Reporter shares beat on Islam in Indonesia

Chris Holm, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Tracy Dahlby's book is the latest in a long line of works -- some serious or scholarly, others cheap cash-ins -- that reporters, correspondents and researchers have written in their attempts to explain Islamic extremism in Asia to a Western audience.

What makes Allah's Torch stand out from the others is not its subject matter -- Indonesia -- or its sources -- many of the usual suspects -- but its unusual tone.

Books on wars, whether George Bush's war on terror or other conflicts, are normally serious, descriptive accounts, designed to get the reader as close as possible to the grisly front lines of battle as they attempt to explain the ideologies or chain of events that make people fly planes into buildings and drive bomb- laden cars into bars on tropical islands.

They are not normally jaunty Boy's Own-style travelogues written by a reluctant narrator, who is as frequently as much concerned for his own skin as the story. However, this is what Dahlby, a veteran U.S. journalist -- and the former bureau chief for The Washington Post and Newsweek in Tokyo -- serves up in Allah's Torch.

With an eye for a descriptive beginning, Dahlby starts off in the thick of things, jumping from the beginning of an nervous interview in 2004 with Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) leader Habib Rizieq to colorfully describing his first brush with Islamic militancy in 2000, when he became an unwilling passenger on a boat full of Laskar Jihadis bound from Makassar to Maluku to stir up sectarian violence.

Dahlby uses this frame, an uneasy boat ride to the Banda Islands, to give the reader background information about Indonesia in general and more specifically about the religious movements that have become radicalized since the downfall of the Soeharto regime.

Here, we are also introduced to three important people: Dahlby's Indonesian sidekick, the story fixer Norman Wibowo; his sometime host in the Bandas, Sultan of Banda Des Alwi and Alwi's daughter and Dahlby's traveling companion, Tanya.

Unfortunately for Dahlby, the character mechanics in the first half of the book make it the least compelling section. While it is generally well-written and researched, the journey to the Banda Islands and the interplay between the characters getting there is far less interesting than the update on Indonesian Islam that the second part of the book provides.

As its subtitle says, Allah's Torch is a "behind the scenes report" on Asia's war on terror: a journalist writing about himself doing his work. But while Dahlby does meet a series of interesting characters, he sometimes makes the mistake of believing that his personal interactions with them are more interesting than they actually are.

It is also a little tiring listening to Dahlby's protestations of fearing for his life, however honest they may be, each time he sits down with an Islamic firebrand with anti-American views. To give Dahlby credit, he, an American, was interviewing Muslim fundamentalists here while the war in Iraq was at its hottest, and not long after English journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded in Pakistan.

However, to anyone who has spent any time in Indonesia, it seems a bit much to expect death or dismemberment coming from an interview with the leader of the FPI or the head of a pesantren, or local Islamic boarding schools.

Of course, Dahlby's main target audience, readers in America and Europe, won't know this, and like many other correspondents before him, one suspects Dahlby is embellishing the emotional content of a situation a little to ensnare readers and create a little drama.

But while he likes to tell a memorable yarn, Dahlby is sucking the reader in with the best intentions, creating pictures of Muslim bogeymen only to tear them down later on when he actually gets down to describing the interview.

While he is certainly no apologist to radical Islam, Dahlby does, however, try to get into the head of his interviewees, casting them not as rolling-eyed extremists but as political actors, offering up one of many solutions to the poverty and corruption plaguing Indonesia. His journey also takes in as many liberals, moderates and traditionalists, including former president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, Muslim feminist and university lecturer Ruhaini Dzuhayatin and the Sultan of Yogyakarta Hamengkubuwono X.

Allah's Torch is a book that attempts to cast light on Indonesian Islam, to explain what is a complex and dynamic situation to readers and to encourage a little more cross- cultural understanding in U.S.-Indonesian relations.

Dahlby's book ends up creating a portrait of a religion under change, which can be as thoughtful and as insightful as it is sometimes irreverent and off-the-cuff.