My Friend the Fanatic:Travels with an Indonesian Islamist

By the time I arrived in Bali the exodus had already begun. Every flight out of Denpasar airport was packed and Qantas was said to have commissioned an extra aircraft specially for panicked Australians. In the last of the evening’s light, in sarongs and printed shirts, thongs or sandals, here and there a surfboard tucked under an arm, they formed a ragged line outside the airport.

The sun had barely set when I reached Kuta, but it felt like the still before dawn. I walked past Bounty Bar, shaped like a pirate schooner and as deserted as a shipwreck. A bikini-clad mannequin stared out of a surfing-equipment store’s darkened window. Ahead of me a small band of stay-behinds, their thongs and floral shirts at odds with their ashen faces, trudged towards a yellow-tape police barricade. I flashed my press card - I was here as a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal - and ducked under the tape. Soldiers and policemen, machine guns slung from their shoulders, stood in a knot puffing on kreteks, clove cigarettes. Behind them stood a small Hagen-Dazs truck, its roof depressed as though it had been stepped on by a giant. The driver, I later learned, had been decapitated by the blast while he idled in traffic.

Ground zero smelled of gasoline and burnt wood. Uprooted tables, blackened beer bottles and mangled red plastic beer crates dotted the ashes of what had been the Sari Club the night before. Cars parked in front had been reduced to junkyard wrecks. The Balinese had already visited, leaving behind maroon, white and orange flowers in delicate banana-leaf baskets, their appeasement for the Gods. For a while, searching for some trace of a human being, a shoe, a bracelet, a severed hand, I followed the spotlight of a video camera manned by another latecomer to the scene. But the site had already been cleaned up and all that remained was rubble. More than two hundred people died in the attacks: a smaller backpack bomb at Paddy’s bar across the street had preceded the massive car bomb that did most of the damage. Three months later they would fill 140 bags with unidentified body parts for burial, but on that night it was as though the dead had been vapourised, leaving behind only ash and glass and plastic.

Less than a week earlier I had stood at the same spot, eager for the bustle of Kuta after four days in a sleepy east Balinese village. I had wolfed down a hamburger at the Hard Rock Caf� overlooking the beach then strolled to the Sari Club for a drink. It was empty except for a squad of bronzed and bare-chested Australians chugalugging Bintang beers under a large screen on which writhed Madonna dressed like a cowboy. The evening was still young; the sun’s last salmon pink smeared the sky. Hours lay before the appearance of the first slender-hipped hookers. And it was not until close to midnight that the dance floor, packed and sweaty, would turn the club into a viable target.

I heard the crunch of the cameraman’s receding footsteps. A few minutes later it was time for me to call it a night as well.

Until the Bali bombings every foreign journalist in the country could tell you two things: that Indonesia was the world’s most populous Muslim country and that its Muslims were overwhelmingly moderate. Islam was a relatively recent import to the archipelago. It washed up in the twelfth century, took root in the fifteenth and became dominant as late as the seventeenth. It arrived through trade rather than conquest, by Indian dhow rather than Arab charger. It was preceded by a millennium and a half of Hinduism and Buddhism, whose achievements included central Java’s Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist monument, and Majapahit, a Hindu-Buddhist empire whose influence stretched to present-day Cambodia. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in comparing Indonesia to Morocco: ‘In Indonesia, Islam did not construct a civilisation, it appropriated one.’

By the time the new faith took hold in the archipelago its influence in other parts of the world had already begun to wane. The high-water marks of Islamic civilization - Abbasid Baghdad and Moorish Spain - had long receded and in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies completed the Reconquista by evicting the Moors from Granada. Portuguese gunships had already entered Southeast Asian waters when Majapahit sputtered its last in the early 1500s. Consequently, Islam was denied the long political supremacy it held in regions closer to the first flush of Arab power, and with it the chance to cement its hold on society. In 1619 the Dutch established their headquarters at Batavia, today’s Jakarta. Except for a brief period of Japanese rule during World War Two, they stayed until 1949.

You still saw Dutch fingerprints here and there, in an odd word (bioskop - movie theatre, rekening - account), or in a sturdy old building, but it was the Hindu-Buddhist past that was felt most clearly. This was the only place in the world where you might call yourself Muslim yet name your children Vishnu and Sita, seek moral guidance in a wayang shadow puppet performance of the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, and believe in Dewi Sri, the Goddess of the rice paddy, Ratu Kidul, Queen of the South Seas and Nini Tawek, angel of the Javanese kitchen. This comfort with the past, it seemed, fostered comfort with the present. The supermarkets stocked beer; Ramadan sales offered discounts on Capri pants. State-owned television housed a weekly show called ‘Country Road’, ninety minutes of Indonesians in denims and Stetsons line dancing, whirling imaginary lassos and crooning hits from deepest Texas and New Orleans.

At the same time, though, a deeper transformation of society was under way. Since the 1970s Indonesian Islam had begun to be stripped of its native foliage by a combination of rapid urbanisation, the implementation of uniform religious education by then President General Suharto’s bitterly anti-communist regime and the efforts of homegrown and Middle Eastern purifiers of the faith. The old tolerance was giving way to an assertive new orthodoxy. You could see superficial signs every day - in the headscarves that dotted college campuses, in the shiny-domed mosques mushrooming in the countryside, in the prayer calluses on the foreheads of the devout. Demands for implementing the medieval Arab practices enshrined in sharia law, dismissed by the nation’s founders more than fifty years earlier, had risen again. Church burnings, once unthinkable, barely raised eyebrows. Groups with names like Islamic Defenders Front and Laskar Jihad had taken to the streets, trashing bars and discotheques in Jakarta and battling Christians in a bloody civil war on the country’s eastern fringe. Against this backdrop, the carnage in Bali was only the most visible expression of a much larger churning.

In the weeks after the bombings, Bali had the appearance of a familiar TV set peopled by an alien cast. Sunbathers gave way to police and soldiers, and to a contingent of set-jawed Australian investigators; reporters flooded the Hard Rock Hotel where officials tallied the body count at the daily press briefing. My time collapsed into a series of disjointed images: a Hindi film playing in the smoky waiting room at police headquarters, fresh plywood coffins stacked under the moonlight in a hospital courtyard, lunch alone on a sprawling white terrace by a deserted beach, a long row of red and white national flags at half-mast on bamboo poles, red silk umbrellas and the smell of incense at an interfaith prayer to keep the peace. In Bali I felt the stirrings of a curiosity deeper than any I had ever felt before. Over the previous two years I had written about the growth of hardline Islam, but these articles, I now saw, barely hinted at the scale of the transformation under way. To understand where things were headed, what Indonesia would look like in ten years or twenty, I would have to pull together the disparate threads of a story that crisscrossed the archipelago.