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.
