Part 1 of 2 : The west and Islam in Indonesia and the true jihad
Part 1 of 2 : The west and Islam in Indonesia and the true jihad
Juwono Sudarsono, Indonesian Ambassador, United Kingdom, London
The most frequently asked question after Sept. 11, 2001 was:
What were the reasons for so much hatred against the West among
al-Qaeda and its followers? The answers have varied, depending on
one's educational background, social standing and cultural
perspective of responders across the Muslim world.
As an Indonesian Muslim academic turned temporary diplomat my
tentative answer would be: Sept. 11, 2001 was in a sense an
inevitable consequence of the combination of America's
pervasively dominant role as the world's "24/7" superpower in all
of its dimensions -- political, economic, military, scientific,
cultural -- and the unique combustible atmosphere of modern
Middle East political economy. American preponderance begets
defiance most tellingly in many Middle east societies whose
governments often fail to address much needed comprehensive
political and economic reforms. Anti-Westernism in the Middle
East are linked to the anger and desperation of the Muslim poor
against established oil-rich governments, perceived to be
rampantly corrupt.
Fortuitous circumstances created the Osama bin Laden
phenomenon whose virulently anti-American ideology were based on
his personal marginalization and ostracism by the Saudi royal
family and his particular view of Middle East regional and
domestic politics since the early 1990s. Bin Laden's personal
psychological scars defined his main goal which was to fuel
acerbic hatred against selected Arab governments -- especially
in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt -- whom he saw as corrupt and
immoral clients of United States economic imperialism and
purveyors of Western moral decadence.
The perpetrators of the hijacking of the fatal planes in New
York and Washington were middle-class Saudi and Egyptian
nationals who saw their governments as being hand-in-glove
partners of the American "infidels" since 1981, made worse by
supporting Israel politically, militarily and economically. Bin
Laden and his followers' main objective was to polarize the
Islamic world of the ummat, instigate the cause of an Islamic
revolution in those Arab states allied to Western interests and
regain the moral high ground for what he believed was the
interest of Islam's true believers across the world.
In fact, the United States was not the prime target of bin
Laden's real objective; it merely represented the modern Hubal,
symbol of contemporary idolatry and of that most ubiquitously
powerful "Christian" nation supporting what he deemed as corrupt
Arab governments who exploited and usurped power from the Muslim
ummat in their respective countries.
It is this defining intra-Muslim and intra-Arab ideological
struggle which explains more cogently the 9/11 phenomenon and
which to my mind explains more cogently than analyses centering
on the notion of "challenge and response" of Arnold Toynbee, the
patronizing theme of "Islam on the defensive" of Bernard Lewis or
the popular but misplaced "clash of civilizations" of Samuel
Huntington. Understanding the ideological struggle within
political Islam in the Middle East, in Africa and in East Asia ,
sheds more light on 11 September than rehashing variations on the
theme of permanent discord between Islam and the West.
In the contemporary world of the Middle East, leaders of Arab
governments that for reasons of economic and military strategy
are perceived as clients of the fulcrum of global idolatry are
despised by bin Laden and his followers as hypocrites, munafiqun.
These leaders are also invariably demonized as those who formally
believe in Islam but reject its precepts after being poisoned by
the greed and predatory disposition of Western interests in the
oilfields of the Middle East.
Worse, they were branded as mere apostates, since they were
depicted as never having embraced "true" Islam in the first
place. Al-Qaeda ideology derives much of its precepts from the
more extremist interpretation of the Salafis, who believed in the
imperative of the return to the pure teachings of the Prophet. In
the view of the Salafis, all states with Muslims majorities must
apply the sharia' exclusively. Failure to adopt it constituted
idolatry.
The extremist versions of Islam further maintain that it is
the duty of the purist to go on the path of jihad against those
governments that do not adopt the sharia as state identity and
that these despicable regimes should therefore be overthrown by
violent means. In the Declaration of War against the Americans in
1996, Osama bin Laden saw himself as having common cause with
members of the Islamic Jihad in Egypt whose members had been
involved in the assassination of president Anwar Sadat in October
1981. Both groups viewed members of the Egyptian government and
the Saudi royal family as having renounced Islam both by refusing
to apply al-Qaeda's view of the sharia as the basis for political
life and because of their dependence on American economic
patronage and military protection.
For us in Indonesia, events in the Middle East often resonate
quickly into our domestic situation. What happens in the Middle
East may affect our future, politically, economically, even
strategically. But the vast majority of Indonesian Muslims also
believe that Indonesia can provide an alternative to political
desperation in the Middle East. Our tradition of enriched
discourse and constructive dialogue about the need for all
members of the Islamic ummat throughout the world to come to
terms with contemporary Western dominated globalization has been
scrutinized by many scholars of Islam. The true jihad is to
improve oneself and our Muslim communities. Western dominance can
be overcome by using our brains, skills and knowledge to gain
leverage and restructure the world's political and economic
system into a more equitable international order.