Indonesian democracy's enemy within

Indonesian democracy's enemy within

Sadanand Dhume
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Philadelphia

As world leaders condemned last October's suicide bombings on
the resort island of Bali, Indonesian leaders set a different
tone. Hidayat Nur Wahid, speaker of the People's Consultative
Assembly (Indonesia's highest legislative body) pooh-poohed the
idea of another terrorist strike just three years after the
October 2002 attack that killed more than 200 people, and instead
blamed the most recent bombings on rivalries within the local
tourism industry.

For those who follow Indonesia, Nur Wahid's comments hardly
came as a surprise. The speaker has been one of the most
outspoken defenders of Abu Bakar Ba'asyr, the spiritual head of
Jamaah Islamiyah -- al-Qaeda's Southeast Asian franchise. Nur
Wahid is also the former head of the Justice and Prosperity Party
(PKS), which threatens to import a more subtle form of radical
Islam to Indonesia -- and which is rising rapidly.

In the seven years since it was founded the Justice Party has
emerged as the country's most disciplined political force. In
last year's election it won nearly 7.5 percent of the vote and 45
seats, making it the seventh-largest party in Indonesia's
parliament.

The Justice Party has built a reputation for incorruptibility,
devotion to social work and attachment to Islamic causes. Few
know that it draws its ideology and organizational structure from
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood -- whose vision spawned radical
Islamist movements like Hamas, Sudan's National Islamic Front and
(most famously) al-Qaeda. While Jamaah Islamiyah stands for
suicide bombings, the Justice Party believes in peaceful
protests.

The magnitude of that threat is most clear in the ideology of
the Justice Party's greatest political inspiration, the Muslim
Brotherhood. The Brotherhood's ideology is encapsulated in its
slogan: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran
is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our
highest hope."

The movement's most influential thinker was the virulently
anti-American Egyptian literary critic Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966).
For him, as for Islamists everywhere, God's laws (sharia) were
superior to man's laws. Islam belonged everywhere: In the
classroom and the boardroom; in banks, in courts, in movie
theaters.

On the face of it you couldn't seem to find less promising
ground for militant Islam than Indonesia.

During his 32-year rule anti-communist strongman General
Soeharto enforced uniform religious education in schools. At the
same time, petrodollars from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf financed
mosques and preachers demanding a "purer" reading of Islam. The
Internet and desktop publishing imported the discourse of Riyadh
and Tehran to Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi.

It was against this backdrop that Qutb's ideas reached
Indonesia in the late 1970s. Activists linked to the Saudi-
sponsored Islamic World League began indoctrinating small groups
at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology with
Brotherhood materials. Like the Brotherhood, these groups
organized in secret cells, each with a leader and between five
and fifteen members. They met once a week to discuss Islam and to
learn how to develop a proper "Islamic personality," studying the
works of al-Banna and Qutb. The movement was called Tarbiyah,
Arabic for education.

Indonesia was rapidly urbanizing in the 1980s. Many college
students were the first in their families to acquire a higher
education or to live in a city. Tarbiyah gave its members a sense
of purpose and dignity; simple ideas of right and wrong; a
framework for understanding the changes taking place around them.
By the early 1990s it controlled student movements in virtually
all of Indonesia's largest public universities.

The party's top leadership is steeped in Brotherhood ideology.
Nur Wahid, who resigned from the party chairmanship last year to
take his present position, holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the
Brotherhood-founded University of Medina in Saudi Arabia. Party
Secretary-General Anis Matta graduated from the Jakarta branch of
Riyadh's Al-Imam Muhammad bin Saud University, also linked to the
Brotherhood.

The party has the blessing of today's most prominent Muslim
Brother, the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who believes
that democratic means can be used to pursue Islamist ends. He has
visited Indonesia several times over the last twenty years and is
quoted in the Justice Party's founding manifesto.

The party has grown from 60,000 members in 1999 to between
400,000 and 500,000 in 2004.What explains its extraordinary
success? For one, it is the only party in the country based on a
network of tight-knit cadres. These well-trained party workers,
many graduates of technical and scientific departments, tend to
be driven and organized.

The party also takes its self-image as an agent of moral
reform seriously. It's virtually impossible to find a Justice
Party member who smokes or a female party member without the
headscarf. When there's a natural disaster such as last year's
tsunami, party cadres are among the first volunteers at the
scene.

Despite the Justice Party's social work, little separates its
thinking from Jamaah Islamiyah's. Like Jamaah Islamiyah, in its
founding manifesto, the Justice Party called for the creation of
an Islamic caliphate. Like Jamaah Islamiyah, it has placed
secrecy -- facilitated by the cell structure both groups borrowed
from the Brotherhood -- at the heart of its organization.

Both offer a selective vision of modernity -- one in which
global science and technology are welcome, but un-Islamic values
are shunned. The two groups differ chiefly in their methods:
Jamaah Islamiyah is revolutionary; the Justice Party is
evolutionary.

Of the two, the Justice Party is by far the larger threat to
Indonesia. With its suicide bombings Jamaah Islamiyah has set
itself up for a confrontation with the government that it cannot
hope to win. In contrast, the Justice Party uses its position in
parliament and its metastasizing network of cadres to advance the
same goals incrementally, one vote at a time.

At the same time, by throwing its weight behind Jamaah
Islamiyah's Ba'ashir, the party complicates the government's
efforts to crack down on terrorists. Indeed, peaceful methods
aside, the Justice Party's success can only help terrorists: The
more people who believe that the problem with society is too much
modernity, and that a purified Islam is an answer to twenty-first
century problems, the more likely it is that hotheads among them
will use terrorism to achieve their goals.

Sadanand Dhume, a former Indonesia correspondent of the Far
Eastern Economic Review and The Asian Wall Street Journal, is
writing a book on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia. An
expanded version of this article appeared in the May 2005 issue
of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Reprinted with permission
from YaleGlobal Online, (http://yaleglobal.yale.edu).