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Introduction
p. 1-3
Texte intégral
1Long cited as an example of harmonious cohabitation between different religions, the biggest Muslim country in the world occupies a special place in the Western imagination. Indonesia reassured with its brand of irenic Islam, a convenient counter-model to a rowdy and finger-pointing Arab Islam, but seeds of doubts were planted when confrontations broke out between Christians and Muslims in the Moluccas in early 1999. With the intervention of external militias one year later, perceptions evolved: henceforth Javanese Islam could take on the visage of hate-filled bearded men who had come to transform the spice islands to a hotbed of jihad. Many saw in this mutation a confirmation of the old thesis of a consubstantial obscurantism in Islam that would emerge sooner or later in violent spurts. Nourished by explanations developed in isolation, this essentialist thesis interpreted radical Islam exclusively through the hypothesis of a violence inherent in the Muslim religion with no consideration for the particularities of national histories. By focusing solely on visible expressions of extremist Islam, it fell into the trap of a stock rhetoric presenting a single-faceted religion, trustee of a fixed and exclusivist truth1 The Islam of the radicals has neither history nor territory, and is identical everywhere, any time; any analysis that is too generalised, even when it is a condemnation, ends up confirming the legitimacy of these theses.2
2This book takes a totally different approach. It aims to present the recent history of the relationship between the umma (Islamic community) and its most extremist manifestations. Probing beyond the flowing white robes of the new censors, the army fatigues of jihad fighters or the turbans of the moral order militias, it aspires to depict the multi-faceted Indonesian Muslims. Heirs of a religious history unique to the Archipelago and products of diverse political and social traditions, their itineraries deserve much more than simplistic analogies with their fellow believers in the Middle East. Far from being the pathological outgrowth on a healthy religious body that has been contaminated by a mysterious foreign virus, Indonesian radical Islam should be examined in its own context. As such, the following chapters attempt to reconstitute the genealogy of the different networks of Indonesian radical Islam so as to understand its functioning and describe its ideology, while analysing the complex relationships the Indonesian Muslim community maintains with its extremist fringes.
3Immediate history (or “histoire du temps present”, history of the present), our approach attempts to place events merely glimpsed in the course of the agitations of current affairs in their chronological context. This approach therefore endeavours to link different points of immediate history to other developments, national or international, such as the spread of Muslim reformism in the Archipelago, the formation of the Indonesian nation-state, the beginnings of the New Order or exposure to the networks of international Islamism. The milestones of this chronology demonstrate clearly how phenomena of a diverse nature have come together. This is true of 1967, the year that opens our period of study. In Indonesia it marked the birth of the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia, DDII), in which a section of reformist Islam with a sometimes-audacious liberal bent mutated into a sectarianism that closed in on itself. But more generally, 1967 was also the moment of an humiliating defeat for the Arab armies during the Six Day War, whose role in the genesis of an international Islamism is well known. Concomitances more than coincidences, these confluences between internal causes and more general developments demonstrate the plurality of causes involved and the diversity of expressions — very much the contrary to the “Islamic abstraction” that Georges Corm has denounced.3
4This complexity of causes corresponds, of course, to a multiplicity of expressions that cannot be easily encapsulated by a single vocabulary, which is in itself somewhat simplistic. We should therefore explain the vocabulary chosen for this work. Radical Islam — which we largely prefer to fundamentalism or Islamism — is a good indication of the dual nature of the movements described. Being extremist in nature since it calls for a total and uncompromised change, radical Islam is also an attempt to return to the roots and foundation of its religion. In Indonesia, this can be defined by a rejection of the status quo adopted after Independence. The preamble of the Constitution proclaimed at Independence elevated to the level of national ideology the five principles (Pancasila), of which the first, belief in one God, was supposed to guarantee a pluralistic religious identity. Although it did give the state a religious basis, it also placed Islam on an equal footing as the other religions. Accepted since by the over-whelming majority of Muslim organisations in the country, conscious of the constraints associated with the multi-religious dimension of the Archipelago, this principle was, however, opposed by a militant minority, the object of our study. This rejection was obviously rooted in older traditions. The radical manifestations of Indonesian Islam did not emerge with Independence, and the entire history of Islam in the Archipelago since its early spread till the rough period of Reformasi (the post-Soeharto period) should be reconsidered in this perspective. The very nature of the phenomenon of radicalisation lies at the heart of these events: neither a “maladie de l’Islam (disease of Islam)”4 nor an outgrowth with no links to the social body from which it has originated, radicalism seems more like a temptation to us. That of a simplistic explanation in response to a chaotic and complex world, of an immanent and unquestionable norm in a relativist world, but also the temptation of an instrumentalisation for social or political ends. All very human temptations which remind us that, beyond the eschatological gesticulations, the story of radical Muslims is above all a story of men and women.
Notes de bas de page
1This risk is prefectly summed up by Gabriel Martinez-Gros and Lucette Valensi who wrote concerning Islam’s pseudo refusal of the modern world: “In general we do not realise the full implications of an interpretation so spontaneous and so widely shared by militant Islamists and Western observers that it does not seem to warrant discussion, when in fact it springs from a wide base of discourse that should be explained”, L’Islam en dissidence, Seuil, Paris, 2004, p. 8.
2Thus the state of impasse of analyses that view Islam as “a sort of omniscient myth holding the key to the secrets of how Muslim societies operate, their history, morality, culture, politics, economy and future”, rightly denounced by Burhan Ghalioun in Islam et Politique, La modernité trahie, La Découverte, Paris, 1997, 250 pp.
3Georges Corm, L’Europe et l’Orient, La Découverte, Paris, 1989, 380 pp.
4According to the title of Abdelwahab Meddeb’s work, The Malady of Islam, trans. Pierre Joris and Ann Reid, Basic Books, New York, 2002, 221 pp., some analyses of which we share, notably that pertaining to the role of the “semi-literate” in the radicalisation process.
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