Thursday last week, 28 July, Sjoerd van Koningsveld passed away. Two years younger than me, I felt impressed, because the end of life can be so close. Sjoerd was born in 1943 as the son of a Protestant minister in Leeuwarden, the Frisian province of the Netherlands. He studied Arabic and Islam at the (Protestant) Free University of Amsterdam. His dissertation was about a Spanish Arab-Latin dictionary of the 15th century. He proved that it was written for Arabs who wanted to study Latin. This was the time of the reconquista, when city after city was conquered by the Christian Spanish army, destroying seven centuries of Muslim domination of this great European country. His whole life he continued the study of this Muslim community and its fate under severe Christian rule. Two of his students, Herman Beck (now in Tilburg) and Gerard Wiegers (now professor in Amsterdam), continued this interest. Also Nico Kaptein (now in Leiden), was among his students, but Kaptein wrote a dissertation about the introduction of the maulid celebration of the Prophet's birthday in Fatimid Egypt.
After finishing his studies in Amsterdam, he became keeper of the Arab manuscripts in Leiden University library, later moved to the theological faculty to teach Islam. Here quite a few Indonesian students met him for their studies in the Netherlands, because he was always willing to help new people coming to Leiden. Later he also had close relation to the Iraqi scholar Qasim al-Samarra'i and the Egyptian Nasr Hamid Aby Zayd. In the early 1980s he published a series of articles on the life and work of Snouck Hurgronje, venerated in Leiden as the greatest professor in Islamic Studies. He found in the archives firm proof that the father of Snouck was a Protestant minister who fled from Holland to England with the pregnant daughter of a colleague, leaving his own wife pregnant of a child as well in his home country. Snouck senior was thereupon dismissed from his function in the church. Nevertheless, Snouck junior studied theology, but also Arabic in Leiden, and became the government's advisor for native affairs in Batavia. Twice he married in the Dutch East Indies the daughter of a Sundanese penghulu, at the advice of the religious leader Hasan Mustafa. In the 1890s Snouck junior became also the advisor in the cruel war in Aceh.Van Koningsveld demythologised the fame of Snouck Hurgronje, stating that it is unethical to abuse academic studies and positions for such colonial oppression. The debate about this 'destruction of the image of Snouck Hurgronje' continues until today. Leiden professor Wim van den Doel in his recent (2021!) biography of Snouck. Het volkomen geleerdenleven van Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje), under the subtitle of Verguizing (=slander), spends five pages (534-540) to the deep emotional ties between Snouck and his Indonesian spouses and offspring.
In 1990 Sjoerd was nominated, still in Leiden, full professor for Islam in Europe. With the Dutch-Palestinian social scientist Wasif Shadid he started research about the recent arrival of Muslims in Western European countries. After several experiments he even started in Leiden a special education programme for future imams in the Netherlands, that proved to be not successfull. The combination of the Dutch model of secularised religious studies with the more practical training of a good functioning (but lowly paid) imam was not attractive for Muslim students.
Sjoerd was married to a Sino-Indonesian wife. They had two son, and two grandchildren. After divorce he remarried in the mid-1990s with Iraqi-born (1953) artist Afifa Aleiby, a well known painter in her own right. One of her paintings is included here to show angels who may welcome Sjoerd van Koningsveld in paradise. Perhaps at his surprise!
On 17 Februari 2021 Lies Marcoes (b. 1958) celebrated
her 63d birthday. Just one year short of the 64 years of the Prophet Muhammad
and one year short too of eight times eight year or windu. She received that
day a great gift. Mirisa Hasfaria, a colleague and friend in her work for
better positions of women, against enforced marriage of young girls, against
old fashioned and irrational understanding of shari’a rules and similar issues,
had collected 112 short pieces written for facebook (between 1-3 pages),
sometimes also published in Kompas, Jakarta Post, Gatra and together
with a longer interview with Mirisa herself and an opening letter by Nani
Zulminarni, it became a literary corpus of 114, as many as the number of sura
for the Qur’an. However, the title Merebut tafsir has no direct relation
to interpretation of the Qur’an, it rather means that the book will try
understand the problems and enigmas of the modern world of Indonesia,
especially of Muslim women. It is not only an effort for understanding, it is
also an activist initiative for change. In this way also the organization of a
Ceribon Pesantren and Lies since 2010, Rumah KitaB(=House of the BooK) has no direct relation to
the Holy Book (only), but is an acronym for Our Common Home (Rumah Kita
Bersama), the world where we live must be understood and odd things must be
repaired and improved, because Lies is not only a researcher but also an
activist. Moreover, she wants first to concentrate on concrete people, not on
old texts. In three time months the first edition was sold out and the second
is now in the market. Lies was so kind to send me a copy and below I will give
some impressions.
The interview with Mirisa Hasfaria (235-244) tells how
Lies, after graduation at IAIN, the State Academy for Islamic Studies in
Jakarta in 1982, worked in the last decade of the Soeharto government mostly as
a critical promotor of birth control for P3M, until she received from the Ford
Foundation a fellowship to study medical anthropology in Amsterdam (2000,
Master’s Thesis on Javanese Surinamese in the Netherlands and their views on
health care, human reproduction). She saw the programme for birth control by
the Soeharto government as just an instrument forlarge-scale economic progress, without a good
insight in the real need of women. It was often misunderstood. The programme
was called Keluarga Berencana, usually KB, but kabeh also stands
for ‘many’(children, p. 53). In general
it neglected the problems of teenagers: it was restricted for married people
with already one or two children. In 2018 she wrote a column for the newspaper Kompas
(here pp. 282-4) where she comes to the problem that has one of her major
concerns since 2010: the high number ofmarriages under 20 year. Research has proven that 45% of the girls in
the age of 15-19 want to use contraceptives, but it is against the law to give
it to them. In this field again and again she criticizes the 97% of teenagers
who receive dispensation from the Religious Courts to marry under the legal age
of marriage (minimal 19 years). Nationally about 20% of the marriages are of
this kind. As a qualified scholar in Islamic studies she gives her own style of
interpretation to the difficult and ambiguous term wali. In the end of
2016 there was the debate about the interpretation of the word by Jakarta
Governor Ahok. In her own way Lies supports him (p.11). She also argues as
former leader of the fiqh an-nisā programme at P3M that the term wali
as a father (or even uncle, older brother) should not be abused to enforce a
young girl, dependent, without a network of her own, often poor, into a
marriage that is profitable for her wali or ‘protector’s’ sake (p. 35). She
also connects the abuse ofthe power of
the wali to one of the major causes, the overpopulation in agrarian regions,
where most people no longer have (enough) land to live from. In her general
disgust of patriarchy or manipulation of women by men, she includes also the
headscarf and more radical clothing of women in funny descriptions of jilbabisasi
and the ‘policy of kebaya’. Quite interesting is also her view on older
people (in Tafsir no 38, 65, 74). She writes lovely about the mudik,
visiting the parents at the end of Ramadan. But she is critical about the
position of elderly as ‘guests’ in the house of one of their children: it is
often not a bless, but the end of independence and authority for the older
people. From little children, teenagers, women in general, to older people: she
puts the individuals and their development first. In
a more general formula she defines the goal of the ‘struggle for understanding’
as below: ‘To bring back tafsir to its role of defending the oppressed, we
must confront the text with actual life. In this sense the direction of
understanding must be clear. It must give a thirst for liberation to and by
those who are harassed by social structures and ‘class’.’ (See the text below, ' p 2 in Tafsir 1, a commentary on ideas of Ziba Mir-Hosseini)
The major isues of Muslim feminist theology are here exposed mostly in concrete cases. The six are: 1. against poligamy; 2. pro gender equality; 3. ladies can be called alima, or ulama, 4. men have no right to beat their spouses; 5. against marriage of children and teenagers; 6. against jilbab, One very special case here is about poligamy. 'Tafsir 79' about a seminar about poligamy. The entrance fee was 4 millin rupiah or € 400, which tells us about the goal of peple seeking a seond wife. They live in a marriage as in business: to keep one for manager in the household, another one for pleasure. This is the reason that in most cases men take a second wife in secret. The first wife knows nothing, children also are not involved! Quite funny too is her description of some male
scholars of Islamic law, especially of ‘the
conversion or metamorphosis of Kiai Husein Muhammad’. This learned man had some
strange ideas about the menstruation of women: ‘it feels as if they must piss,
and they feel when it stops..’ But later he was corrected by the women themselves
and considered as a ‘feminist Muslim scholar’ and he received a doctorate honoris
causa from the Islamic University of Semarang in 2019 (57-61). When read this I felt sorry for Lies that she
could never fulfil the invitation to write a doctoral dissertation in
Australia, due to medical problems. Perhaps we should consider this book as her doctoral dissertation, or as
a book that may stimulate a doctorate honoris cause for this researcher
in the field of Islamic feminism or fiqh an-nisā? Also quite funny is
her description of another famous personality in Indonesian Islam, Mama Dedeh
(29-32). She followed the formal regular courses like Lies: pesantren,
the State University of Islamic Studies, but developed as a specific example of
traditional Javanese preaching: serious matters mixed with good humorous
jokes.She mixes her daily very early (five o’clock in the morning) short speeches in television
with Arab phrases, but also many common jokes, representing the Islam Nusantara
or local Indonesian Islam, seen as the true answer to Salafi Islam. We must
thank Mirisa Hasfaria who composed from the Facebook messages and scattered
printed material such a lively and wide-ranging collection. It is complete and
reliable as to the valuable contributions of Lies Marcoes. This is truly a very
direct and concrete report of the contemporary debate on the issue of women,
modern culture and Islamic law and local traditions in Indonesia.
For a review of one of the earlier books by Lies
Marcoes see my former blog: http://relindonesia.blogspot.com of 3
January 2015, A journey against defeat. – Karel Steenbrink, Utrecht, 12
July 2021.
During the last 15 years again and again aspects of Dutch colonialism have been put forward, often to criticize this long history. In December 2008 ten widows of men who were shot in the village of Rawagede without any process on 9 December 1947 started a court case against the Dutch State in The Hague. On 9 December 2011 they received € 20.000 each. In 2018 another case was started against the Dutch State in favour of men whose fathers were killed in February 1947 in a very strange way. As part of punishing anti-Dutch villages, besides setting houses in fire and shooting people running away, the Dutch held boxing contests between two men: the one who lost was shot, while the winner was saved. There was no reason for this arbitrary killing, under order of one Captain Rijborz of KNIL, the colonial army. On 7 May 2021 the court decided that two sons of victims of these killings will receive € 5.000: one Santa, son of Jabu from Lisu and Alwi Ros, son of La Miru from Amparita. There is much criticism now in the press about the slow process and the low amount given for a war crime so many years ago. By contrast I include here a picture of a calm group of KNIL soldiers, and the modern Puskesmas of Amparita.
The debate continues: from the genocide in Banda under Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, to many war crimes in the period 1946-1949. Also in the recent biography of Muslim scholar Snouck Hurgronje, much details about his involvement in cruelties in the conquest of Aceh were given. The latest field of interest is slavery. Although most facts are given about the Dutch involvement in the slave trade between West Africa/Ghana and Central America, more and more is written now about the Dutch participation in the slave trade between Asian regions. The city of Amsterdam has ordered research and a book is published on the subject on De slavernij in oost en west where Wim Manuhutu wrote about the slaves introduced by the VOC to replace the Bandanese killed under the command of Coen. He also called for a more systematic research of the history of slavery. Also the American series of demonstrations for Black Lives Matter, has supported this interest in the dark side of Dutch colonial history.
Today I attended the live-stream examination of the doctoral dissertation by Maaike Derksen at Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The title if the dissertation is Embodied Encounters. Colonial Governamentality and Missionary Practices in Java and South Dutch New Guinea, 1856-1942.
The title refers to the book on British colonialism: Missions and Empire, where it is stressed that the missionary enterprise was not just a religious activity, but had connections in the spread of Western cultural practices, education. Two chapters of the book concentrate on the Catholic mission in Java, mostly on the Jesuits and their schools in Muntilan and the Heithuyzen (now Semarang) Sisters and their boarding school in Mendut (see the book by Mangunwijaya Ballada Dara-dara Mendut). Two more chapters concentrate on the difficult start of mission (and colonialism per se) in Merauke, to guarantee the Eastern border of the Dutch colony since 1905 and stop head hunting by the local tribe of the Marind Anim.
The pictures are the reality of zoom presentation. In fact Maaike Derksen is a convincing and very lively speaking person and she showed a deep affection to her subject. Missionary activity was not only an expansion of Catholicism (it was today all very Catholic, with few references to the Protestant missions). Colonialism was here mostly seen as a cultural project (ethical policy!) and mission with its education, hospitals and close encounter with people of Western life style, was part of it. Even the terminology of 'soft colonialism' has been used here for the involvement of religious organizations in the colonial world.
In the 50 minutes of academic questions and answers not much specific could be questioned: after eleven years of work on the dissertation, this was only the closing ceremony with some 30 people in the huge room and some more (perhaps) watching through the zoom technology. Derksen wants to continue her work by GEDINMU: Gedeeld Erfgoed Delen: Indonesische/Nederlandse Missiecollecties Uitgewisseld, a programme of exchange of data of Dutch archives with Indonesian researchers. Yesterday I received an interesting request in this field: the Indonesian PRR Sisters of East Flores (Lebau/Larantuka) hope that their founder, Archbishop Gabriel Manek will be given the honour of being a saint of the Catholic Church. Therefore they look for documents from/about him, as many as possible. I will look for more material, although it will take some time (and money in Rome!) to have a true Saint Gabriel Manek in Larantuka!
Recently, I wrote already about the museum in Hoorn, where Jan Pieterszoon Coen was born and their condemnation of the genocide in Banda, May 1621, 400 years ago. This week there were again two initiatives that strengthened bad feelings about the Dutch and their own past.
The first is the first movie from the Dutch side on the cruel war by Captain Westerling in South Sulawesi. The movie De Oost shows the naive young soldiers who were lured to the last colonial war with the idea that 'they should defend the Indonesians against the self-interest of Sukarno, who created a nation full of internal conflicts'. In fact, in the movie a young soldier becomes member of the troops who under command of 'the Turk' (the common name for Raymund Westerling) terrorised the villages of South Sulawesi by setting many of them in fire and brutally killing all adult men. The movie De Oost is not yet shown in cinemas (closed due to the Covid-19 pandemy), but can be seen at Amazon's prime video and has created a renewed debate in the country. The story-line of the movie reminded me of the jihadi warriors who went to Afghanistan, Irak and Syria in order to do good, defend Islam against its enemies, while for many of them it was a deception, as decribed in the book by Beatrice de Graaf, below.
Veterans from the 1945-1949 in Indonesia criticised the movie because it would suggest that all elements of the army had been involved in violent warfare and indiscriminate killing of Indonesians. Two scholars of the KITLV, the Leiden institute for Indonesian studies, criticised the movie, because it gave no attention to the bravery of the Indonesian soldiers and only showed the brutal tactics of the Dutch army.
The other issue in our country these days is the great exhibition in the Rijksmuseum, the great national museum in Amsterdam, which focuses on the history of slavery and the involvement of the Dutch. This is usually only the story of trade of slaves for the Americas. But now also the Dutch involvement in Asian slavery is shown. First of all this was the case in Banda, where the population of about 15.000 mostly was killed, then the rest sold as slaves in Batavia, while other slaves were brought to Banda to work in the nutmeg culture. But in many other ways the Dutch were involved in the slave trade from India up to Indonesia. A special case is the strong personality of Surapati: a boy who was taken as a slave from Bali to Batavia, where he served as a houseboy in the ansion of the rich Dutch trader Pieter Cnoll (who married a lady ofJapanese offspring).Then he created his own army of runaway slaves and founded a realm of his own in Eastern Java.
On the painting above we can see Surapati as a houseboy in the mansion of the Dutch trader Pieter Cnoll. Below he leads his army against the Dutch (notice the Red-White-Blue flag).
Beatrice de Graaf (b. 1976) is a Dutch scholar on the history of terrorism. Recently she published a book with the title: Radicale Verlossing: wat terroristen geloven (2021, Prometheus Amsterdam, 383 pages). The title can be translated as: Radical Redemption. What terrorists believe. On page 14 she identifies what she does not accept as methodological guidelines: 1) "Islam is a peaceful religion. Muslim terrorists therefore cannot be accepted as Muslims." 2) "Religion in general and more specifically Islam invites its believers to be violent." Both position are rejected by De Graaf. Instead she takes as her methodology, that the actual modern terrorists often claim that they have religious motivations and this must be taken serious. Not the basic religious texts, not theology, but the actual motivation of terrorists must be taken as a starting point.
In many life stories, she found that terrorists were seeking some kind of redemption from personal sin, from a lost life, frustrations and negative feelings. Quite many of them were as teenager small criminals, who sought a radical redemption in a turn towards 'Islam', whatever they may have understood about it.
De Graaf was born in de Dutch village of Putten, known for its orthodox Protestant population, went as a child twice to church services on Sundays and still holds a good memory of the pious environment in which she grew up. For her research De Graaf interviewed 18 young men put in jail because of terrorist acts in the Netherlands. One of these was of Dutch offspring and was member of a small group that tried to set a mosque in fire in the town of Enschede. All 17 other young men originated from Muslim families, most of them from Morocco, some from Iran or Turkey. They had been jailed for terrorist actions and De Graaf could interview them in prison. All of them had no thorough knowledge of classical Islam and most of them had a history of contact with the police for drug addicts, thefts. De Graaf's method is called by her as thick description and micro history. Narratives fill about 70% of her book and she moves then to 'grounded theory', or a general theory grounded in facts rather than theoretical models or reasoning from sacred texts.
She also included five Indonesians in her research and took interviews in Jakarta from 24-27 February 2020 (with good help from the side of the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta and BNPT or Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terorisme: the National Counter Insurgency of Indonesia).The five ex-terrorists were Sofyan Tsauri, Kurnia Widodo, 'Ramli' (a self-chosen name of a terrorist), Syarafina Nailah (member of a large family, whose father and uncle are still in prison), Farihin. She gives a very positive impression of the way BNPT works to de-radicalize terrorists. A difference with Dutch terrorists is also that some of the older terrorists of Indonesia have a history of parents or even a grand-father, going back to the 1950s like Darul Islam in West Java. Also the debate about the Jakarta Charter and the introduction of shari'a is typical Indonesian. Common ground is found in the positive attitude to the war in Afghanistan and the rise of IS in Syria and Iraq. And most of all in the individual quest for Radical Redemption.
Sofyan Tsauri was born in 1976 in Depok. His father was a police officer, the family seldom went to the mosque and prayed at irregular times. At secondary school Sofyan became a petty criminal and was arrested several times. At the age of 18 a friend suggested him to read books by Sayyid Qutb and Shaikh Azzam. He realized 'that I had to change my life. I should cleanse my soul from all evil acts. ... I should not only think about myself, but spend my energy and agression in favour of others.' He started dreaming of the desert of Afghanistan, 'we were hiding in caves and we had grenades and guns who always hit the target. And my ammunition never was finished.'[88] But he would never make it to Afghanistan. After secondary school he went to a pesantren, a religious school, besides studying at the police academy. In the pesantren he met some teachers who had fought in Afghanistan and the book by Shaykh Azzan, Ayaturrahman fi JihadilAfghan became his favourite. He left the circle of Muslim Brothers, because they were only talking, had no actions and became in 2007 member of Jemaah Islamiyah, more or less the Indonesian branch of Al-Qaida, With his friend Dulmatin he went to Aceh to start a training camp. He did not tell to his police department, where he had worked for several years that he left his job. Also to his father he did not say anything. He was active in the camp in Aceh, in processes of securing weapons from corrupt police fellows, until the camp was arrested on 6 March 2010, put in jail for six years (after a first verdict of ten years). Already before his arrest he concluded from readings from Usama bin Laden, that it is not allowed to kill fellow Muslims. De Graaf only gives very short and incomplete life stories: she only uses the cases as illustrations for her major thesis aboutthe Radical Redemption.
The most interesting story resulted from the interview with Syarafina Nailah, member of a great family. Her father worked in Batam as government official in a quite good position. But she, and even more her younger sister Nur Dhania were not happy in Batam: life without meaning (151-6). Nailah was at university for her study of computer science, Dhania still at high school. The two girls listened to stories of a brother of her mother, a devout Muslim who had heard stories about life in the Islamic State as a truly Muslim paradise. Thisuncle had problems with his business and so the three dreamt of going to Syria in order to become a citizen of the new caliphate. Moreand moremembers of the family became happy with the idea of a new life: the father sold the family house in Jakarta and in August 2015 the extended family, 18 members left for Turkey (6 more members could in the end not follow themajority). Already in the first weeks they saw that the Caliphate was not a good place: everything dirty, even the hospital, strict separation between men and women and the obligationfor men to join the fighting. The Caliphate was a disastrous utopia. Communication with people of the caliphate was very difficult and it took them two years before they could reach Turkey, where the Indonesian government facilitated the return to Indonesia. (Something the Dutch government is quite reluctant to provide!) The grandmother of the family had died in hospital and put in a anonymous grave before the members could perform the burial rituals. The father and theuncle were sentenced to four years of prison because they had become member of a terrorist organization. The female members of the party had to attend de-radicalization programmes and a re-integration course.
In general this is a quite interesting book, but it remains difficult to formulate general qualifications for the 18 Dutch and 5 Indonesian terrorists from the short andsomewhat defective life stories.
Last week, Thursday 22 April, I had the rare experience of a succesful webinar. Elga
Sarapung and Dian/Interfidei in Yogyakarta held a memorial for Daniel
Dhakidae. DD was born on 22 August 1945, only five days after the declaration of Independence of Indonesia. He passed away on 6th April 2021. After a traditional youth (born in Ngada, Flores) of minor seminary in Mataloko, about 2,5 years of major seminary in Ledalero, he moved to UGM in Yogyakarta, where he obtained his BA in Ilmu Administrasi Negara: insight in the government administration, while he since then would work as support vor non-Governmental 0rganizations, NGO. First (1976-1984) he was with the journal Prisma and LP3ES, founded by Dawam Rahardjo (and also publisher of my doctoral dissertation on Pesantren). In the mid-1980s he moved to Cornell where he wrote a prize winning dissertation The State, the Rise of Capital and the fall of journalism in Indonesia where he argued that the Soeharto government had killed the free press and it lively debate on the state of Indonesia, by its policy that only the New Order style of 'development' should be presented. After returning to Indonesia he became active in the newspaper Kompas as chief R&D, Litbang from 1995-2005.
The webinar was interreligious as usual with DIAN: opened by Machasin
from UIN and Depag, anthropologist Laksono had a nice story about Flores
where the penjajah was absen and therefore people never feeled
colonised. Noorhalis Majid from Banjarmasin, Muhammad Taufik from
Padang: the work of DD for Prisma (1975-1984) and Kompas (after his
Cornell period). Zakaria Ngelow from Makassar saw him as a cendekiawan
with a social commitment. He was not a man of agama or the bureaucracy of religion, but rather of personalised iman.
All speakers had five minutes. Inevitably, I also had to add something
and I praised Ritapiret and Ledalero for their cosmopolitan
education, especially the basis for classical and modern (Western!)
languages.
My former student and life-time friend Lies Marcoes sent me the following article, published at Melbourne University.
Last week, an Indonesian woman opened fire at police at the National Police Headquarters in Jakarta. The woman, who was
apparently inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),
was shot dead after she fired six times at police. This incident came
just days after a husband and wife launched a suicide attack on a church in Makassar, South Sulawesi.
Conflict and extremism expert Sidney Jones has long warned of the
role of women in terror attacks. But many terrorism experts appear slow
to apply gender analysis to their examinations of violent extremism. It
is still common to read simplistic analyses that suggest men pursue
violent jihad as a way of performing and asserting their masculinity,
while women are stereotyped as participating in jihad naively, without
any agenda or goals.
The attacks in Makassar and Jakarta appear to be cases where women
were not coerced, pressured, or tricked into participating. Women have
repeatedly demonstrated that they participate in violent jihad with
their own missions and aims. Their reasons for doing so vary, and may
even relate to their husbands, children, or families, but they usually
participate actively.
The case of Dian Yulia Novi,
the first Indonesian woman convicted of planning a bomb attack, also
demonstrates this trend. She pledged allegiance to ISIL, and planned an
attack on the Indonesian Presidential Palace, before being arrested in
December 2016. She reportedly believed that the act would ensure her
mother would go to heaven in the afterlife, after being disappointed
that she had failed to bring her mother happiness on earth. This
apparently relates to the view held by many jihadis that if they die as
martyrs, their family and friends will join them in paradise.
But Dian is not unique. In fact, as far back as two decades ago,
there were already plenty of examples of Indonesian women exercising
agency and participating in violent extremism for their own reasons. The
ability of Noordin M Top, the architect of the JW Marriot bombing in
2003, to evade authorities was in no small part thanks to the women
around him.
He married at least three times before being killed by authorities in
2009. These marriages, which were facilitated by his networks, were in
part a strategy to evade authorities and blend in with the local
community.
In terrorism studies, the role of the household is often said to be
to allow terror fugitives to have a “normal life”. Noordin’s last wife,
Ariana Rahmah Noordin, was a kindergarten teacher at a religious
organisation in Central Java. Ariana, and his previous wife, Muflihatun
(also known as Fitri), reportedly did not know the details of their
husband’s activities other than he would regularly leave for long
periods to “engage in jihad”. But these women actively participated in
these marriages because they knew their husband was conducting jihad.
The trend of women’s participation in violent extremism has evolved
considerably over the past few decades. For a long time, women were only
seen as ‘supporters’ in jihadist movements. This was, in part, because
highly conservative interpretations of religion forbid women from
participating in warfare or fighting (known as qital). Women
were instead considered useful for assisting the movement and supplying
male children to bolster the troops of male fighters.
But when combatants who had been fighting in Afghanistan began
returning home to Indonesia, people heard stories of the ‘heroic’ acts
conducted by women jihadists. Recent years have also seen a similar
glorification of the role of female suicide bombers in Europe and South
Asia. These stories have been consumed by young Indonesian women who
want to participate in jihad, but not just through their wombs. At the
same time, many of the men who had returned home from combat in places
like Afghanistan were pursued and arrested by authorities, creating a
shortage of fighters.
The emergence of ISIL in 2013 further changed the face of jihadism,
from individual males to women and families. The dissemination of
radical ideology no longer occurs just in religious gatherings (between
men) or in the bedroom (between husband and wife), but also at the
dining table, with the whole family.
This was the case with Dian, the woman who planned to attack the
Presidential Palace, as well as the 2018 church bombings in Surabaya.
The women involved in these attacks rarely socialised or attended
Islamic study groups. The radicalisation process occurred in the family
setting.
But it is clearly not easy for terror experts and policymakers to
examine terrorism with a gender lens. This is seen in the feminisation
of rehabilitation programs for former foreign combatants and returnees.
Women are typically given a small amount of funds, supported to engage
in income generating activities, and efforts are made to encourage them
to love their country.
Meanwhile, efforts to address ideology and ideas about what is
considered a “meaningful life” as a jihadist are not always planned or
funded. How is it possible to address Dian’s wish to participate in
jihad to make sure her mother goes to heaven?
The difficulty in understanding the participation of women in
terrorism is that the security sector is often highly masculine.
Consider the film “Jihad Selfie” by Noor Huda Ismail, which tells the
story of a 17-year-old boy, Akbar, who considers joining ISIL. The film
depicts a desire to express masculinity as an important factor
explaining why young men participate in violent extremism.
Women, meanwhile, are depicted in the film as carers and protectors.
Too often, examinations of violent extremism see women simply as
providers of love, as if they have no agenda or desire to solve the
world’s problems, in contrast to their terrorist husbands and children.
More work needs to be done to examine the private sphere to better
understand trends in terrorism. The longstanding assumption that
terrorism is a problem of the public domain has meant that it is viewed
in relation to national stability and state authority. As such, the
focus of analysis is on matters of the public sphere: power, ideology,
political authority, representation, examination of space, funding, and
networks between men.
Meanwhile, the experiences of women and power relations in the
private sphere are not considered to have the same gravity as the
problems in the public sphere.
Looking at the trend of growing women’s participation in terror
attacks in Indonesia, it is clear that gender analysis that examines
relations among husbands, wives, and their children, and relations
between the public and private spheres can no longer be left out of
efforts to understand and respond to violent extremism.
Gender analysis helps to explain why women are increasingly
participating in extremist violence. When power relations between men
and women are so uneven, when respect for women is so low, when women
are considered the source of sin and other problems, why wouldn’t they
want to die young, if that could give their lives more “meaning”?
Again a new book on the scholarly work by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936). Its title is not directly modest:Wim van den Doel, The Complete Scholarly life of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, 448 pages, Amsterdam: Prometheus. The picture on the cover of the books shows the black, piercing eyes of the young Snouck (27 years old) in Mecca, the Arab centre of Islam. Since the revelations about the offspring and personal Indonesian life of Snouck by Sjoerd van Koningsveld in the 1980s, and the doctoral dissertation by Dr. Husnul Aqib Suminto (Jakarta 1984) about the political strategy of the colonial administration, there was some time of silence. Only in 2006 there were more details about his stay in Jeddah and Mecca, 1885-6, by Jan Just Witkam. The Dutch publications by the Dutch authors Van Koningsveld and Witkam were about his personal conditions, while Suminto wrote about the social and political implications for the Muslim community in colonial Indonesia.
Michael Laffan has since written on him. In 2014 Kevin W, Fogg wrote a very outspoken, nearly agressively written article about him. I found it recently in The Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in Asia, (published by the Shanghai International Studies University, 2014:51-73) under the title: Seeking Arabs but looking at Indonesians: the Arab lens on the Dutch East Indies. Because Snouck concentrated hisIslamic Studies between 1877-1888 on the Arab societies and its literature, he found the Indonesians 'to be inferior Muslims', because of their lack of orthodoxy (defined as 'being that which the center taught' p. 63).
After reading this, I looked again in Edward Said's Orientalism, where Snouck is only portrayed in the way Suminto looked at him: "Snouck Hurgronje went directly from his studies of Islam to being an adviser to the Dutch government on handling its Muslim Indonesian colonies' (210).
Like many other people Snouck had various roles in his life. In his scholarly work two different styles can be distinguished: he wrote the reports as an employee of the colonial government, in complicated bureaucratic style. Besides this there are the much more lively scholarly books. He had his professional view on Islam: as successors to scores of local sultans and other rulers, the Dutch administrators and so he himself should give advice in the style of orthodox Muslim doctrine. In his academic work he realised and described that Islam has many faces and interpretations and is changing continually. Finally, he did not often express his personal views in his printed work, but also in this genre he sometimes openly expressed his view that the present state of Islam needed a reform, where many aspects of customs and rules should be deleted. I still have to start reading the summary of his scholarly life in the quite many pages by Van den Doel.
Books about (past of) Indonesia appear again and again in the Netherlands, even in a period of Covid-19, when books shops are closed and distribution is only through internet-orders, while communication through life presentations and discussions ('bedah buku') is not possible yet. A new book last week was by Jan Brokken, De Tuinen van Buitenzorg (The Gardens of Buitenzorg). Brokken (born 1949 in Leiden) is the son of a Protestant Minister, who worked as a missionary in Southwest Sulawesi between 1935-1946 (including livingas a risoner in Japenese ca,ps, 1943-5). The book is not based on the work of his father, but on the 39 letters written by his mother to her sister while living in Indonesia. Brokken never paid much attention to this material, partly because the family liked often to talk about Indonesia, where Jan Brokken himself never lived and only saw a country during two turistic trips.
For several reasons, I became quite in his father Joseph C. Brokken, who was sent to study a movement in the island of Selayar, established as a independent movement around 1910 by Haji Abdul Gani Daneng Maurapi ibn Rakhman (ca 1846-1922) as Igama Binanga Benteng after the place where he lived. This movement can be compared to the 'aliran kepercayaan' of Madrais in West Java (Kuningan, Ceribon, but also Garut). After the Pacific War this Buginese movement became known as the Mukhdi Akbar Movement. Initially they remained, like the Madrais people, between Islam and (elements of) Christianity, moreor less as an individual tarekat. But after 1965 they were forced to opt for one of the five major religions and the majority then wanted to remain Muslim, but hundreds also wanted to stress their Protestant Christian identity and formally asked for Baptism (where quite many Madrais people became Catholic, of whom somealso 'returned' to Islam.
A second movement started in in the town in the early 1930s of Makassar as PMKI, Perkoempoelan Menoentoet Kebenaran Igama or 'Society for the search of religious truth'. According to some it was close to theosophy, but others wanted to curb it to reformed Islam, like Muhammadiyah. Reverend Blokker became in 1937 an official advisor, and he hoped that quite many of its members would turn to Christianity, but it remained a liberal debating network.
A third free movement started in Soppeng, about 100km north of Makassar, by one Haji La Galiti(k), born about 1900 in a noble family. He was head of an unnamed village,had performed the hajj and thrugh Qur'an reading became convinced that Jesus was the greatest Prophet. He met reverend Blokker in September 1939 and was baptised in March 1940, together with one La Salomo. 15 May 1940 they were followed by 150 sympathizers. In December 1941 this group had grown to some 800.After the Pacific War, in 1945 they had grown to some 2000. They are a quite rare example of people whocame to Christianity through the Muslim story and doctrine about Jesus.
Buginese society has, like Javanese culture, a great literary religious work, the I La Galigo. Like Javenese societyit has a strong pre-Islamic identity, which is still fostered until nowadays, notwithstanding the formal Islamization in the fist decade of the 17th century. So, one may question whether there is something like an abangan or non-Arab, Islam, where also pre-islamic and other traditions are kept. Some contribution for the idea of Islam Nusantara?
The title of the new book is taken from a great piano work by the Polish-American composer, Leopold Godowsky (1870-1930), who wrote in 1924-5 a Java Suite, where the Gardens of Buitenzorg are no 8 (out of 10). Godowsky liked to include elements of gamelan music in his compositions.
If we look to the study of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), we can see Indonesia, together with Malaysia in one of the seven civilizations: Islamic. There have been and are different classifications. From its name alone Indonesia means 'Insular India', and the word Insulinde was also for some time used as a name for Indonesia. If we visit the Louvre Museum of Paris, Metropolitan Museum of New York, but also Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: there is no place for Indonesian art in the Islamic section (also not in the new building, the tent-shaped section of the Louvre), but much can be seen amongst Indian art.
The Dutch (KITLV) scholar Marijke Bloembergen recently published a long article on The politics Greater India, a moral geography (in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63 (2021), 170-211), where she starts with the foundation in 1926 in Calcutta of the Greater India Society with Rabindranath Tagore as the great star. The idea has been promoted also by Michael Wood in his famous quote: 'History is full of empires of the sword, but India alone created an empire of the spirit'. The idea that there was once a 'colonial' empire from India, which caused the spread of Indian religions, Buddhism and Hinduism in Southeast Asia, from Thayland to Indonesia, this idea has proved to be not true. There was, however, in literature, in religious art a very refined and elaborate tradition also in Indonesia, since the 4th-5th centuries (Dieng), culminating in the Buddhist Borobudur and the Hindu Prambanan temples of the 8th century. Visiting the museums mentioned above we can now enjoy master pieces of Indonesian products as well, that can be called fruits of the Greater India. Their arrival in Europe and America nowadays is also called roofkunst or 'robbery, plunder'. Bloembergen has a large number of cases where some 43 out of the 504 great statues of the Buddhha have disappeared, mostly through people connected to the colonial elite. Recently a Dutch report was written: 'Colonial Collection and the Recognition of Injustice', with the promise that much of these should be sent back to the country where they were stolen, with one Von Saher as an intriguing example.
While reading this interesting article on the idea of Greater India, between 1890-1960s, I was also thinking about the decline of wayang theatre, where Muslim also celebrated holidays with the performance of parts of the epic stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana. Much of this was also practised by outspoken Muslim leaders like Diponegoro. Also the first President Soekarno like to mention the heroes of the Indian epic stories for his mostly Muslim audience. Therefore I like to show here an image, given to me in 1983 by my former colleague Dr. Abdurrahman of the UIN Sunan Kalijaga of Yogyakarta. It is the tree of life, painted on buffalo leather, the symbol opening the wayang performances. But here we see the confession faith: Ashhadtu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ashhadtu anna Muhammadan Rasulu Allahi. This Islamic university tried to stimulate students to read classical Javanese texts where we can see this Islamic use of Hindu art tradition, like its founder did, Sunan Kalijaga. In 2015 there was a movement trying to strengthen this way of a distinct Indonesian Islamic spirituality, labelled as Islam Nusantara. It has always been my dream that something like this combination shoud be continued and elaborated.
The great CMR project (Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History) has now published volume 17, on Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia in the 19th century. Volume 16 was on (Southeast) Asia and had 5 entries written by me. For volume 17 I wrote on Bilderdijk, Salomon Keijzer, J.B.J. van Doren and Snouck Hurgronje. Herewith a cooperation of more than 10 years has come to an end.
Volume 17 has been dedicated for 490 of its 605 pages to Britain with a fine selection of scholars. On the cover is Edward Henry Palmer, professor of Arabic in Cambridge, dressed in Arab style. There is a good introduction to Edward Lane, the giant in lexicography and description of common Egyptians. Pages 330-355 offer the stories of five Victorian ladies travelling in the Ottoman world. A special entry gives an analysis of novelists: not the Arab scholars alone or theologians, but quite a mixed genre of authors. It is also not all about Muslim-Christian relations. In fact, an author like Edward Lane lived and showed as a Muslim, but about his personal faith not much can be said, at least he was not the quite negative and proud 'orientalist' as suggested by Edward Said (who maybe never read his work but wrote about him!)
A quite intriguing figure is Dean Mahomet (1759-1851), born in Bihar, India. He became as a young boy of 11 the private servant of an English Officer. So he came to Cork, Ireland in 1786, where he was baptised an Anglican and married a local lady. A grandson even became an Anglican priest. In 1800 he moved to London where he opened Indian restaurants. In 1815 he opened in Brighton 'Mahomet's Bath' on King's Road. He wrote in the first years after his arrival in Ireland a book with the long title of The travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India, while in the service of the Honourable the East India Company written by himself, in a series of letters to his friend. The book was published in 1794, but his conversion to Anglcanism nor his Irish marriage are mentioned here. He only gives a sophisticated and elegant introduction to his native country to British people. His biographer, Michael H. Fisher, who also wrote the CMR entry compares him to Oloudah Equiano (1745-1797), the abolitionist who converted to Christianity as an instrument for his fight against slavery and also wrote an autobiography. For Fisher, Dean Mahomet felt himself a 'member of several cultural communities, with expertise in traditions associated with Muslims, Christians, and Hindus.' So to say: an early, proud and well-informed product of global culture.
