Weekend Reading: Indonesia Special

This weekend, some thought-provoking readings on Indonesia with special reference to radical Islam and Indonesia’s Hindu & Buddhist past and traditions.

Why Indonesia? Because events that are unfolding in this country – home to the world’s largest population of Muslims – are likely to have serious and long-term implications for us in India. Read on to find out why.

First, excerpts from Indonesian lessons for secular India by Sadanand Dhume(emphasis added)

If you had to pick the place in the Muslim world least susceptible to any kind of religious extremism, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Indonesia. The world’s most populous Muslim country is on Islam’s eastern edge, separated from the faith’s Arabian birthplace by space and time. Islam washed up in the archipelago in the 12th century, took root in the 15th and became dominant as late as the 17th. For the most part, it arrived through trade rather than conquest, by Indian dhow rather than Arab charger. It was preceded by more than a millennium of Hinduism and Buddhism, whose achievements included Borobudur, a massive 9th-century Buddhist stupa.

As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in comparing Indonesia to Morocco: “In Indonesia Islam did not construct a civilization, it appropriated one.”

In India, a strain of Islamic orthodoxy was sometimes in open conflict with Hinduism. But in Indonesia, the new faith sat comfortably atop a Hindu-Buddhist past. Like most Indians, and unlike the Arabs, most Indonesians continued to believe that there are many paths to God. Indeed, until recently, Indonesian Islam – steeped in a culture of music and mysticism – was synonymous with tolerance.

…Indonesians did not confuse being Muslim with being Arab. Their national airline is named Garuda. The national epic is the Mahabharata. In Bahasa Indonesia, the word for heaven is surga, the word for hell neraka.

But this culture of pluralism and tolerance can no longer be taken for granted. Today, Indonesia is struggling…

Radical Muslims, those who seek to order every aspect of society and the state – from burqas to banking – by the medieval dictates of sharia law remain in the minority, but their numbers are growing.

…For Indians the drama unfolding in Indonesia is especially urgent because the conflict there is as much cultural as political, a battle between a native, deeply Indicized Islam and a strident Arab import. Over the past 30 years, Arab names have gradually edged out Sanskrit ones in kindergartens. Headscarves have mushroomed on college campuses. In offices, the greeting assalamu alaikum has become an alternative to the religiously neutral selamat pagi, or good morning. The traditional tiered-roof Javanese mosque has given way to the ubiquitous onion dome. For the first time, a generation of Javanese children is growing up unfamiliar with Arjuna and Bhima from the Mahabharata.

The political consequences of this broad cultural shift are already apparent…In recent years, a demand that Indonesian Muslims follow sharia law has resurfaced.

…despite these inroads by radicals, the battle for Indonesia is far from lost. ..Indonesia may yet live up to its promise as a bastion of moderation..But by the same token, nobody who follows the region should be surprised by a very different outcome, an Indonesia (that is)…a Southeast Asian version of Pakistan.

Image courtesy: Indonesia Tourism

Next, how Indonesia’s surface hides beneath it an Intricate Quilt of Faiths:

…The visitors stood at the edge of a large fenced-off pit where a ninth-century Hindu temple had recently been unearthed here on the campus of the Islamic University of Indonesia.

…The discovery of the nearly intact Hindu temple was a reminder of the long religious trajectory of the country that now has the world’s largest Muslim population. In few places on earth have three major religions intermixed with such intensity and proximity as in Indonesia’s island of Java.

…About 90 percent of Indonesians are now Muslim, with only pockets of Buddhists and Hindus left. But Hinduism and Buddhism, Java’s dominant religions for a much longer period, permeate the society and contribute to Indonesia’s traditionally moderate form of Islam.

For more than a decade, proponents of a more orthodox version of Islam have gained ground in Indonesia. More women are wearing head scarves and more Indonesians are adopting Arabic-style religious rituals as fundamentalists press for a purge of pre-Islamic values and ceremonies. But Indonesia’s traditional Islam provides a counterpoint.

…It all began last August when the private university decided to build the library, “the symbol of knowledge of our religion,” next to the mosque, Mr. Muhammad said. In the two decades the university had occupied its 79-acre campus outside Yogyakarta, no temple had ever been found. But chances were high that they were around. Most of the nearby villages had the same prefix in their names: candi, meaning temple.

…Researchers from the government’s Archaeological Office in Yogyakarta…eventually unearthed two 1,100-year-old small temples. In the main temple, 20 feet by 20 feet, a perfectly preserved statue of Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity, sat next to a linga, the symbol of worship for the god Shiva, and a yoni, the symbol of worship for the goddess Shakti.

In the adjacent secondary temple, about 20 feet by 13 feet, researchers exhumed another linga and yoni, as well as two altars and a statue of Nandi, the sacred bull that carried Shiva.

…Officials moved the most valuable artifact, the statue of Ganesha, to the Archaeological Office. For further protection against thieves, workers erected a fence on the campus, and guards limited access inside.

The two Buddhist monks, though, had had no trouble getting inside. They had traveled from their monastery, about an hour away by car, to visit.

“These are our ancestors, so we have a sense of belonging,” said one monk, Dhammiko.

Sadly this “sense of belonging” is not shared by all Indonesians. From No yoga for Muslims in Indonesia:

Indonesia’s top Islamic body banned Muslims from doing Yoga as it is necessary to perform religious rituals during the exercise. A report in The Telegraph said that about 700 clerics from the Indonesian Council of Ulemas (MUI) agreed to ban the practice of yoga over fears that the use of Hindu prayers could ‘erode’ Muslims’ faith.

Mar’uf Amin, a spokesperson said, “The yoga practice that contains religious rituals of Hinduism including the recitation of mantras is ‘haram’ (forbidden in Islam). Muslims should not practise other religious rituals as it will erode and weaken their Islamic faith,” he added.

…The fatwas are not legally binding but can influence government policy and it is considered sinful to ignore them.

Radical Islam is not a new worry in Indonesia..It has been so for the last several years. Below are some exceprts from Indonesia: The shadow of extremism by Roger Hardy (writing in 2005):

…The teenaged schoolgirls in Yogyakarta, in central Java, gave me a warm and very noisy welcome. Identically clothed in neat blue dresses and white headscarves, they laughed and joked. One even sang a Maria Carey song.

It was a far cry from the prevalent Western image of a madrasa, or Muslim school.

…But only a few miles from the girls’ school, I visited a very different madrasa. This was infamous school founded in Ngruki by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir – the elderly cleric currently on trial in Jakarta as the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah. Asked whether he condemned the Bali bombings, Wahyuddin – the man who runs the Ngruki school – said merely that he “disagreed” with them.

Americans attack Muslims, he said, so Muslims attack Americans. It was a case of action and reaction.

…Back in the capital, I visited a bar which had been smashed up during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.

…Islamic radicals like these pose a direct threat to Indonesia’s centuries-old tradition of tolerance and moderation.

…In numbers, Indonesia’s moderate mainstream – bolstered by groups like Muhammadiyah – dwarfs the radical fringe. But I was reminded of the cryptic words of a former British prime minister: “It’s not enough to be nice.”

However, not all may be lost (yet). Here is Norimitsu Onishi reporting on the elections of last year:

From Pakistan to Gaza and Lebanon, militant Islamic movements have gained ground rapidly in recent years, fanning Western fears of a consolidation of radical Muslim governments. But here in the world’s most populous Muslim nation just the opposite is happening, with Islamic parties suffering a steep drop in popular support.

In parliamentary elections this month, voters punished Islamic parties that focused narrowly on religious issues, and even the parties’ best efforts to appeal to the country’s mainstream failed to sway the public.

The largest Islamic party, the Prosperous Justice Party, ran television commercials of young women without head scarves and distributed pamphlets in the colors of the country’s major secular parties. But the party fell far short of its goal of garnering 15 percent of the vote, squeezing out a gain of less than one percentage point over its 7.2 percent showing in 2004.

That was a big letdown…The party had projected that it would double its share of seats in Parliament even as it stuck to its founding goal of bringing Shariah, or Islamic law, to Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, with 240 million people.

…Although final results from the election on April 9 will not be announced until next month, partial official results and exit polls by several independent companies indicate that Indonesians overwhelmingly backed the country’s major secular parties, even though more of them are continuing to turn to Islam in their private lives.

“People in general do not feel that there should be an integration of faith and politics,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “Even though more and more Muslims, in particular women, have become more Islamic and have a growing attachment to Islam, that does not translate into voting behavior.”

…Despite the Islamic parties’ decline, they remain influential, analysts say. The country’s major secular parties, including President Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party, have courted them and their supporters…Ahmad Suaedy, director of the Wahid Institute, a research organization (says), “The agenda of many people inside the party is still to Islamize Indonesia, and that’s a constraint on democracy.”

It will be interesting to see how events in Indonesia shape up. As home to the world’s largest population of Muslims, developments in Indonesia are likely to have profound impact on the tussle between a moderate, accommodating version of Islam and a radical, intolerant version of the faith. I will be watching this space keenly.

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P.S. Some of you may remember this controversial article about Obama & the time he spent in Indonesia from about 2 years ago. His home district has not been immune to these changes either.