Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (43 page)

Such religious vibrancy, so intellectually rich that, consequently, it has avoided the ideologizing of faith, could only have occurred within a multi-confessional state that has proved sturdier than many gave it credit for back in the tumultuous days of 1998, after Suharto’s downfall. Indonesia now boasts an independent media of eleven national television stations and a press that is the freest in Southeast Asia. Because more people were lifted out of poverty in the 1980s and 1990s here than in any other place in the world save for, perhaps, China, Indonesia is poised to be an economic giant of the twenty-first century. Indonesia is positioned to withstand the rigors of decentralization, and, despite its archipelagic nature, hold together because it is united by a common Malay language: Bahasa Indonesia, which, since it is a traders’ tongue not associated with a particular group or island, is embraced enthusiastically by all. And with decentralization comes the potential of applying religious laws differently in each place, according to local traditions, thus further defusing religion itself as a political issue.

Because of the somewhat unexpected success that religious progressives have had against radicals in the democratic environment of the past few years, Indonesian intellectuals are, grudgingly, starting to give Suharto some credit for establishing the basis of a strong modern state, with his promotion of an educated middle class, without which Indonesia could never have held together following his demise. The very students whose demonstrations led immediately to Suharto’s exit were the ones who, when they were younger, benefited from the primary and secondary education
initiatives he started. I have even heard Suharto compared to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and to Park Chung-hee, who built the basis of South Korea’s industrial might in the 1960s and 1970s. Suharto (and Sukarno, too) helped provide Indonesia with a secular nationalism that has been crucial in the battle against religious extremism. Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups like Jemaah Islamiyah, with their strong Yemeni element, still lurk in the interstices between more moderate Islamic organizations, but they are perceived as weak, and that is partly because Suharto’s legacy is not altogether bad.

Whereas Islam arrived on these islands at Aceh, the continuing struggle over the religion’s place in modern life in post-Suharto Indonesia will be fought amid the urban slums and skyscrapers of cities like Jakarta. Greater Jakarta has twenty-three million people by some estimates. With skylines in all directions, it exudes the immensity of São Paulo, and in its lazy red-roofed
kampongs
(houses) and grubby storefronts the ratty edginess of Manila. Cars and motorbikes squirm through its streets in traffic jams as bad as Kolkata’s and worse than almost everyplace else in Asia. During the rainy season as much as a quarter of the city floods.

Yet, the most interesting places to observe Indonesians are at the spanking new malls, built often with ethnic-Chinese money. While constituting only about 4 percent of Indonesia’s population, the Chinese account for well over half of its business dealings. The new malls, packed with Louis Vuitton, Versace, and other designer stores, are the places to observe women in the most fashionable silk
jilbabs
and the most revealing, sophisticated dress. Now that the extremists are at bay, even assuming occasionally spectacular terrorist incidents, the real values’ clash here is not between one brand of Islam and another, but the clash between an Islam ostensibly of the Middle East and the rampant materialism of China. The fact that China is nominally still a communist country is, of course, meaningless. China, and the ethnic-Chinese community here, in particular, represent global capitalism, which constitutes the real threat to Indonesian Islam. Nevertheless, these same Islamists wish China well when it clashes with the United States.

The wild card in these tensions is the environment. Remember that Indonesia lies within a ring of seismic fire. Alyasa Abubakar, the Islamic scholar I met in Banda Aceh, told me that because “people accepted the tsunami as the will of God, there was no chaos afterwards. Because of Islam, people didn’t become insane with grief despite losing many of
their family members. The people here,” he went on, “had faith, unlike the people in New Orleans after Katrina. The social reactions to the two catastrophes could not have been more stark.”

And so an era of natural disasters will, perforce, strengthen Islam. That will only raise the stakes for the continued evolution of the faith, the debate over which is more pulsating in Indonesia than almost anywhere else, precisely because Indonesia is a non-Arab, virtually secular state. The language of the Prophet is not the spoken language here. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is geographically distant, despite the widespread presence of Al Jazeera in people’s homes and the resultant public relations victory of the Gaza Palestinians. Islamic law is applied sparingly and is not always revered. Most importantly, Indonesia is a democracy where people are unafraid of having their thoughts on religion printed, for fear of retribution from either the government or radical groups. Thus, Indonesia provides the level playing field necessary to establish the true vision and philosophical texture of Islam in the twenty-first century. Along with India, Indonesia is emerging as a vibrant, democratic powerhouse. Monsoon Asia will truly be at the heart of things.

I
ndonesia—in particular, the island of Sumatra—and peninsular Malaysia on the opposite side of the Strait of Malacca form the heart of maritime Asia. The Strait of Malacca is the Fulda Gap of the twenty-first-century multi-polar world, the place where almost all of the shipping lanes between the Red Sea and the Sea of Japan converge at the most vital choke point of world commerce; where the spheres of naval influence of India and China meet; where the Indian Ocean joins the western Pacific. The volume of energy-related tanker traffic will grow in the strait by at least 50 percent by 2020, further increasing its importance.

In and of itself, Indonesia, besides being a major oil producer, will remain East Asia’s primary supplier of natural gas for decades. The country’s vast archipelagic nature, its energy resources, its ethnic diversity, predominant Muslim religion, institutional weaknesses, and ultra-strategic location will make it a critical hub of world politics.
¹
History is instructive: Suharto’s consolidation of power in the middle and late 1960s—moving the country in a rightward direction—secured the sea-lanes for the United States, making the war in Vietnam unnecessary, had only we realized it.

I stood again in Banda Aceh, at the entry point of the Strait of Malacca, which is more than five hundred miles in length and two hundred miles wide here at its northern end. But it is only eleven miles across at its heavily congested southern entrance near Singapore, a place made narrower by treacherous shoals and the very volume of ship traffic, from supertankers to small tugs and fishing boats all vying for space.
²
Here geography
rules. All the advances in technology since antiquity have thus far done little to reduce commercial dependence on this waterway. Of the fourteen nations constituting East and Southeast Asia, twelve are highly dependent on Middle Eastern oil, which mainly comes through here.
³
The Strait of Malacca drives home the point that whereas the Atlantic and the Pacific are “open oceans,” the Indian is “semi-enclosed,” which is what makes it so vulnerable and, therefore, for yet one more reason, so important.
⁴
In fact, in earlier times the very terms “Indian Ocean” and “South China Sea” were not used; rather, in the minds of local merchants, the waters that had to be negotiated constituted a series of separate seas stretching from East Africa all the way to Indonesia’s Spice Islands close to New Guinea.
⁵

Three quarters of the way down the strait on the Malaysia side, not far from Singapore, is the old emporium of Malacca itself, at the halfway point between the Indian and Chinese trading networks, which were themselves dictated by the reversible monsoonal winds: ships could wait out one monsoon in the town of Malacca and then take advantage of another. In the late Middle Ages, Malacca constituted an Islamic maritime city-state, a thriving Malay market town dependent on Indian Gujarati traders and the protection of the Chinese, with whom it had cemented a relationship following the visit of the eunuch admiral Zheng He. The Portuguese overran Malacca in 1511, and for the next 130 years used it as a headquarters for their monopolistic trading empire. So exorbitant was the Portuguese tax on merchants that many traders simply redirected their ships to other ports, undercutting Portugal’s attempts at domination.
⁶
Forced out of Malacca by a trio of the Portuguese, the Chinese, and Hindu Tamil merchants, the Muslim Gujaratis from India more or less en masse shifted their business across the strait to Aceh, to where they imported Indian cloth in exchange for pepper.

Pepper, the “pungent berry of a tropical vine,” which thrives on the wet-and-dry tropical monsoon climate, was the main commercial prize here, just as frankincense was at the other end of the ocean, and just as oil is today. Labor intensive, hard to produce, and craved by all from ancient Rome to China, black pepper
(piper nigrum
—“the true pepper”) was known in the way of frankincense for its medicinal properties, as a heart and kidney stimulant. Its importance cannot be overestimated. And northern Sumatra—Aceh—was full of it.
⁷
In fact, a main reason the Portuguese failed to take over the pepper trade on Sumatra, despite their
perch on Malacca, was that the Gujaratis collaborated with their fellow Muslim Acehnese to develop an alternate supply network to the Red Sea via India’s Coromandel coast and Iran.
⁸
While in the late sixteenth century the Portuguese were transporting 1.2 million pounds of pepper annually around the Cape of Good Hope, about four million pounds were being transported via the Red Sea. This was when Aceh’s maritime kingdom was at its height. Under Sultan Ala-al-din Riayat Shah al-Kahar (1537–71), Aceh was the most powerful kingdom in the Malay world, with international connections as far west as Ottoman Turkey.
⁹
Under a later sultan, Ala-uddin, the first fleet of the British East India Company sailed into Aceh in 1602.

Roughly in the same period, in the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese were essentially ousted from the East Indies by the Dutch, done in by naval sieges and blockades, and by their own narrow-minded trading practices. The Dutch, greeted first as liberators, went on to develop a trading system just as authoritarian and yet more comprehensive than that of the Portuguese. The Dutch became masters not only of the trade routes, but also of the “commercial agriculture” of much of Indonesia’s interior.
¹⁰
Given that the Dutch and Portuguese went to war over the Malacca Strait, and that the British in 1786 established a foothold on the small island of Penang on the Malay Peninsula—aided by a trading system far more liberal than that of their European competitors—the strait in the early modern era lay at the heart of great power struggles. Yet the recognition that a violent enmity between Britain and Holland was unsustainable led the two powers into an accommodation in the 1824 Treaty of London, which stipulated that the British would restrict themselves to the Malay Peninsula and the Dutch to the Indonesian archipelago.
¹¹
Thus, the political map of our own era began to take shape.