For the longest time, Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population on earth, practiced a form of Islamic religious co-existence that was gentle and recognized that portion of the Qu’ran that preached acceptance of the other “people of the Book” – notably Christians and Jews. The Hindu island of Bali rested peacefully with the vast Muslim majority elsewhere. They called it “soft Islam.” While the largest Muslim association in that country, Nahdlatul Ulama, still promotes tolerance and religious pluralism, in the last 10-15 years tolerance has faded as Islamist (radical Muslims) have made heroes of those who attack “non-believers.”
Militant groups, like Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Darul Islam, many with strong ties to al Qaeda, spread the word to hopeless and impoverished farmers and villagers, and fomented a resurgence of radical hate for non-Muslims, particularly Western superpowers. The power of the Jihad – a holy war against the non-Islam world – was hoisted as a national goal. Indonesia was no longer a safe tourist destination for most.
Remember the bombs that rocked, among other places, a bar frequented by Westerners on that non-Muslim island – Bali – in the Indonesian archipelago? On October 12, 2002, a series of blasts killed 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 were Indonesian citizens. There have been more attacks since then. This fervent anti-Western, anti-nonbeliever message became increasingly legitimized.
The October 7 International Herald Tribune reported: “In a sign of its growing prominence, Indonesia's Council of Ulemas [religious leaders] moved its headquarters from the basement of a major mosque here into an expensive new office tower in the heart of downtown… The council was established in 1975 as a quasi-governmental body of Muslim scholars by Suharto, the country's leader for three decades, partly as a tool to keep politically minded Islamic organizations in check.”
For almost 400 years after the fall of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad, the Islamic sword conquered North Africa, Spain and raged eastward and north, through France, Italy and up into the Balkan states. The West countered with an equally destructive Crusade that lasted about 119 years. Then Muslim conquest returned. Mughals invaded central and south Asia, while the Ottomans attacked the Byzantine empire, spreading their power through parts of northern Africa and the Middle East. These new Muslim rulers grew fat with riches and weak with self-indulgence. Starting in 1627, British traders slowly disemboweled the remnants of the Mughals, formalizing the British Raj in 1857, and by the 1800s, the Ottomans lands – the empire was labeled the “sick man of Europe” – were all but formally in Western hands. The formality finally came with the end of World War I.
Since then, the lure of modernization and the hope of a Western lifestyle had stalled the fundamentalist aspirations of the masses of the Islamic world. They just wanted what we wanted. When greed and corruption, often encouraged and supported by the Western powers, made the promise of economic prosperity unattainable, there was fertile ground for radical resurgence. We even supported this radical movement in the Russian war over Afghanistan that ended badly for the Soviets in the 1980s. We armed and trained the Afghan Mujahideen (we called them “freedom fighters” then. We call them the Taliban now.), the same radicals who nurtured and provided training grounds and safe haven to those who attacked the Twin Tower and the Pentagon in 2001. We rationalized this phenomenon as “blow back.”
Muslim pride, amplified by secular greed and corruption, has brought the specter of a globalized Jihad to the forefront of every nation on earth, even as the economic realities have crushed hopes, dreams and lifestyles everywhere. It is useful to ask “why now?” We know that most Muslims simply want to practice their faith quietly and live their lives in harmony with the rest of the world. But the Muslim extremist edge has gorged itself on a litany of success and still pictures a global Caliphate (Muslim governance) under Sharia (Muslim law).
The Mujahideen have long since taken credit for bringing down the Communists of Soviet Russia by sapping her military and economic strength in the Afghan campaign. They brag about how their heroes, men like al Qaeda leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, remain free and at large despite concerted U.S. efforts to find them. They’ve gorged themselves on “guilt” money paid by oil rich barons hoping to buy peace and religious blessings with large sums of cash paid to Muslim extremists. They’ve used some of this money to create schools – madrasa – to inculcate radicalism deep into young minds.
They revel in the fact that somewhere around 70 nuclear weapons reside under Muslim control in Pakistan, a regime that appears to be perpetually on the brink of collapse – a potentially easy target for Muslim radicals who control, without government interference, the entire Western Tribal District, a large region that borders Afghanistan. Strangely, Iran’s nuclear menace is less of a concern, for despite the malevolent rhetoric, this Shiite nation finds few friends in the vastly larger Sunni Muslim world, and the arms are (or will be) in the hands of a central government that appears to be very much in control. Unfortunately, the Iranian link to Pakistan remains the nuclear design brilliance of Dr. A.Q. Khan, who passed the Iranians information not only on how to build the weapons but on how to construct the exceptionally complex centrifuges necessary to secure enough weapons grade plutonium to power the bombs and missile warheads.
The radicals tout how they lured the U.S. into a battlefield to fight a war in the wrong country (Iraq), a war that they believe was as damaging to the U.S. economy – a nation that has incurred in excess of a trillion dollars of national debt – as was the war in Afghanistan to the Soviets. They really expect us to collapse as well. They laugh as America turned her focus from Afghanistan to Iraq and allowed the Taliban to return to power over most of the war-torn Afghan nation. They love that Afghan opium poppies supply the heroin to over 90% of the planet’s addicts – mostly in the non-Muslim world (although, as much of the drugs pass through Iran on the way to the West, Iran has been blessed with a particularly high addition rate). The Islamist world is actually taking credit for initiating the global economic downfall by sapping the U.S. economy over Iraq and Afghanistan, a fall which they feel has been accelerated by the non-believers’ greed and avarice.
And today, as virtually every radical who participated in the attack on Mumbai has been killed or captured, they celebrate that they have literally destroyed the tourism business, shaken to the ground the economy of a city that represents the combined impact of New York and Los Angeles to India, and have seriously damaged if not destroyed the nascent exploration of détente between Pakistan and India – two nations separated by religion that have battled each other since their “creation by separation” in 1947. The countries have especially battled over the disputed border region of Kashmir (heavily Muslim, but within India), where some believe that the Mumbai attackers found their support (with funding, many also believe, from sources within Pakistan). There have been a series of other Islamist attacks in India, mostly over the past year, and tensions are escalating.
Suketu Meta, writing for the November 29, 2008 New York Times, wrote: “The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.” Indians will retaliate with success in the longer term, suffering in the near term.
But radicalism is basking in the searing heat of their continued success against their anointed enemies. And the battleground is expanding; as a national elections split along Christian and Muslim factions, the November 29, 2008 CNN reported that the West African nation of Nigeria was being ripped apart: “Mobs burned homes, churches [on the 29th] in a second day of riots as the death toll rose to more than 300 in the worst sectarian violence in Africa's most populous nation in years.” Is this just the beginning or will rational thought find a path to settle this fire of animosity?
I’ll end this little historical piece with a reminder from my own past, as a teenage step-son of a career U.S. diplomat in Beirut, Lebanon – a time of wonderful memories for me. I have never been treated better, with more kindness, dignity and respect, than I was treated by local Muslims – Sunni villagers in the countryside, Shiites in neighboring towns – in that Middle Eastern nation. This morning, as I looked at this new radical movement that has gripped the region and exploded into the world, I started to cry.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I hope my son lives to see a return to a period of more peaceful co-existence in the world.
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