Indonesian Islam is a good-news story for peace

If you think our politics complex, try understanding Indonesia. Our nearest big neighbour has a popul­ation of 250 million. Just less than 90 per cent of those folks are Muslims. Yet in the world’s debates on Islam, you hardly hear anything about Indonesia.

Certainly, its destiny is important to Australia. It is among the handful of countries that will materially, even fundamentally, affect our nation’s fate by its own actions. So, with the Middle East in chaos, with Islamic State propaganda polluting the internet and enticing gullible young people the world over, how is Islam going in Indonesia? With some colleagues, I am spending this week in Jakarta asking that question, among many others. And the answers are spectacularly diverse.

Dave Laksono, an up-and-coming politician representing the nationalist Golkar Party, says “one big issue” confronting Indon­esia is “the growing threat of terrorism”.

Yet one of the most doughty foes of Islamist extremism, Ulil Abshar Abdalla of the Liberal Islam Network, seems to take a contradictory view. He told me: “In terms of structure and networks, terrorists are getting weaker and smaller and losing support among (Indonesian) Muslims.

“After the Bali bombings, many Indonesians didn’t really believe that extremist organisations like Jemaah Islamiah really existed. Now the majority accepts that they do … and they are dangerous.”

So who is right? In a peculiar way, they both are. As always, Indone­sia is a land of contradictions and dualities and paradoxes. Nothing is ever really simple, which makes it perhaps a singularly challenging neighbour for Australia.

A long discussion with Indon­esian experts in extremism explained­ some of these contra­dictions. Islamic State and similar groups are winning the internet war by an embarrassingly large margin, they tell me. Moderate websites are dull compared with jihadis­t websites. Government websites are the most boring of all.

Extremist websites, by contrast, are slick and clever, full of gripping images and tales of moral outrage, and they host enthralling discussions. Yet in Indonesia, at least, they are not converting large numbers of people. The overwhelming majority of Indonesians do not believe that Islamic State or al-Qa’ida, or any similar group, represents real Islam.

Not only that, there are many measures on which Indonesian Islam is outstandingly resistant to extremists. Many more British Muslims have gone to Syria to fight than have Indonesian Muslims. Yet there are many more than 200 million Muslims in Indon­esia, a tiny fraction of that in Britain. More than that, secular national parties get a bigger vote than Islam-based parties at election after election in Indonesia. Even more important, the political parties loosely based on Islamic association­s or identities are overwhelmingly moderate.

So what is the source of this success, which incidentally is a great blessing for Australia? For a start, you have to acknowledge sustained, brilliant, courageous police work. You don’t need many bad eggs out of 250 million people to create enormous problems. The police have stopped many, many terrorist outrages from happening, and caught and prosecuted the perpetrators of the offences that have taken place. Notwithstanding the terrorist attack in Jakarta in January aimed at both civilian and police targets, it is the police who for the past decade have been the terrorists’ No 1 target.

But this police success is built on a much deeper and broader social­ and political success. Islam in Indonesia is self-confident in its identity, both its religious and its civic identity. It has long, old, continuous indigenous traditions of Islamic practice and scholarship. It furnishes its citizens with many acceptab­le ways to be Islamic.

After the fall of Suharto, the assertio­n of democracy was assoc­iated with a more self-consciously Islamic political identity. The fact this took place in part through the gifted, if eccentric, personality and presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur, was not only a great stroke of good luck, it was a tribute to the richness of Indonesia’s Islamic culture.

Gus Dur was moderate by any yardstick — he had for a time championed Indonesia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel­ — yet his status as an authentic Islamic leader was unassailable. The Gus Dur interregnum, even if his presidency was a bit chaotic, enabled Indonesia to make its democratic and Islamic transitions within the constitut­ional framework. The constitution failed neither democracy nor Islam.

Yet it also would be wrong to suggest that everything is rosy. Friends describe an undeniable growth in the conservatism of Indone­sian Islam. It would be overstating things to say this has become­ generally intolerant. Rather, there are pockets of intolerance. But it is tending to narrow society in several areas.

There has been a debate all this week in the Indonesian press about how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people should be treated. A government minister urged religious organisations not to expel gay people. That is a step towards tolerance. But the reason he gave was because their homosexuality had to be seen as an illness for which they could be treated. Another government announcement suggested a proposal to ban websites featuring LGBT material. On the other hand, several government ministers spoke up to defend the rights of gay Indon­esians.

Even the sense that Islam in Indone­sia is becoming more conservative is complex in its political consequences. Increased piety does not necessarily mean increased political Islamism or intolerance. Similarly, increased public practice of religion does not hold any specific or obvious political result­s. There are complex cross-currents of class and social status involved in the way people express their religious identity.

There are still areas of intercommunal tensions within Indon­esia, but perhaps the greatest hostility is experienced not by the recognised minority religions such as Christianity and Hinduism but by the Islamic communities that are themselves minorities, such as the Shia and the Ahmadiyas.

If you want to be certain of things in Indonesia, it’s best to stay away because no preconception, indeed hardly any well-formed idea about Indonesia, can long survive exposure to the dizzying complexity of the place.

But we should know this much at least. The single largest popul­ation of Muslims in the world lives in a sprawling archipelago just to our north. And they are committed to democracy, economic developmen­t and peace with their neighbours.

There are lots of problems, but compared with almost anywhere else in the world it’s a pretty good story.

We shouldn’t let the appalling but compelling dramas of the Middle East blind us to this enormous Islamic reality on our doorstep.