Conflict hits Indonesia hard

PEMOGON, Indonesia The men were marked as outsiders and Islamic fundamentalists by their untrimmed beards and long, flowing robes. They arrived, one or two at a time, in the summer of 2002, preaching, trading, selling rolls and sandwiches in this quiet village on the working-class side of Bali, where Muslims coexist placidly with Hindus, Buddhists, and animists.

The residents of Pemogon had no clue that this was an organized infiltration, and they welcomed the newcomers to walk the shady, cobbled streets, sit along the canals, and pray in the modest stone-and-wood mosques.

But mixing in was not what the strangers had in mind. That October, devastating car bombs exploded in the middle of a strip of nightclubs in nearby Kuta, the center of Bali's resort complex, killing 202 people. Most of the victims were foreign tourists, but 35 were Indonesians, many of them from Pemogon, where driving taxis to and from the resorts is a common occupation.

Soon afterward, investigators came to Pemogon looking for suspects, villagers say, but by then the strangers had vanished.

Suddenly, a community that has long cherished tolerance, hospitality, and moderation as the hallmarks of Islam was sucked into the global struggle between the religion's moderates and extremists, a struggle that will determine the future of a strategically important arc of Islamic nations extending from Morocco to Indonesia.

Indonesia is a vitally important battleground in that struggle. It is the world's fourth most populous country, and nearly 90 percent of its 238 million people are Muslims. Relations among religions in Indonesia, and between Islam and the government, are in many respects representative of conditions in the Islamic world outside the Middle East. Radicalization of Indonesia would dramatically advance the extremists' bid to wage a global holy war against the West and against Muslim societies that fundamentalists view as corrupt or heretical.

What happened in placid Pemogon illustrates how comparatively small networks of radical schools, mosques, and militias have been able to exploit and intimidate the much larger number of Muslims who reject violence.

"The process was very soft at the beginning, then the marketing pitch became strong," says Hasan, the village patriarch, whose few remaining teeth and snow-white hair lend some plausibility to his claim to be 123 years old. An exotic bird shrieked in his small, stone-paved courtyard as he recalled how the disaster unfolded.

"They visited each house, one at a time, saying they had the correct Islam," Hasan says. "They came to the mosque, they prayed, they talked with us there. When they started telling us Islam should be radical, I rejected them, and we told them to leave."

But the men did not leave Pemogon until after the bombs exploded.

Seeds of conflict

The two strains of Islam that came into confrontation in Pemogon date back centuries. The radicals trace their lineage to a fundamentalist Middle Eastern cleric who helped establish the first Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 18th century, the moderates to Yemenite traders who brought a less orthodox form to Indonesia beginning in the 15th century.

The Islam that developed in Arabia -- sometimes referred to as Salafi, based on the Arabic word for purity, and sometimes Wahhabi, after its founding cleric, Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahab -- is dedicated to preserving the religion in what its leaders say is its original form. Its most extreme adherents have been attacking and killing Islamic moderates since the early 1990s, when they murdered Egyptian human-rights advocate Farag Foda in 1992 and ended the career of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz with a near-fatal knife attack in 1994.

The intimidation effort spread to Turkey in 2000 and 2001, where Turkish Hezbollah militants killed leading feminist Konca Kuris and dozens of other Turkish moderates and progressives, then to countries farther from the center of the Islamic world.

In south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where about 60 percent of the world's estimated 1.4 billion Muslims live, Islam has not only influenced society, but it has also been influenced in turn by Hindus, Buddhists, and native religions. Especially in Indonesia, Islam developed strong traditions of coexistence with other religions and with the government.

But as Indonesians schooled in the fundamentalism of the Middle East and hardened on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan began filtering home following the end of the Afghan wars, moderates and extremists increasingly came into conflict. The encounter in the streets and mosques of Pemogon showed one face of their struggle. The schools, where future generations are being taught sharply contrasting views of Islam and of the world, show another.

Two schools of thought

Sunan Drajat Pesantren and Pesantren Al-Islam are located about 275 miles west of Pemogon on the central Indonesian island of Java. The two Islamic boarding schools are separated by four miles of shimmering green fields and by the enormous differences that divide moderate and militant Muslims today.

One epitomizes the modernizing face of Islam in Indonesia. The other was the home base of the leader of the Bali bombers.

Sunan Drajat, in Lamongan, is wide open, physically and intellectually. Entry to the campus is not restricted. Female faculty participate with male colleagues in discussions of religion and politics. Female students in their early teens are modestly but brightly dressed; they cover their hair but do not wear veils. They are encouraged to practice their English with a visiting male foreigner. They express ambitions that are anathema to those who fashion themselves "pure" Islamists.

"I want to study in America and be an airline hostess," says Lena Rachmawati, 15. "I haven't ever been to America, but the education there is very good."

Her friend Ninikrohmawati, who wants to be a teacher, also wants to study in America.

Boys and girls are separated in most classes but participate together in activities ranging from Koran recitation practice to leadership training courses. The school has 2,000 resident students, an educational tradition that has been evolving since the 15th century, and a curriculum that includes sciences and modern languages. The faculty unequivocally rejects all use of force in the name of Islam.

"Islam teaches us to live in peace, not just with Muslims but with other religions," says Mussallam, 37, a religion teacher who like many Indonesians uses a single name. Adds Hasbullah, 26, the deputy headmaster, "We educate our students to think critically."

"They have to understand [the religious instruction] to live, prosper, and die in the way of Allah," adds Shahrul, 30, a language instructor. "This does not mean dying in battle."

There are tens of thousands of Islamic academies -- madrassas in Arabic, pesantrens in Indonesian -- with tens of millions of students across the Muslim world. For many students in rural areas and poor neighborhoods, they offer the only possibility for getting an education. The tremendous number and variety of schools make precise statistics impossible, but religious, political, and security officials from Indonesia to Morocco say the great majority are moderate, and only a small minority teach that violence is sanctioned by their religion.

Pesantren Al-Islam is one such place. The boarding school is in Tenggulun, a tiny village almost invisible amid lush fields of corn and rice. The school is dark and rough-hewn; cropland runs right up to the doors of the cramped classrooms and crowded, dirt-floored dormitories. Non-Muslims are not welcome, and women are not allowed to use the front entrance. Bumper stickers with messages like "Moslem Bosnia Only for Moslem People" and "Best One Islam" are plastered across the doors and windows. The sexes are strictly separated, and even the smallest girls fully cover their hair, neck, and shoulders.

The school has never had more than 150 pupils. Students spend almost all their time memorizing the Koran and studying religion. But now everyone in Indonesia and many people outside know of the place. The religion teacher and some of his brothers and friends from the village have been convicted in the Bali bombings. Some have been sentenced to death.

Here none of the students would speak with a foreigner. The only teacher who would was Farida, 33, the wife of convicted Bali bombing mastermind Muklas Ali Gufron and mother of his six young children. Her husband, who was chosen for her by her father, was fresh from the battlefields of Afghanistan and the religious schools of Pakistan when they met on the day of their wedding in Malaysia in 1990.

It was the first such arranged marriage in the relatively prosperous clan, a product of the family's growing inclination toward what Farida's father saw as the Islamic way. Farida, who had become religious only two years earlier, was angry and nearly rebelled. But, she said, when she failed to find Koranic grounds for rejecting the union, she submitted.

Now, entirely covered in black save a narrow band around her eyes, she teaches Koran and English to the girls at Al-Islam and raises her children in a roughly built cinderblock and plywood home where electric wires and clothes are hung from nails driven into the walls. The flash of her eyes is heightened by the veils, and she speaks with a fire altogether absent among the moderates.

Muklas did not tell her of his experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Farida says. "But I understood he was interested in jihad. ... We often talked about how Muslims all over the world -- the Middle East, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, East, and West -- were under attack."

Radicals rebound

For a while after Muklas and two of his brothers -- also associated with the school -- were arrested, it looked as if radical Islam in Indonesia was on the run, and that Pesantren Al-Islam would not survive. Most of the students left, and the school closed. Front Pembela Islam, the most militant Islamic organization operating legally in Indonesia, suspended operations. Ali Bakar Bashir, an influential fundamentalist cleric who encouraged the founding of the school in 1992, was arrested on charges related to the Bali bombings.

But despite the revulsion of most Indonesians at the bombings and other extremist actions, radical Islam has rebounded here. Early this year the most serious charges against Bashir were dropped for lack of evidence. In February he was convicted of conspiring with the bombers and sentenced to 30 months imprisonment, a sentence that drew protests, for its leniency, from US and Australian officials.

Al-Islam reopened less than a year after the bombings and regained more than two-thirds of the enrollment it lost. And Front Pembela Islam, reactivated amid the swell of public opposition to the US attack on Iraq in 2003, is back in business.

Muhammad Rizieq, the head of Front Pembela Islam, studied in the Middle East and became a traveling preacher, trader, and political activist, much like Muklas and the strangers who infiltrated Pemogon. He and Bashir, the radical cleric, are pictured together on posters in poor, strictly religious areas, and he expresses, with fire and clarity, the radical philosophy that Indonesian moderates and Bush Administration policymakers are up against.

"If Americans die in Afghanistan and Iraq, it makes me happy," Rizieq says during a conversation in the compound that serves as his home, shop, and classroom in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. "In New York, too. This is the will of God. ... I tell other Muslims that if a Muslim with a nuclear bomb can, he should commit suicide in America."

Rizieq advocates physical destruction of nightclubs and other centers of sinful behavior. He also urges immediate implementation of the harshest interpretations of Islamic law, such as cutting off the hands of thieves. Moderate groups "prefer dialogue and discussion with America," he says. "FPI prefers war. The language of the World Trade Center is the best way to talk to America."

His views are hardly those of the Islamic mainstream, and extremist views have never won more than a small percentage of the vote in national elections. But this is irrelevant both to the fundamentalists, who do not believe in majority rule, anyway, and to the moderate majority, which recognizes that the extremists are a threat far beyond their numbers.

"Islam is opposed to democracy and opposed to kingdoms," Rizieq says, asserting that religious Muslims are morally required to strive for the rise of a single state that would encompass all the Islamic world.

Indonesia's moderate Muslim leaders have very different ideas. They endorse separation of Islam and the state, ban violent behavior at their demonstrations against American policy, and worry about the potential of the extremists.

Ali Maschan Moesa, East Java chairman of the socially and politically powerful Islamist organization Nahdlatul Ulama, says his organization's 70 million members and 40 million supporters make it far more representative of Indonesian Muslims than Rizieq's Front. But he acknowledges that numbers alone are no antidote to the radical threat.

"Religion needs the state, and the state needs religion," he says. "But the relationship should not be too close. We do not want an Islamic state, as long as people can pray and fulfill their other religious obligations freely.

"Jihad does not mean killing people," Moesa says. "Jihad is a struggle for social justice, "but people tend to be radical these days because of where they are educated. They go to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East for education, and they are very radical when they come back."

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