Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi disavowed the inflammatory rhetoric in his speech to the UMNO conclave, and Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak suggested that the police have a word with delegates who’d used extreme language. Still, the UMNO chest-thumping makes clear that the moderate Abdullah is
struggling to cope with a surge in intolerant–and in some cases extremist–behavior by his base of Malay Muslims. Earlier this year a Muslim mob disrupted a forum being held in Penang to discuss religious pluralism. Forum organizers said the mob’s message was unmistakable: attempts to equate other religions with Islam in Malaysia will be met with violence. Malaysia’s minority Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs–already on the short end of economic policies that favor the Malay majority–are worried. Wong Kim Kong, head of a Christian evangelical group, said in a newspaper interview after the UMNO conference that tensions among the communities were higher than they’d been in decades–partly because Muslims “feel they are being cornered” by the Western war on terror.
In neighboring Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, even more troubling scenes are playing out. Last week a radical Islamic preacher publicly said it was the obligation of Muslims to assassinate George W. Bush during his visit to Indonesia. In Jakarta, three Muslim men are on trial now for allegedly decapitating three Christian schoolgirls in central Sulawesi last year as they were walking to class. On the main island of Java, mobs of young Muslim men have forcibly closed dozens of Christian churches. “We cannot ignore this radical tendency among certain elements of the community,” says Din Syamsuddin, chairman of Muhammadiyah, a mainstream Indonesian Muslim group that boasts 30 million members. “The mainstream in the country are a bit worried.”
Traditionally, Southeast Asian Muslims have been known for their tolerance and their incorporation of traditional beliefs into an Islamic framework. Indonesia and Malaysia are thought to be models of multicultural democracy. And yet, say mainstream Islamic scholars, political analysts and even former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, Southeast Asia’s two most important countries are both drifting toward fundamentalism–a trend made scarier by the inability or unwillingness of some senior political leaders to condemn those promoting the shift. Some analysts are already calling this the “Arabization” of the region.
Certainly, most agree that mainstream Muslims generally are more religious and conservative than they were 10 years ago, and Southeast Asia’s Muslim regions (Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, southern Philippines) are more radical. The trend–which was started by Islamic radicals in exile in Europe in the 1970s and then slowly gained strength with the Iranian revolution and later the struggle of the mujahedin in Afghanistan and now the Iraq war–is both ironic and surprising. Indonesia has been moving toward democracy and the rule of law after decades of authoritarianism; Malaysia is quick to lock up alleged terrorists (without trial) under national-security laws. Fundamentalist Islamic political parties that demand Sharia are regularly trounced at the polls in both countries.
There are different factors at play. In Malaysia, the lower-income Muslim Malay majority resents the economic clout of minority Chinese business groups. Economic insecurity, hence, has resulted in a mix of Muslim nationalism and Malay nationalism, exacerbated by the possibility that non-Malays (almost 45 percent of the country’s 26 million people) could someday become the ethnic majority in the country. Malaysia already has Sharia for Muslims, which has equal status to the civil and criminal laws that apply to ethnic and religious minorities. Still, the conservative Islamic opposition wants harsh hudud laws to be enacted.
In Indonesia, the issue is really what kind of Islam the country should have–and the debate between moderates and radicals has political overtones. Indonesia’s fundamentalist parties were suppressed for decades, ever since founding president Sukarno dissolved Parliament in 1959. Only after the dictator Suharto fell in 1998 were fundamentalists able to rise up and speak out again.
And that they do: defeated at the polls, radical Muslim groups nonetheless use bluster, threats and occasional violence in somewhat successful attempts to hijack the public debate on Islam, impose social restraints at the grass-roots level and push religious laws through Parliament. Some have glorified holy war abroad and violence against non-Muslims at home. During the Israeli-Hizbullah conflict in Lebanon this past summer, Indonesian fundamentalist groups demanded Jakarta break off ties with the United States and use the Indonesian military to fly hundreds of young men to Lebanon to fight.
Some of that is just anti-Americanism. Still, the influence of fundamentalists is growing, partly because political leaders seem reluctant to challenge them. In Indonesia, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono tends to react timidly to extremist demands for fear of being smeared by political opponents as being un-Islamic. Such softness is dangerous: while liberal Muslim scholars receive death threats, radical clerics like Abu Bakar Bashir–the alleged head of the Jemaah Islamiah terror group, who spent two years in prison on conspiracy charges in connection with the 2002 Bali bombing–are heroes to many for lashing out against the infidels. “Bashir has become a symbol of standing up to the West in the war on terror,” says Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia director of the International Crisis Group.
All of which has Christian leaders wondering whether Indonesia’s move toward democracy is taking a detour. “The question is whether Indonesia will stay a pluralistic and secular society or become victim to growing Islamization,” says Father Magnus Franz Seseno, a Jesuit priest at STF Driyarkara Catholic College. Indeed, non-Muslims of all stripes in Southeast Asia are asking whether the portrayal of Indonesia and Malaysia as models of multiracial and multireligious harmony are only myths. Among the assumptions they are calling into question:
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS RESPECTED.
While both countries’ constitutions guarantee such freedoms, on the ground it’s a different story. Both require that state identity cards list every citizen’s religion, which rights groups say opens non-Muslims to discrimination. Malaysian Muslims are not allowed to convert to another religion, and can be sent to re-education camps if they do so. The highly charged issue was recently highlighted by Lina Joy, a Malay Muslim woman currently appealing to Malaysia’s High Court to recognize her conversion to Christianity.
Similar examples can be seen in Indonesia. Fundamentalist groups including the Alliance for Anti-Apostates and the Islamic Defenders Front have forcibly shut down dozens of Protestant churches in West Java during the past year, purportedly because they did not have proper permits. Police did nothing to stop the closures. In addition, three Christian women in West Java were convicted of proselytizing and are now serving three-year sentences for including Muslim children in a Sunday-school class–even though their parents had agreed. “In the past, this [extremist] behavior would be crushed,” says Seseno, the Jesuit priest. “This is a consequence of democratic opening.”
SECULARISM IS STRICTLY UPHELD.
Indonesia has 230 million people from more than 300 ethnic groups. The country has remained unified under its state ideology, Pancasila, which promotes multicultural and religious harmony. But now even that’s under threat. In 1999, Indonesia’s Parliament passed a law allowing the implementation of Sharia in the strife-torn province of Aceh–even though it violates the country’s secular Constitution.
The move has opened a Pandora’s box. Earlier this year Muslim parties in Jakarta submitted antipornography legislation that would have jailed women for 10 years for showing their arms and legs in public. More than two dozen provincial governments have issued Sharia-inspired bylaws, including one district in West Java that bans women from walking alone at night. Today in Aceh, morality police detain women for not wearing headscarves and break into homes without warrants looking for Muslims engaged in “bad behavior.” Despite the abuse of power, provincial officials from other areas of Indonesia are visiting Aceh to study its Islamic model. “I think it’s going to expand,” says Jones of the International Crisis Group.
There are also blurry lines in Malaysia between religion and the state. Conservative Muslims are gaining more bureaucratic power through their positions in the civil service and education system. More disturbing, religious edicts issued by Muslim clerics, called fatwas , are legally binding for Muslims, even if they don’t regularly practice their religion. Each state has its own Sharia legal code and religious police to enforce it. They ensure mandatory fasting during Ramadan, and raid nightclubs, bars and even homes to stamp out illicit drinking and sex.
VIOLENCE IS ABHORRED.
Indonesia has suffered four major terrorist attacks since 9/11, most notably the 2002 and 2005 attacks on the resort island of Bali. The bombs have hurt the economy, killed hundreds of innocent people and shocked the country’s 190 million Muslims, the vast majority of whom are moderate. While the Indonesian public is widely believed to reject terrorism, a recent survey by the Indonesian Research Institute found that one in 10 people said violence such as the Bali bombings was justified to defend Islam.
WOMAN HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS.
Malaysia has often been cited as an Islamic-majority country where women, particularly Muslim women, have successfully risen to senior political and business positions. That’s true–but in the past year, critics say, the country has backpedaled. The Parliament amended so-called Islamic family laws to make it easier for a man to take multiple wives and to divorce, and the amended laws now allow a husband to claim a share of an existing wife’s property if he takes additional wives. Some female lawmakers rebelled at the changes but were ordered on threat of dismissal from the government to vote for the measures.
Marina Mahathir, the outspoken daughter of the country’s former prime minister, says Malaysian women are subjected to a form of apartheid. “You could be married to a minister, [but] if he wants to get rid of you, get another wife, there’s very little you can do,” Mahathir says. “It’s all stacked against you because of these personal laws.”
What are the indonesian and Malay-sian governments doing about the ominous shift toward fundamentalism? Some say not enough. Both Yudhoyono and Abdullah Badawi, the Malaysian prime minister, have touted themselves as the voices of moderation in the Islamic world. Those voices seem to be quiet these days. During the Lebanon crisis, it took Yudhoyono nearly a week to respond to public threats by radical groups to send armed fighters to Lebanon and murder American, Israeli and Australian citizens worldwide. Even then, he only suggested they should send humanitarian aid rather than go to fight. The Foreign Ministry inexplicably said that, legally, it could not stop anyone going abroad to join a war.
The reaction infuriated security officials. “These threats have to be taken seriously, and there’s no clear position taken by president–that’s waffling,” says an Indonesian counterterrorism official who’s not cleared to speak to the media. Former Indonesian president Wahid, a respected Islamic scholar and cleric, says Yudhoyono is scared of being pegged as an anti-Muslim because, as a former general, he doesn’t have Muslim credentials. “He’s afraid that if he does anything, it will be seen as against Islam.”
Abdullah has been equally vague in recent months as relations between religious groups have worsened. Political analyst Farish Noor says the prime minister deals with religious tensions in piecemeal fashion, ranging from general statements about the need for moderation in Islam to mild condemnations of extremists. Worse, some of the most conservative-minded religious leaders in the nation have been given positions of power in Malaysia’s religious bureaucracy. “Abdullah is fully aware of the fact that the rise of an increasingly right-wing conservative Muslim voice in the country will bode ill for the image of Malaysia abroad, but at the same time he cannot risk losing or antagonizing the Malay-Muslim bloc vote,” Noor says.
Geopolitical issues have of course angered hard-liners. Analysts say moderate Indonesian Muslim leaders are constantly being isolated by the radicals because of Bush’s controversial policies in the Middle East. To counter this, Yudhoyono has thrown his support behind a move by moderates to rehabilitate Pancasila as a tool to promote Indonesia’s diversity. “I think Indonesia’s mainstream Muslims are concerned that their democratic freedoms are being eroded,” says Robin Bush of the Asia Foundation.
The vast majority of Indonesians are still moderate in their practice of Islam, and the fundamentalists have limited appeal. But they’re gaining traction, and there is a danger that the population can be swayed by the loudest voices, especially when they blame poverty on corrupt, secular politicians in the government. Wahid says that the moderates must initiate an open debate–which societies in Indonesia and Malaysia have thus far tended to shy away from–on what kind of Islam they want. Syed Ali Tawfik Al-Attas, head of the Institute of Islamic Understanding, Malaysia’s Islamic think tank, agrees. “The Muslim idea of tolerance means that you have mutual respect, forgiveness and magnanimity [for others],” he says. “If you ask now if those [attitudes] have weakened, the answer is yes.” The region’s moderate leaders must work harder to strengthen them, or risk seeing two anchor countries slide into extremism.
