The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (32 page)

To signal a new level of U.S. interest in Southeast Asia and the new president’s childhood home, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Indonesia in February 2009. After praising the country’s more or less successful transition to democracy since the 1998
fall of President Suharto, she told a dinner crowd of Indonesia’s academics and activists, “If you want to know if Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.”
¹

Clinton was praising a popular form of Indonesian Islam, which Robert W. Hefner, an expert on Indonesian Islam at Boston University, refers to as Civil (or pluralist) Islam. At its heart lies the understanding
that Islam and democracy are compatible. The nation’s two largest political parties (which are also religious)—Muhammidiyah, with thirty million members, and Nahdatul Ulama, with forty million members—both espouse this point of view, and most Indonesians have no interest in living in a strict Islamic state. The 2009 elections—in which President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was reelected to serve
until 2014—make this last point exceedingly clear. The conservative Islamist party, the Prosperous Justice Party, lost dismally in its bid to share power.

But parties and elections do not tell the whole story of the state of Islam in the world’s most populous Muslim country. As Robin Bush, the Indonesia representative for the Asia Foundation, points out, at the local level poor governance, corruption,
and poverty have led many of the country’s Muslims to look to religion—instead of civil society—to resolve social questions, including the role of women.
²
And in this regard, Indonesia is not decidedly and suddenly embracing liberalism. Even though Civil Islam is thriving in national politics, and conservative Islamists are losing at the polls, the conservatives still have considerable influence
in public
life. As Hefner puts it, “Indonesia is a more conservative place than we had imagined it ten to fifteen years ago.”

Indonesia is a country of Islams, not Islam, and its public life is animated by conflicts between Muslims and Muslims, not Muslims and Christians. These contests—typically between liberals and conservatives—are not matters of theological principle. They involve practical
issues that arise out of questions such as: Is it legal for Muslims to leave the religion? Can some Muslims be declared heretics? What kinds of rights do religious minorities have in a majority Muslim country? Should
Playboy
magazine be allowed to publish in Indonesia? Should Christians be allowed to proselytize and build churches wherever they please, even in Muslim communities? What should the
role of women be in modern society, given the tenets laid down for them in the Quran more than a thousand years ago?

The future of such issues in Indonesia, Abdullahi An-Na’im, the liberal Islamic scholar and professor of law at Emory University, believes, will help set the direction of global Islam. An-Na’im argues that, among other factors, Indonesia’s location along the religion’s geographic
border—on the peripheries, where Islam encounters other cultures and worldviews, as he puts it—makes the religion there more fluid than elsewhere. “I look to these peripheries for vigor and change,” he told me. These peripheries include Nigeria and Sudan, where he’s from, in addition to Indonesia, and An-Na’im thinks that Muslims along this geographic border, which lies largely between the equator
and the tenth parallel, will be able to confront the challenges that modern life poses to devotion and practice, in ways that those who live in the conservative Muslim heartland of the Arabian Peninsula, 4,500 miles from Indonesia, will not.

“My sense is that the Middle East is too full of itself in Islamic terms—too arrogant to be willing to ask these hard questions,” he said. There is also
the matter of numbers, since of the world’s 2.6 billion Muslims, only 20 percent live in the Middle East, and the vast majority of the rest live in the Global South. Given the sheer size of such populations, An-Na’im hopes that the more open-minded Muslims on the periphery will gain the power to wrest Islam away from its conservative Arab center. It’s quite a hope—a high-stakes, half-billion-player
numbers game. Paradoxically, conservative Christian analysts use the swelling numbers of fellow Christians
in the same regions as evidence that their faith is moving in a more conservative direction. Numbers do matter, but they are not the sole factor that determines the future of world religions. Christianity and Islam, and others, will continue to shift and splinter in unpredictable ways.

Along these peripheries, as elsewhere, then, exclusive claims on truth tend to call forth their opposites. In Indonesia and neighboring Malaysia, for instance, as conservative Muslims have tried to co-opt the public sphere with their interpretation of Islam, the moderate “silent majority” has begun to pay more attention, and has grown willing to speak out on behalf of the openness it has taken for
granted. This may be what happens at some point in a conservative religious reawakening: after a while, the moderates wake up, too. As Zainah Anwar, the founder of Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian NGO that protects women’s legal rights, put it, “Moderates can no longer afford to be silent.” This is a sentiment one could as easily hear among American Christians, be they Episcopalians, Catholics, or evangelicals.

On Sundays in the wealthy Jakarta suburb of Menteng, the streets close, the diesel clouds and horn squawks dissipate, and pick-up violinists gather in a park a few blocks from the Santo Fransiskus Assisi School—the Christian school, named for the twelfth-century Italian saint, that Barack Obama attended when his family moved to Indonesia in the late sixties. In October
2008, Liszt etudes rose, along with the
slap slap
of runners’ sneakered feet, into the whorled branches of the mahogany trees that ringed the park. I, too, went for a run that day, to clear my head. I had just arrived after a think tank’s meeting on the United States and the Islamic world in neighboring Malaysia. That afternoon I was hoping to see Ibnu Ahmad, the erstwhile warrior with a brain
like a broken computer. Two and a half years after I first met him, I wanted to see how burgeoning democracy had affected the relationship between Indonesian Christians and Muslims. I was eager to hear if Ibnu Ahmad and his comrades were still attempting to move beyond jihad, and whether they really could. How, in the long term, could former fighters like him hold on to their millenarian thinking
but leave the strife behind; what did the road beyond jihad really look like?

Jakarta is the biggest megacity in Southeast Asia; its population of more than eight and a half million people is slightly larger than New York City’s, and just as varied, making it possible for men like Ibnu Ahmad to hide in plain sight. I showered, then met him at the Starbucks in the lobby of my hotel; and a few
hours later, in a warren of shanties across town, I followed him into the dark basement of Jemaah Islamiyah’s clandestine headquarters. He flicked on the compact overhead fluorescent lights. With the help of Taufik Andrie, a Jakarta-based journalist who was with us that afternoon, it had not been hard to find him. In the more than two years since I had seen him, he had changed: at forty-two, he could
now hold a steady eye-to-eye gaze without his focus skipping away. The passage of time had helped him recover from his rough stint in prison, and he once again was a militant accepted by his fellow militants—not a suspected informer fresh out of torture. No longer plugged into earphones or hiding beneath a baseball hat, Ibnu Ahmad had rejoined the world, and he had a new job selling alternative
medicine: Islamic cures called
tibbe nabavi
, “the Prophet’s medicine.”

This new Islamist revival looked a lot like the Mary Kay cosmetics concern: several years earlier, when a handful of veterans of the Afghan war (they called themselves Afghan alumni) needed money, they went to work for Naturaid, the herbal cures company owned by a fellow JI member named Faisal Ishak. Naturaid was run like
most door-to-door sales companies. Each agent invested several hundred dollars in the products, and could receive up to 40 percent of the profits from his sales. Hawking these herbal cures also allowed the aging, paunchy jihadis to reach new clients—and prospective recruits—with the message that the world’s end was at hand. But jihad was a young man’s game. For JI, the times had changed, even if the
ideology had not.

Ibnu Ahmad ducked behind the counter of the basement shop, reached into a case, and fished out a plastic vial. He held up the amber liquid; its label read, “100% Cedar.” “This is for casting out devils,” he said. His JI colleague entered the shop. A fellow Afghan alumnus, he went by the alias “Jibril,” or Gabriel, after the angel in both the Bible and the Quran. (It was also
the only name he wanted to give.) Wearing a button-down shirt and chinos, Jibril looked like a computer specialist. Running the store and living in JI headquarters above it, he, too, had left jihad life behind. “It is difficult to be a militant if you don’t have the money and the training,” Jibril confessed. Ibnu Ahmad added proudly, “We fight with our brain, not our muscle.” He must have taken this
aphorism, like most of his militant one-liners, from someone else. He picked up his cell phone and began to play the game Brick Breaker with his thumbs. Not everything had changed; he was still easily distractible.

The medicine made money and provided a calculated way to do
da’wa
, “missionary outreach,” Jibril said. It was their equivalent of a medical mission. It allowed JI to medicate and indoctrinate
at the same time, while offering Indonesians something they, like everyone else, wanted: healing. Also, the market for alternative, faith-based cures was exploding in direct competition with the Western ones. But selling the Prophet’s medicine
had less to do with undermining Western medicine than with ensuring quality medical care for believers.

“It is not really an infidel thing,” Jibril said.
“This is consumer consciousness. We want people to go back to natural things.”

Ibnu Ahmad handed me the amber vial of cedar oil. “Every human is born with more devils than angels,” he said. “Only the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, can remove them.” When the devils acted up, a person became possessed. A JI member, armed with this oil, could cast them out.

“I have seen it work,” Jibril said.
“People come to us with their eyes rolling around in their head.”

“Like epilepsy,” Ibnu Ahmad added.

It probably was epilepsy, I said.

“No, no—you ask, what day of the week, simple things,” Jibril explained. Epileptics don’t lose their minds, but these sufferers were definitely in the grasp of a devil, or
jinn
. “You put this oil in the mouth, and if they vomit, they were definitely possessed.”

“If they vomit, they are cured completely,” Ibnu Ahmad said.

He doddered behind the case again and returned with the rest of the Naturaid product line: a blue beauty powder called Zulu, medicinal honey, and, most popular of all, a pill called Power Cleanser. All of them were supposed to contain
habbatusauda
, or “black seed,” which, according to the Prophet’s sayings, is the holiest medicament
in the world. The tenth-century scholar Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari, the first and most respected of the six Islamic intellectuals who collected the Prophet’s sayings, recounts the following story, which one of Mohammed’s companions, Khalid bin Sa’d, told:

We went out and Ghalib bin Abjar was accompanying us. He fell ill on the way and when we arrived at Medina he was still sick. Ibn Abi
‘Atiq came to visit him and said to us, “Treat him with black cumin. Take five or seven seeds and crush them (mix the powder with oil) and drop the resulting mixture into both nostrils, for Aisha [the Prophet’s wife] has narrated to me that she heard the Prophet saying, ‘This black cumin is healing for all diseases except As-Sam.’ Aisha said, ‘What is As-Sam?’ He said, ‘Death.’ ”
¹

This miracle
seed goes by a variety of names: black cumin, fennel flower, nutmeg flower, Roman coriander, and black caraway. (Stores on
Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue advertise the cure-all in English as “black seed.”) Cancer, low sperm count, depression, HIV/AIDS—black seed is believed to cure everything but death.

Ibnu Ahmad pocketed a dozen vials; his colleague opened an oversize ledger and noted twelve vials
for “Yasir,” Ibnu Ahmad’s JI alias, which had carried him through the training camps in Afghanistan and through his attempts to blow up the American embassy in Jakarta.

Evening had come, and it was time for the men to pray. They filed outside to a spigot, cuffed their pants and shirtsleeves, and washed their forearms, dirty feet, and legs up to the calf. As they went back inside the shop, I sat
on a bench in the alley. Two emaciated cats eyed me warily, flicked their wiry tails, and skulked down the narrow passage Ibnu Ahmad had called JI’s “escape route.” Through the window’s dirty panes, I saw that the men had begun to pray: three shadows lined up and bent forward at the waist, halving themselves. “Allah hears those who praise him,” one sang in Arabic as their shadows stretched straight
again, then disappeared below the window frame as they knelt and placed their foreheads against the floor.

It was like watching a dance through a scrim; the simple repetitions of their devotions quieted me. In this moment of solitude, it was almost possible to imagine a man like Ibnu Ahmad being ready to give up his fight against Christians. Jihad had cost so much; maybe it was time for him to
sell medicine and take care of his family. When he finished praying and came outside again, I posed this idea to him; his face darkened. Although he did not believe in killing fellow Muslims, the fight against Christians was eternal, and everywhere.

His theology needed an opponent—an enemy—to perpetuate itself. This was one of its many weaknesses. Once the “enemy” was vanquished, these fighters
would have to administer a state and its functions. They would have to deliver something concrete to their people beyond struggle and the promise of a better afterlife. And building a functional infrastructure in the developing countries along the tenth parallel was much more difficult than calling upon ailing friends to buy the Prophet’s medicine.