The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (33 page)

Later that night, Ibnu Ahmad, Taufik Andrie,
and I went to a local mall to see a film called
Laskar Pelangi
, or “Rainbow Warrior.” Andrea Hirata’s bestselling book was now a film—a musical—and Indonesians were flocking to see this Bollywood version of Indonesian life. The musical followed a small class of poor boys and girls studying the Quran. Sitting in the dark
theater, I wondered what Ibnu Ahmad would think: here was revered Quranic
scholarship, Western education, singing, and dancing all in one. Never having been to a cinema, he grew too distracted by the video arcade outside and the shopping mall to pay much attention. Afterward, as we rode down the escalator, Ibnu Ahmad stopped before the unguents at the Clinique counter.

“Dunia”
—“the world”—he said, pointing sadly. By this, he meant the secular world. He believed that
Zulu, the beauty powder he peddled, was sanctioned by God.

Ibnu Ahmad’s skepticism reflected a growing mistrust of Western, or infidel, medicine. He’d heard that America was caught trying to sterilize Nigerian Muslims under the guise of vaccinating them against polio. “I don’t let my children get vaccinated for polio anymore,” he said proudly. I tried in vain to explain that I had actually gone
to Nigeria, found the Nigerian doctor who made all the fuss, Dr. Dhetti Mohammed, and heard from the doctor himself that he had changed his position. The vaccine, much of which was now manufactured in Indonesia, a Muslim country, was safe. Ibnu Ahmad narrowed his eyes and pursed his mouth. He did not believe me. It was not that I was lying exactly, but I came from a world he did not believe in.
I was a benevolent enemy.

Beyond the Prophet’s cure-alls, former fighters, frustrated and broke, were turning to other moneymaking ventures, including publishing. They were doing a brisk business reprinting, translating, and selling the latest militant religious tracts. Most interestingly, Sidney Jones of International Crisis Group, the world’s leading authority on Indonesia’s militants, pointed
out, the tracts revealed a growing debate over what legitimate jihad really meant.

Radical revivals are innately polarizing: those who are not with the radicals are against them; no one is left indifferent. So it was in Indonesia. Some factions spouted ultraviolence in their books; others criticized the tactics of terrorism. The same divisions that had separated Ibnu Ahmad from his younger brother
Salahuddin—who was still imprisoned—over whether it was okay to kill fellow Muslims were now being played out across the pages of tracts and magazines.

One of the youngest and hippest of these publishing outfits, Ar-Rahmah, had a high-tech website,
www.arrahmah.com
; an account on
Friendster; and a blog called Jihadlife, a religious nod to the hip-hop term
thug life
. The company made its money
by downloading videos from the Internet and mass-reproducing them. The most popular, a two-disk version of
Escape from Bagram
, was the made-for-DVD tale of Omar al-Faruq, a captured member of Al Qaeda and one of Ibnu Ahmad’s colleagues. Al-Faruq had burned down the Sulawesi village of Sepe after Ibnu Ahmad’s operation. In 2005, according to the U.S. military, al-Faruq had stacked cardboard boxes
against a wall at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and, taking off his shirt like a local workman, he escaped. Afterward, the Iraqi citizen became a folk hero in Indonesia, and the DVD, which featured a dramatic reenactment of his “rescue,” became a hit.

Ar-Rahmah had also recently launched a magazine,
JihadMagz
. On its masthead it claimed to have correspondents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and
the United States, among other places. In reality, the editors downloaded and reprinted accounts from Mujahideen websites. Even Ibnu Ahmad called
JihadMagz
“a cut-and-paste job.” Still, it was slick: it had a bimonthly print run of ten thousand, and sold for the equivalent of four dollars per issue.

American slang was splashed across its headlines in pseudoskater font, yet instead of double-page
spreads of skateboarders flying along a half-pipe, the issue of
JihadMagz
I saw featured photos of young women fighters posing with Kalashnikovs in the Afghan countryside.
JihadMagz
was a commercial for violence: its glossy features packaged a world in which fighting the West was honorable, and cool. Its slogan, in English, read “Always Making the World Better.”

The founder of
JihadMagz
, Mohammed
Jibril, ran his publication out of a nondescript stucco prefab in a subdivision at the southern edge of Jakarta. Jibril and his editor, both scruffy twenty-something men wearing low-riding jeans, their hair sticking hiply up, could have been running a startup anywhere—except that the father of global jihad, Sayyid Qutb, graced the cover of the magazines stacked in the corner.

When I arrived unannounced
at their office in October 2008, the two young men hopped around nervously, making a batch of sugary orange drink and shuffling papers. They were in the middle of an editorial meeting, and said they had never before had a Westerner in the office, let alone a fellow journalist. Jibril, twenty-six, his baggy, cuffed jeans riding up his calves, lounged cross-legged on the office floor.

“Democracy
is bullshit,” he said. “We want ‘Allahcracy.’ ” Barefoot, he indonesia
crossed the tile floor to grab an issue off the pile in the corner, and handed it to me. Inside, in one photograph, an Iraqi insurgent commander sipped tea on a Baghdad street corner. In another, the ravaged faces of Gracia and Martin Burnham—two American missionaries held captive from 2001 to 2002 by the Al Qaeda–linked Abu
Sayyaf Group—stared out angrily from the leafy jungle floor of the southern Philippines. Gracia, a fortyish pixie in a head scarf, sat next to a sunburned Martin. About the same age, he was already bald, with a strawberry-blond beard covering most of his hollowed face. The pair seemed solemn, but while Martin looked resigned, Gracia cocked her head at the camera with rage and suspicion. As this
2001 image of dirty, frightened missionaries bounced around the world, it became a harbinger of the West’s escalating confrontation with militant Islam.

I’d seen this video still in American magazines, except that where I saw sympathetic victims, the boys of
JihadMagz
saw neo-imperial Christian agents.

Paging through their magazine was like looking through the lens of an old box camera; everything
upside down and backward. Our presupposition as to who was winning and losing this war was also diametrically opposed.

On one cover, under the headline “Enemies of Islam,” Jibril had reproduced photographs of Salman Rushdie and Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. (He was angry with Jones for her revelatory reports on militancy in Indonesia.) Although Rushdie was beyond the reach of
the wannabe jihadis who read the magazine, Jones was not. She’d laughed when we’d spoken of the photo, but it was clearly intended as a threat. And in August 2009, a month after coordinated attacks on Jakarta’s Ritz-Carlton and J. W. Marriott Hotels left nine people dead, and injured at least fifty more, Jibril was arrested for helping to fund them.
²
From prison, he posted a new Facebook photo.
At twenty pounds lighter, he was freshly shaven and shirtless. A digital pinup, he’d listed himself as a fan of Ashton Kutcher, the star of the television show
Punk’d
, and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a radical utopian organization calling for an Islamic state.

Leaving the
JihadMagz
office, I went to meet Ibnu Ahmad for the last time. We were going to visit his brother Salahuddin in prison that afternoon.
Word had it that Ahmad’s brother—now thirty-two, and still serving time for a 2001 car bombing in downtown Jakarta—was about to be released. I picked Ibnu Ahmad up in a taxi outside a Starbucks in the Menteng suburb; we bought a bag of golden starfruit, some avocados, and a few cellular phone scratch cards, and drove past President Obama’s school again on the way to the prison.

To rehabilitate
fighters like these two brothers, the Indonesian government was piloting a deprogramming effort, teaching former militants skills such as motorcycle repair, welding, and tailoring. In reality, such skills meant little beyond the promise of a few dollars to their families and a possible job when they got out of prison. According to Ibnu Ahmad, the police could be kind to as many committed young fighters
as they wanted, but it was not going to change anyone’s thinking about God. “I went through rehabilitation,” he scoffed from the taxi’s front seat. “We were supposed to get money to start a business, but I did not get it.”

Outside the prison, two bored-looking prostitutes sat on a cement culvert. One had a daughter with her; the girl, who looked about ten, lay her head in her mother’s lap so
her mother could comb her hair before going back to work. It was the most noxious by far of the Indonesian prisons I had visited. The place smelled like carrion; a cart heaped with tangy garbage stood inside the small exercise yard. Men picked through the pile for plastic to recycle. Only the guards wore uniforms. A guard straddling the yard’s steel weight bench eyed Ibnu Ahmad. A prisoner sat behind
the guard and massaged his back.

When Salahuddin strode into the courtyard—stocky in a Salafi’s signature seventh-century pajama—the garbage pickers paid no attention, but the guard did. Salahuddin had done his best to grow a beard, a Fu Manchu affair, long hairs drooping from a pudgy face, just like his brother’s. The two men grinned at each other as Ibnu Ahmad handed his little brother the
sack of starfruit and avocados.

“No one liked me here at first. They thought I was a terrorist,” Salahuddin said, eyes darting around, taking quick stock of our audience. “Now I am their religious teacher.”

The thought of Salahuddin teaching the tenets of Islam to his fellow criminals—rapists, robbers, and murderers—was profoundly unsettling. “I follow the thinking of Zawahiri and bin Laden,”
he continued matter-of-factly and without anger or bluster. Unlike his elder brother, Salahuddin had never been to Afghanistan, nor had he ever received any legitimate
religious education. Instead, he belonged to the next generation of jihadis. Coming of age in the nineties after the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, they ran drills in the jungles of the Philippines, where they learned to
fight another dirty, lawless war.

This included the right to call fellow Muslims who opposed them infidels, or
kuffar
(the plural of the Arabic
kafir
), including the members of the Indonesian government. “As long as the
kuffar
do not stop trying to ruin us, we will not retire,” Salahuddin said. Jihad was his job; he would protect Islam in Indonesia, just as, in the name of protecting the Land
of Islam, their grandfather had fought the Dutch. Their uncle, he said proudly, had also tried to assassinate Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. Now Salahuddin saw the enemy everywhere, even among fellow Muslims. Although locked away for the moment, he completely supported the bombing campaign of his militant colleagues, who belonged to the JI splinter group led by Noordin Top. The group targeted
places associated with the West—including the 2003 bombing of the J. W. Marriott Hotel in south Jakarta, the second Bali bombing in 2005, an attack on the Australian embassy in 2004, and the coordinated attacks on Jakarta’s Ritz-Carlton and J. W. Marriott Hotels on July 17, 2009, for which Jibril would go to prison. (Two months later, Top would be killed during a police raid in Solo, Central Java,
which was Salahuddin and Ibnu Ahmad’s hometown.)

In these attacks, which left dozens dead and hundreds more wounded, most of the victims were Indonesians, not Westerners. That fine point did not matter to Salahuddin: a war was a war, and there was no stopping this one until the Islamists had won the whole world. I leaned against the prison yard’s concrete-block wall and grew first bored with
his rhetoric, then alarmed that this man was soon to be released. I only hoped his inferior training and newfound isolation would neutralize him, since clearly, his thinking had not changed a bit. The former JI leader Nasir Abbas told me that Salahuddin was involved in the deprogramming initiative, but the young man denied it.

Why would he want to sell out? He stole a look at his brother, who
was sitting on the prison bench next to him. Apparently, the rift between the brothers had healed enough that Ibnu Ahmad could deliver fruit and phone cards, but had not closed in any ideological sense. Ibnu Ahmad had moved in a middle-aged way beyond jihad, and into selling alternative Mary Kay; his brother had had no such change of heart.

“The people who do not want to keep fighting do not
know how bad it
is on the front line,” Salahuddin said. The front line—where was that mythic division, exactly, that bright, shining divide between good and evil, the Land of Islam and the Land of War? Was it the “Berlin wall” that divided Muslims from Christians on the island of Sulawesi? Or did it hang in the airwaves between the blaring hymn “Jerusalem” and the dueling call to prayer? Or was
it dynamic, and running right now between these two brothers standing in the prison yard?

The stench and heat were growing overpowering, and the harder I tried to listen to Salahuddin, the muddier his certainty sounded—thicker with fear and self-defense, as if he knew he was waging a losing battle. To console himself when others, including his brother, dropped away from the cause, Salahuddin
found a single verse of the Quran most comforting. It guaranteed him heaven: “Anyone, male or female, who does good deeds and is a believer, will enter Paradise and will not be wronged by as much as the dip in a date stone” (Women 4:124). If there was no justice in this world, he would wait for the next.