The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (29 page)

At the same moment, partly as a result of the Dutch efforts to supplant their religion, Indonesian Islam was undergoing a revival, and during the late 1800s, Muslims began to violently oppose the Dutch, reinforcing the centuries-old story that Christianity was the oppressor’s religion, and Islam the means of liberation.

The Japanese
occupied Indonesia throughout World War II. Two days after Japan’s global surrender to Allied forces, Indonesia declared its independence from the Netherlands. That was August 17, 1945. But Indonesia’s people struggled for four years against their colonial masters before gaining their freedom. During the struggle, Islamic fighters fought alongside nationalists to liberate the country. When
the Dutch recognized a free Indonesia at last, the country’s first president, Sukarno, faced the daunting prospect of forging a single nation out of the populace of more than seventeen thousand islands.

Much to the dismay of many devout Muslims, Sukarno decided against the formation of an Islamic state. Instead, he adopted Pancasila, a political program based on five principles: “belief in one
supreme God, humanitarianism, nationalism, consultative democracy, and social justice.” Indonesia’s motto became “Unity in Diversity,” and Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and initially Confucianism were all state-approved religions.

The Islamic militants who had fought alongside the nationalist Sukarno to help him win the war against the Dutch were enraged at this turn of events. Under
the leadership of one of Sukarno’s former allies, Sekarmadji Maridjan Kartosuwiryo (an erstwhile follower of Gandhi), some militants formed a group called Dar-ul-Islam, the Land of Islam, which went underground after independence and kept fighting against the nascent state—and against the Christians who now enjoyed state-sanctioned religious freedom. Ibnu Ahmad’s grandfather, father, and uncle
all eventually joined Dar-ul-Islam. From generation to generation, this early anticolonial struggle would develop into the battle against the neo-imperial,
neocolonial West, and the new fight would fall to sons such as Ibnu Ahmad.

Sukarno ruled the country for nearly twenty years, until, in 1966, after a failed coup attempt, he fell from power and his former subordinate, Major General Suharto,
rose in his stead. Staunchly pro-Western and anti-Communist, President Suharto became a cold war darling of Nixon and Kissinger; his mid-1960s pogrom against alleged Communists left at least five hundred thousand dead.
⁷
(And militant Islamists manned Suharto’s death squads—a dirty open secret of Indonesian history.)
⁸
Since converting to a state-approved religion prevented people from being charged
as godless Communists, many Indonesians did, and religion consequently became more important in their lives than it had been for their forebears. Ostensibly to combat communism, the state outlawed the Chinese practice of Confucianism; most Chinese turned to Christianity instead. During the 1960s, thousands of Chinese chose to be baptized as Catholics and Protestants. These numbers laid the foundation
for a broader religious awakening, and the shift toward charismatic and muscular Christianity that would contribute to religion’s outpacing ethnicity as the primary mark of identity.

While the Christian reawakening took place mostly among the middle-aged, its Islamic counterpart was really a youth movement. Particularly on college campuses, during the 1970s, religion became a way to organize
socially under the oppressive grip of Suharto. During the 1980s, following the Iranian Revolution, a groundswell of Islamic devotion swept Indonesia, as elsewhere. Only a generation earlier, many Muslims had looked down upon praying five times a day as antimodern; by the late 1980s, praying, and other forms of public devotion such as head scarves, had grown fashionable. By the 1990s, President Suharto,
the staunch anti-Communist, needed religion to bolster his waning authority and his strained relations with the military. He built mosques and prayer halls in villages and schools, went on the hajj, promoted Islamic education and scholars, and placed Muslims, instead of Christians, in high military positions. Yet his signs of outward devotion did little to undo the corruption of his government.
In 1997, an economic crisis tore through Southeast Asia as Thailand unpegged its currency, the baht, from the U.S. dollar; the tumbling economy set off a financial domino effect throughout the region. The crisis, also called the Asian economic flu, triggered the collapse of
Indonesia’s currency, the rupiah, as well, and in 1998, after widespread rioting, Suharto was forced to resign. His decades-long
grip on a strong central government suddenly collapsed. In the ensuing political vacuum, there arose the question of who would hold power and by what authority. All sorts of groups long silenced by the absolute rule of Sukarno and Suharto seized the chance to speak out. This new populism led to religious strife—a pattern similar to what would happen one year later in Nigeria, when military
rule ended and Christians and Muslims began to compete for political advantage. So, too, in Indonesia, religious identity became the arena in which rival groups began to compete for newfound political power.

From Jakarta to the outlying islands in the east of the archipelago, where, due to the legacy of Dutch Protestant missionaries, Christians and Muslims were more evenly divided than elsewhere,
rival gangs and militias sprang up on both sides. In the name of defending Christianity or Islam, they vied for dominion over markets, neighborhoods, and local governments. Yet this competition was fueled not only by local conditions; the worldwide revivals in both religions compounded the problem. On the eastern island of Sulawesi, for instance, Christians had begun to use loudspeakers outside
of churches
⁹
(and mobile-phone offices) to reach their flock, as the Muslims did outside mosques. The two were vying for the airwaves in the thousand-year-old question of whose prayer had the right to be louder. Both were building larger, fancier places of worship as emblems of their power—emblems that became the first targets once the bloodletting began.

This competition over religion fit easily
on top of centuries-old animosities. On Sulawesi, for example, Christians were poorer than their Muslim neighbors and had been for a hundred years. While their Muslim neighbors fished along the coast, and gained access to global trade routes, the isolated Christians farmed crops such as rice, crookneck winter squash, cucumber, Chinese eggplant, and peppers.
¹⁰
In short, Christians saw their coastal
neighbors as greedy; Muslims saw the Christians as lazy.

The world’s demand for chocolate made things worse. Much of the world’s cacao crop comes from Indonesia, and in the 1990s, its price exploded. To grow cacao on Sulawesi, Muslims began to buy up traditionally Christian land. The envious Christians could not afford
not
to sell; even if they kept their land and harvested the cacao themselves,
they did not
have the means of competing in the global marketplace. Resentment grew over the green seedpods, and soon, along with newfound democracy, the price of chocolate would help to fuel a local power struggle between Muslims and Christians, and men such as Ibnu Ahmad would rush in to fight under the banner of global jihad.

More than four hundred churches
in Indonesia have been bombed, burned, or forced to close by Islamic militants in recent years. It is virtually impossible for Christians to build new churches in Muslim areas. Under a law instituted in 2006, Christians may not open a new church unless certain conditions are met: there must be at least ninety church members living in the neighborhood, sixty Muslims in the neighborhood must sign
a petition in favor of the new church, and the government must issue a permit. Needless to say, the government rarely does so. The law has widespread support from most of Indonesia’s Islamic leaders, both conservative and moderate. Even moderates argue that in a Muslim country, freedom of religion cannot mean the right to preach to whomever you want. “Christianity and Islam are both expansionist
religions,” said Din Syamsuddin, the chairman of Muhammadiya, a mainstream political and religious party with thirty million members. “Their aim is to grow.” Proselytizing creates competition, and in Indonesia, that competition leads to violence.

In lieu of church buildings, many Christians gather to worship in houses, malls, and high-end Chinese restaurants such as Yen Yen in Jakarta, where
the Reverend Ruyandi Hutasoit, a fifty-six-year-old urologist turned evangelist, walked among a floor full of well-heeled ethnic Chinese, many of them clutching Louis Vuitton purses, to preach one Sunday evening in May 2006. Hutasoit, who is not aligned with a particular denomination, preaches a version of the prosperity gospel based on Success Motivation International, a program developed by Paul
J. Meyer, a motivational speaker from Waco, Texas.

“This is the wheel of life,” he said, drawing a large circle on a white board and lancing it with spokes labeled “Wealth,” “Health,” and “Hygiene.” Hutasoit follows the plan himself. Upon entering the restaurant, he had
swept past me to go brush his teeth; an aide told me, “He is very tidy and clean.” The plan, the reverend said, made it possible
for him to play golf twice a week, to continue to perform urological surgery, to start a Christian political party called the Prosperous Peace Party 2001, and to run for president in 2004, on a platform of increasing the number of Christians in Indonesia from roughly 9 percent to half of the population. He lost. Five years later, in the 2009 presidential and legislative elections, his party won
less than 2 percent of the vote. “If we don’t struggle with our faith, we are lost,” Hutasoit said. “We will conquer Goliath.”

For many of Indonesia’s conservative Muslims, Hutasoit is Public Enemy Number One. Having survived attempts on his life, he is frequently accused of
Kristianisasi
, or “Christianization,” a controversial concept with a history dating back to the arrival of the Portuguese
ex-crusaders. Christianization refers to the (real and imagined) effort to make Indonesian society Christian—and hence Western—by converting its citizens to the Gospel. Indonesian Muslims grew fearful of such an effort half a century ago, with the arrival of American groups such as Campus Crusade for Christ International, an evangelical mission founded by Bill and Vonette Bright at UCLA in 1951.
At the time, CCC—which professes a mission to reach the entire world with the Gospel—proselytized aggressively among Muslims. Today, Christianization provides a ready source of fear for conservatives looking to whip up the need to defend Islam, and Hutasoit is their bogeyman.

In the eighties, the pastor started an evangelical seminary, a health clinic, and an insane asylum founded on the message
of the Great Commission. Young preachers, as well as sick and mentally ill people, came to the compound to attend the seminary and to be healed. After the economy collapsed in 1997, his organization filled to bursting with new members, as Indonesians turned to religion for security and stability. This still happens, an aide told me; when oil prices spike and people cannot afford the fuel they
need, new converts appear. Hutasoit’s goal was to send his young preachers, some former Muslims, into the 10/40 Window.

One night in 1999, a mob set Hutasoit’s seminary on fire. As the students tried to flee, the mob cut them down with machetes. On his laptop, the pastor directed an aide to show me a PowerPoint presentation with photographs used for fund-raising. In one snapshot, a young man
named Sariman, a former Muslim, lay dead on the ground, his neck slit open like a fish gill. “We have many martyrs. Sariman is just the tip of the iceberg,”
the aide said. The attacks had an unintended effect: they attracted converts. “Because we’re being persecuted, the more you press us, the bigger our faith becomes,” the aide said. Herein lies one of the most striking enigmas about religion:
faith grows faster under pressure. In America, for instance, Islam enjoyed a growth spurt after 9/11. The inverse occurred in Indonesia. According to Hutasoit’s aide, 9/11 was “a boomerang for Indonesia.” Still, Hutasoit felt that the American government had failed Indonesia’s Christians—making such an effort at rapprochement with Muslim leaders over the past decade, while having little to do with
Christian ones. “For persecution, we get nothing,” he said. “All America’s money goes to Muslims, because they want to make good relations with them.” Hutasoit had recently gone to New York City and visited the Foundation Center, which provides people with information about applying for various grants. He’d counted almost no secular organizations willing to give money to persecuted Christians,
but plenty ready to fund different Islamic interests. Although persecution in Indonesia was widespread, much of it took place on a local, not a national level, Hutasoit said, which made it harder to see. One recent case in the Islamic heartland of West Java, with its history of powerful Muslim sultanates dating back to the sixteenth century, had received little international attention outside Christian
media. Three female evangelists, Pastor Rebekka Zakaria and her two lay assistants, Ratna Bangun and Eti Pangesti, who belonged to the Christian Church of Camp David, had been charged with running a church out of one woman’s home, which was illegal. According to local authorities, they thus had violated the 2002 Child Protection Act, which forbids missionaries from preaching to children. (The
act’s timing was deliberate: in this new democracy, as religion became more of a political contest, there was growing hysteria about the business of Christians attempting secret conversions, whether or not they actually took place.) The women were serving a three-year sentence at Indramayu State Prison, 120 miles east of Jakarta. Hutasoit, who had attended their trial and was one of their most vocal
defenders, sent me to see them.

The hills surrounding the prison had been stepped with the terraces of hanging gardens, earthen ziggurats mostly planted with tea. Teak trees nodded their tufted heads, which looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. Even within its walls, the prison was surprisingly breezy and pleasant. The
three women had planted a small garden outside of their cell. They had cleaned
the prison’s toilets and painted the walls of the cell, where they held church meetings, yellow and blue.
¹
Meeting them was surreal at first; these women were in prison
for teaching Sunday school
. Yet despite the gentle atmosphere, they were considered villains among the local Muslims, who saw them as the embodiment of Christianization, a force actively working to erase Indonesia’s Islamic identity.
Thirty of the forty children who attended their “Happy Sundays” were Muslims, and the local authorities claimed Zakaria and the others had rounded up local kids, fed them, and taught them about Jesus and to sing Bible songs—without their parents’ knowledge.