Out of Bali: cybercaliphate rising.

• Author: Jones, David Martin

ON SUB-TROPICAL Sunday mornings in August, in the square outside the Fatahillah Museum in north Jakarta, cultural tableaux testifying to Indonesia's diversity take place. In one of them, a troupe of Balinese school girls performs the elegant Legong dance that interprets, in its distinctive way, aspects of the island's ancient Hindu traditions. In its 2002 Jakarta version, however, instead of the sinuous traditional dress, the girls cover their heads with white headscarves. White gloves and white socks obscure their elegant hand and foot movements, while what appears to be a green satin sack hides the rest of their prepubescent anatomy.

Such puritanical disdain for traditional practice reflects the growing Islamization of Indonesian cultural life. It marks a significant breach with the recent and historical past, when both pre- and post-colonial Javanese rulers took pride in a syncretism that amalgamated religious and cultural differences into an original Indonesian blend. Across Jakarta today, however, middle-class women anxiously debate -- while sipping latte in air-conditioned cafes in the downtown shopping malls -- whether it is Islamically correct to wear the stylish "millennium" headscarf, elegantly tied at the nape of the neck, as a fitting accompaniment to lipstick and Ray-Bans. This fashionable equivocation receives little sympathy from sisters in Islam like Anne Rufaidah, the owner of an Islamic women's clothing chain. She insists that only the austere Middle Eastern headscarf, which descends shapelessly to the waist, meets the Quranic injunction to modesty and propriety. The Balinese dancers in Fatahillah Square wisely opt for th e righteous look.

A more disturbing illustration of this increasingly intolerant mindset may be found to the south of the museum in the ethnically Chinese suburb of Glodok. Its pockmarked and windowless shopping centers bear silent witness to the chaos that marked the demise of Suharto's New Order in 1998, when over 1,000 ethnic Chinese perished during riots orchestrated by shadowy "dark forces." Even in 2002 members of this despised non-Islamic minority dare not display Chinese characters over their shophouses. Despite the recent return of public celebrations of the Chinese New Year, pragmatism here requires the deliberate obfuscation of identity. Just to the south of Glodok, as it happens, is the site of the Monumen Nasional, once the quintessential symbol of Indonesia's now rapidly decaying secular ambitions. Mounted on a concrete pedestal, a phallus-shaped flame invokes the traditional authority of Javanese rulers; but today the litter-strewn square of arid brown earth, sporting the occasional tuft of grass, testifies elo quently both to the Ozymandian pretensions and the subsequent decay of the New Order.

It is not only in popular culture that we see evidence of the closing of the collective Indonesian mind. In August 2002, the annual session of the Indonesian People's Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusya Waratan Rakyat, or MPR) met to discuss proposed amendments to the 1945 constitution, a document with a somewhat checkered history since the troubled republic gained independence from the Dutch in 1949. One amendment sought not to democratize or liberalize Indonesian life after the Suharto dictatorship, but instead to restore the vision of the country's more Islamically-inclined founding fathers. The Jakarta Charter of 1945 declared the centrality of sharia to the future of the inchoate republic, but the modernizing nationalist regimes of Sukarno (1950-66) and Suharto (1966-98) had no use for such views. In 2002, however, Islamization was back on the political agenda. Although eventually rejected by the MPR, the sharia amendment received support from Vice President Hamzah Haz, Assembly Speaker Amien Rais a d two small Islamic parties in the Assembly.

It was also endorsed on the streets by increasingly assertive Islamist groups like the Front Pembela Islamaya (FPI -- Islamic Defenders Front), Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Majlis Mujaheddin Indonesia (MMI-Assembly of Indonesian Mujaheddin), and it is clear that these groups have popular support that goes well beyond their formal memberships. A December 2001 survey conducted by the State Institute of Islamic Studies (IAIN) found that 61 percent of the population responded positively to the statement that "Islamic government, that is government based on the Quran and the Sunna and led by experts in Islam ... is the best for this country." A higher percentage of the population also preferred military rule to the uncertainties of parliamentary rule (45 to 42 percent). (1)

Easily the largest state in size and population among the diverse nations of Southeast Asia, Indonesia is important in its own right. Destabilized and Islamized, it would threaten both the ASEAN grouping and its immediate neighbor to the south, Australia. (2) But the Indonesian case seems only an advanced version of a growing general propensity in Southeast Asia toward ethno-religious fundamentalism. Thus in Malaysia the long established dominion of the modernizing Barisan Nasional government faces the prospect of both internal factionalism and external challenge. For more than twenty years, an autocratic prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has driven the apathetic Malays toward ambitious developmental goals. But as he contemplates stepping down from his various offices, a countervailing Malay Islamism in the shape of the Partai Agama se-Malaysia (PAS) is both expanding its political appeal and exacerbating long dormant ChineseMalay tensions in the multi-ethnic state. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the unresol ved struggle for Moro (Muslim) independence in southern Mindanao, which dates from the 1970s, has been globalized in the course of the 1990s as the radical Abu Sayyaf group established links with AL-Qaeda.

Indeed, the identification in December 2001 of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a Southeast Asian AI-Qaeda franchise that was preparing to attack U.S. and Israeli embassies and British and Australian High Commissions in Singapore, demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected degree of cooperation among radical Islamists in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia. Also unappreciated until then were their extensive links to and identification with both the ideology and tactics of AlQaeda. Operating through networks of patronage and intermarriage, groups like JI, Laskar Jihad, the FPI and Kumpulan Mujaheddin Malaysia (KMM) seek to unite the Muslim world as a superpower governed by a caliphate like those of the 7th century. Several Islamist groups in Indonesia, linked together through Sheikh Abu Bakar Bashir's MMI, share this commitment to building an Islamic realm. They all maintain that the United States is the real global terrorist because of its links with Zionism, its support for unIslamic regimes in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, and its promotion of the anti-Islamic politics of democratic secularism. These groups may not be able to take over Indonesia or other Southeast Asian states, but they may soon be in a position to disorganize, intimidate, terrorize and paralyze them.

Southeast Asia and Western Social Science

WHAT DOES all this mean? On the conventional policy level, it means that a region which until recently served as a global parable of successful development has transformed itself, in less than a decade, into an arc of instability with global ramifications. But, after the October 2002 Bali bombing, this is to state the obvious. What does it mean in more general terms about the adequacy of our understanding of contemporary Islam, on the one hand, and what we think we know about modernization, democratization and development on the other? While such concerns lend themselves to theoretical considerations, they are also the bases upon which rest several equally unconventional and ambitious policies designed to "drain the swamp" of support for terrorism. The sophistication of our understanding, or lack...