” He worried that the departure of the NGOs would return the area to the situation it was in when he could not find a job.

As Aguswandi maintained, the initial flowering of cosmopolitanism that came in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami will depart with the NGOs, even as radical Islamists are taking advantage of the political process. This fear was echoed by Fuad Jabali, the deputy director for academic affairs at Jakarta’s State Islamic University. “Poverty provides a window for radicalism,” Jabali explained, especially in a place like Aceh, which has seen boom-and-bust development. Radicals use democracy but essentially see it as a tool of Western hegemony. “For the radicals, consultation is not for all the people, since you cannot have the corrupt choosing the direction of the state; and because the society is filled with morally corrupt people, in the eyes of the radicals, only the pure should be allowed to choose, or to vote.”

But Jabali took care to note that such an exclusivist vision is much more a product of the Middle Eastern experience than of the Southeast Asian one. Again, we are back to the stark difference that the
anthropologist Geertz notes: of an Islam that in the brown deserts of the Middle East swallows up a whole culture, and an Islam in a lush, green tropical setting that is layered above and between many centuries of Hindu and Buddhist cultures. While the Middle East enjoys centrality both in the Western news media and in the all-important facts of its being the land of the Prophet and the Arabic language he spoke, nevertheless, in demographic terms, the heart of the religion is in the Indian Subcontinent and particularly archipelagic Southeast Asia. While Western democracy is a very contentious issue in the Middle East, associated as it is with Iraq and the vision of former president George W. Bush, in places like India and Indonesia in South and Southeast Asia, where half a billion Muslims actually live—compared to 300 million in the Arab world—Western democracy is simply beyond reproach. “In Indonesia,” said Jabali, a madrassa graduate, “anyone who advocates an Islamic state over democracy will not be supported at the polls. Here maybe five percent of the voters support radical groups like the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia [Assembly of Holy Warriors] and the Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia [Party of Freedom], which advocate a caliphate, and only ten percent are in favor of dismembering the hands of thieves.” The democracy that Bush tried to build violently in Iraq is developing peacefully in Indonesia without his help.

What is so striking about Indonesia, and Aceh in particular, precisely because it is the least syncretic and therefore the most Islamic part of the archipelago, is how, without any prompting, Muslim scholars champion a liberal vision. “We are content here,” said Saby. “This is not the Middle East where you fight for the sake of fighting in the name of God. Religion should not focus on enemies. We have good relations with Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and others. Education and economic empowerment—not ideology—will improve religion.” He laments the
pesantren
(madrassas) that focus purely on what separates Muslims from other peoples.
*
These were the schools that V. S. Naipaul, while traveling through Indonesia more than a generation ago, said did “little more” than teach “the poor to be poor.” Writing in 1981, from the standpoint of Indonesia, he observes that Islam

Naipaul’s point is certainly relevant to political Islam in parts of the Middle East, but in Indonesia the battle had veered in a different direction since his visit. The
pesantren
he visited do exist, but there are many more throughout the country that teach a broader interpretation of the faith. “Here in Indonesia,” Saby told me, “religion is not black or white, but has many grays.” Alyasa Abubakar, another Islamic scholar and colleague of Saby at the same institute, informed me that despite the Koran and the Hadith, “geography has given Indonesia a different interpretation of religion. Muslims in the Middle East,” he went on, “are obsessed with their glorious past, which means little to us. We are under no such burden.” He then ticked off the names of women who were powerful figures in the Aceh sultanate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “Safiatuddin, Kamalatsyah, Inayatsyah,” and so forth.

Then there is former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, also known as Gus Dur, the grand old man of Islamic pluralism, born in 1940. “Gus” is a Muslim honorific and “Dur” an affectionate shortening of his name. I met him in his Jakarta office, a dark cavernous series of rooms filled with men crouched on chairs smoking. They directed me with their hands toward the inner sanctum. Gus Dur is nearly blind. He sat in the dark, his eyes closed, wearing a traditional batik shirt and tapping on an empty desk hard with his fingers, from side to side. In such gloomy surroundings in the Middle East, filled with chain-smoking males, I had heard many a rant over the years against Israel and the West. But Indonesia is different.

“Radical groups are weak here,” Gus Dur told me. “This is the last breath of radicalism before it will be liquidated,” he continued, partially lifting his eyelids for emphasis. “Formal Islam is not in demand, unlike in the Middle East. Only in the Middle East has the religion been politicized. With Hamas there is only shouting. The initiatives belong to the Jews, who are working in a systematic way to create a future.” He went on: “We are like Turkey, not like the Arabs, or Pakistan. In Pakistan, Islam works against nationalism. Here Islam is a confirmation of [secular] nationalism,” that, in turn, encompasses a Buddhist and Hindu past. “There is no longer a threat of disintegration. Though many islands, we
are basically one nation. Islam is dynamic in Indonesia.” Despite the absoluteness of the Koran, “Islam is not yet finished, it is still in dialogue with itself and with other religions …” He continued thus in his peculiar rambling, progressive, preachy, and visionary manner.
*

His remarks were not mere platitudes. It was striking how throughout my month-long visit to the country, people kept bringing up spontaneously the necessity of having good relations with Jews and other religious groups. Moreover, Indonesia captured, tried, and executed the terrorists who bombed the discotheque in Bali in 2002, killing more than two hundred people, even as it went on to stabilize its democratic system; nor was there a negative public reaction to the execution of the three terrorists. If the first term of President George W. Bush was about the war on terrorism and the second about spreading freedom and democracy, then Indonesia is the world’s best example of what Bush advocated, in the same sequence, although his administration often was too preoccupied to notice.