My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist

Preface

Oddly enough, when I look back on the travels recounted in this book, my encounters with radical Islamists in the slipstream of the 9/11 attacks that changed our world, I’m struck less by a sense of danger or foreboding and more by the relative innocence of those times. Back then it was still possible to dismiss radical Islamist violence as largely an aberration, and hope that the West, newly awakened to its dangers, would find a way to prevail over it.

This was before suicide bombers attacked London rush-hour commuters in 2005 killing fifty-two civilians. It was before the 2008 carnage in Mumbai unleashed by terrorists who arrived by boat from Pakistan. It was before two Chechen brothers robbed the iconic Boston Marathon of its simple association with the best of human endeavor. Of course, it predated the horrific assault on Paris by a band of European jihadists fresh from the battlefields of Syria, and its echo, a few weeks later, by a young couple in San Bernardino, California.

When I charted these travels across the Indonesian archipelago, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were all less violent places than they are today. In Bangladesh, secular and atheist bloggers weren’t yet in danger of being hacked to death by machete-wielding zealots. Europe’s borders appeared secure. American politics wasn’t consumed by Donald Trump and the issue of Muslim immigration. The idea of a resurrected caliphate was alive, but it seemed to belong firmly in the realm of radical Islamist fantasy.

In August 2015 I returned to Jakarta, my home for four years during the reporting for this book. Then, as now, Indonesia remained a beacon of hope for the Muslim world. Democracy had taken firm root, and the Indonesian media was the most raucous in the region. Compared to the grim news and grimmer images pouring out of the Middle East, Indonesia barely seemed to merit attention, let alone concern. To the casual visitor, the proliferation of upscale wine bars and chic malls was immediately reassuring.

And yet, my Indonesian friends were more worried than ever about the direction their country was taking. Part of this, I sensed, came from a deeper disquiet about the Islamic State and the immediacy of its poisonous message. (Al Qaeda in its prime had seemed distant and almost tame by comparison.) But I was also peppered with more immediate concerns—the ubiquity of the headscarf, the disappearance of beer from supermarkets, the increasing diffi- culty in securing a permit to build a church, the import of virulent anti-Shia rhetoric from the Middle East.

On the surface, the story of Herry Nurdi, my friend the fanatic, is light-years away from the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the November 2015 Paris attacks. For starters, though Herry may have lionized violent Islamists, he never struck me as violent himself. At the same time, however, to understand the global spread of radical Islam you have to understand young men like Herry—uprooted from tradition, drawn to religion, and driven by the idea that their time has come.

When I embarked upon this book it was primarily out of concern for Indonesia, a heartbreakingly beautiful country caught between a deep tradition of tolerance and the strong pull of extremism. Looking back now, with the benefit of both hindsight and distance, I view it somewhat differently. Indonesia is simply one of dozens of countries where the dramatic rise of radical Islam continues to play out. In some ways it remains the least welcoming host for this ideological virus, but like all Muslim-majority countries in the times we live in, it’s far from immune. Understanding it helps us better understand the unsettled world we must inhabit.

Sadanand Dhume

Washington, DC

December 2015

Prologue

Bali

October 2002

By the time I arrived in Bali the exodus had already begun. Every flight out of Denpasar airport was packed and Qantas was said to have commissioned an extra aircraft specially for panicked Australians. In the last of the evening’s light, in sarongs and printed shirts, thongs or sandals, here and there a surfboard tucked under an arm, they formed a ragged line outside the airport.

The sun had barely set when I reached Kuta, but it felt like the still before dawn. I walked past Bounty Bar, shaped like a pirate schooner and as deserted as a shipwreck. A bikini-clad mannequin stared out of a surfing-equipment store’s darkened window. Ahead of me a small band of stay-behinds, their thongs and floral shirts at odds with their ashen faces, trudged towards a yellow-tape police barricade. I flashed my press card—I was here as a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal—and ducked under the tape. Soldiers and policemen, machine guns slung from their shoulders, stood in a knot puffing on kreteks, clove cigarettes. Behind them stood a small Häagen-Dazs truck, its roof depressed as though it had been stepped on by a giant. The driver, I later learned, had been decapitated by the blast while he idled in traffic.

Ground zero smelled of gasoline and burnt wood. Uprooted tables, blackened beer bottles and mangled red plastic beer crates dotted the ashes of what had been the Sari Club the night before. Cars parked in front had been reduced to junkyard wrecks. The Balinese had already visited, leaving behind maroon, white and orange flowers in delicate banana-leaf baskets, their appeasement for the Gods.

For a while, searching for some trace of a human being, a shoe, a bracelet, a severed hand, I followed the spotlight of a video camera manned by another latecomer to the scene. But the site had already been cleaned up and all that remained was rubble. More than two hundred people died in the attacks: a smaller backpack bomb at Paddy’s bar across the street had preceded the massive car bomb that did most of the damage. Three months later they would fill 140 bags with unidentified body parts for burial, but on that night it was as though the dead had been vapourised, leaving behind only ash and glass and plastic.

Less than a week earlier I had stood at the same spot, eager for the bustle of Kuta after four days in a sleepy east Balinese village. I had wolfed down a hamburger at the Hard Rock Café overlooking the beach then strolled to the Sari Club for a drink. It was empty except for a squad of bronzed and bare-chested Australians chugalugging Bintang beers under a large screen on which writhed Madonna dressed like a cowboy. The evening was still young; the sun’s last salmon pink smeared the sky. Hours lay before the appearance of the first slender-hipped hookers. And it was not until close to midnight that the dance floor, packed and sweaty, would turn the club into a viable target.

I heard the crunch of the cameraman’s receding footsteps. A few minutes later it was time for me to call it a night as well.

Until the Bali bombings every foreign journalist in the country could tell you two things: that Indonesia was the world’s most populous Muslim country and that its Muslims were overwhelmingly moderate.

Islam was a relatively recent import to the archipelago. It washed up in the twelfth century, took root in the fifteenth and became dominant as late as the seventeenth. It arrived through trade rather than conquest, by Indian dhow rather than Arab charger. It was preceded by a millennium and a half of Hinduism and Buddhism, whose achievements included central Java’s Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist monument, and Majapahit, a Hindu–Buddhist empire whose influence stretched to present-day Cambodia. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in comparing Indonesia to Morocco: ‘In Indonesia, Islam did not construct a civilisation, it appropriated one.’

By the time the new faith took hold in the archipelago its influence in other parts of the world had already begun to wane. The high-water marks of Islamic civilisation—Abbasid Baghdad and Moorish Spain—had long receded and in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies completed the Reconquista by evicting the Moors from Granada. Portuguese gunships had already entered Southeast Asian waters when Majapahit sputtered its last in the early 1500s. Consequently, Islam was denied the long political supremacy it held in regions closer to the first flush of Arab power, and with it the chance to cement its hold on society. In 1619 the Dutch established their headquarters at Batavia, today’s Jakarta. Except for a brief period of Japanese rule during World War Two, they stayed until 1949.

You still saw Dutch fingerprints here and there, in an odd word (bioskop—movie theatre, rekening—account), or in a sturdy old building, but it was the Hindu–Buddhist past that was felt most clearly. This was the only place in the world where you might call yourself Muslim yet name your children Vishnu and Sita, seek moral guidance in a wayang shadow puppet performance of the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, and believe in Dewi Sri, the Goddess of the rice paddy, Ratu Kidul, Queen of the South Seas and Nini Tawek, angel of the Javanese kitchen. This comfort with the past, it seemed, fostered comfort with the present. The supermarkets stocked beer; Ramadan sales offered discounts on Capri pants. State-owned television housed a weekly show called ‘Country Road’, ninety minutes of Indonesians in denims and Stetsons line dancing, whirling imaginary lassos and crooning hits from deepest Texas and New Orleans.

At the same time, though, a deeper transformation of society was under way. Since the 1970s Indonesian Islam had begun to be stripped of its native foliage by a combination of rapid urbanisation, the implementation of uniform religious education by then president General Suharto’s bitterly anti-communist regime and the efforts of homegrown and Middle Eastern purifiers of the faith. The old tolerance was giving way to an assertive new orthodoxy. You could see superficial signs every day—in the headscarves that dotted college campuses, in the shiny-domed mosques mushrooming in the countryside, in the prayer calluses on the foreheads of the devout. Demands for implementing the medieval Arab practices enshrined in sharia law, dismissed by the nation’s founders more than fifty years earlier, had risen again. Church burnings, once unthinkable, barely raised eyebrows. Groups with names like Islamic Defenders Front and Laskar Jihad had taken to the streets, trashing bars and discotheques in Jakarta and battling Christians in a bloody civil war on the country’s eastern fringe. Against this backdrop, the carnage in Bali was only the most visible expression of a much larger churning.

In the weeks after the bombings, Bali had the appearance of a familiar TV set peopled by an alien cast. Sunbathers gave way to police and soldiers, and to a contingent of set-jawed Australian investigators; reporters flooded the Hard Rock Hotel where officials tallied the body count at the daily press briefing. My time collapsed into a series of disjointed images: a Hindi film playing in the smoky waiting room at police headquarters, fresh plywood coffins stacked under the moonlight in a hospital courtyard, lunch alone on a sprawling white terrace by a deserted beach, a long row of red and white national flags at half-mast on bamboo poles, red silk umbrellas and the smell of incense at an interfaith prayer to keep the peace.

In Bali I felt the stirrings of a curiosity deeper than any I had ever felt before. Over the previous two years I had written about the growth of hardline Islam, but these articles, I now saw, barely hinted at the scale of the transformation under way. To understand where things were headed, what Indonesia would look like in ten years or twenty, I would have to pull together the disparate threads of a story that crisscrossed the archipelago.

Part One

Java

1

Jakarta

Hotel Borobudur, said to belong to Jakarta’s most powerful armybacked mobster, sprawled across 23 landscaped acres in the heart of the city. In keeping with the national love affair with the acronym, the hotel disco was called musro, short for Music Room. Five massive columns in the shape of rampant eagles, wings outstretched, curved around its entrance. Inside it was dim and smoky and my eyes took a few moments to adjust before I spotted the birthday girl. Her hair, usually straight, tonight cascaded to her shoulders in glossy black curls. Her leather skirt fell in jagged waves over spike-heeled boots. A crush of reporters wearing sweaters to ward off the airconditioning surrounded her. Those in the first couple of rows thrust their battered tape-recorders under her nose; behind them jostled camera crews.

Djenar Maesa Ayu appeared unruffled, as though sheathed in an invisible bubble. The scrum parted for a moment to allow me to wish her happy birthday before closing back on itself, and as I made my way towards the salvers of peppered beef, barbecue chicken and fried rice lined up on a long table I heard a reporter shout out the one question they never tired of asking: ‘Why do you always write about sex?’

Sometime swimwear model, daughter of an actress and a deceased film director, Djenar was the reigning wild child of Indonesian literature. She had recently threatened to strip before parliament to protest a proposed censorship bill. Her 31st birthday coincided with the launch of her second collection of short stories: Jangan Main Main (Dengan Kelaminmu) or Don’t Fool Around (With Your Genitals). The first story, Suckled by Father, was about a girl nursed not on her mother’s breast but on her father’s penis.

I owed my introduction to Djenar to the businessman and novelist Richard Oh. Richard was the Gertrude Stein of Jakarta, if you could picture Stein as a bald 44-year-old Chinese–Indonesian man with a smoking cigar between his fingers. His QB World bookstores, modelled on Barnes and Noble or Borders, dotted the city, and he owned a small publishing imprint called Metafor. He had established the Khatulistiwa Award, Indonesia’s Booker Prize, and surrounded himself with a retinue of poets, writers and journalists. Unusually for the scion of a business family, Richard had studied creative writing in Wisconsin, where he developed a taste for literary fiction. I envied his easy familiarity with Proust and Kafka and Faulkner. Richard constantly urged me to catch up with authors I had barely heard of: ‘Read W. G. Sebald. You have to read W. G. Sebald.’

By this time it was January, 2004, more than a year since the Bali bombings. In April 2003, six months after standing in the ruins of the Sari Club, I quit my job with the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal in a fit of bravado on being denied promised book leave. My years of writing about bank privatisation and debt restructuring and the fluctuating fortunes of noodle manufacturers and motorcycle importers were over. A new career as an author beckoned, beginning with the book about the changing face of Indonesia that had first come to me in Bali. Befitting my altered status—a step up or a step down depending on who was judging—I found myself struck off the American ambassador’s guest list and welcomed to Richard Oh’s entourage. But though my business card now said ‘writer’ the truth of that claim was tenuous. Once the first flush of purpose had passed, the reality of being unemployed without a bank balance to speak of sank in and my nerve faltered. I sought out a consulting assignment with the World Bank that took me to Aceh and padded my finances somewhat but left no time for other travel or serious writing. I accepted an invitation to the Australian National University’s annual gathering of Indonesia experts in Canberra, and agreed to write a paper on ethnic politics and business, an exercise that somehow ended up taking months rather than the weeks I had intended.

The World Bank consultancy lapsed after six months. Shorn of excuses, I made a few desultory stabs at reviving things. I spent an afternoon with Ineke Koesherawati, the erstwhile star of such films as Kenikmatan Tabu (Forbidden Bliss) and Gadis Metropolis II (Metropolitan Girl II), who had seamlessly transitioned from surfsoaked white shirts and flashes of dark lingerie to compering events for the headscarfed new middle class on how to achieve true Muslim womanhood. She seemed insulted when I compared her former screen persona to Jennifer Lopez. ‘No, no, I was more like Pamela Anderson,’ she insisted. I interviewed Puspo Wardoyo, a 47-yearold fried chicken restaurant magnate who had founded the nation’s first polygamy award. His phone rang with the azaan, the Islamic call to prayer; his morose and childlike third wife had little Snoopies embroidered on her chaste white socks and nursed a barely disguised resentment towards wife number four. To balance the pious with the profane, I whiled away a long night with a transvestite dance troupe, the fabulously named Tata Dado and the Silver Boys. ‘My body, better than Tyra Banks,’ insisted Tata Dado, a rouged middle-aged man with the features of a butcher. But though each of these encounters captured something of the times, I had to admit that they didn’t add up to much.

It was not as though I was entirely rudderless. If anything, the logic of the travels I had in mind dictated itself. I would begin in Java, home to half of Indonesia’s population, the country’s economic and political centre, and the heartland of the culture under siege. Then would come some of the so-called outer islands—Sulawesi, Borneo, Batam and, circumstances permitting, the Moluccas, also known as Maluku. In terms of themes, the broad changes in Indonesian society struck me as far more significant than the somewhat hyped threat from terrorism. Orthodox Islam was equally uncomfortable with the pop-culture present and the pagan past. To get a sense of these conflicts I would write about a massive Islamic reform movement called Muhammadiyah, the popular entertainer Inul Daratista, nominal Muslims who still worshipped the Queen of the South Seas, and the charismatic Bandung-based televangelist A. A. Gym. Only then would I address the question of terrorism. The odds of seeing the country’s most famous terrorist suspect, Jemaah Islamiyah’s Abu Bakar Bashir, appeared awfully slim, but I could visit the infamous school he founded, and also the prestigious Islamic school that helped shape Bashir’s own world view.

Jemaah Islamiyah, though, was only the most prominent of a rash of organisations that shared the common goal of Islamists everywhere: the imposition of sharia law. What set Jemaah Islamiyah, an al Qaeda offshoot, apart was not its vision of an ideal society but its willingness to use violence to achieve its objectives. In parts of the country, such as south Sulawesi, the same goal was being pursued through administrative fiat. Other Islamists, such as the missionaries of the Borneo-based Hidayatullah network, preferred to dot the country with private enclaves run by strictly orthodox norms. Most ambitious of all was the Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS. Modelled on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and imbued with the same bedrock belief in the need to organise all aspects of society and the state according to Islamic precepts, it was widely seen as the party to watch in parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for later that year.

Of course, my plans were just that, plans. In practice, an innate talent for procrastination reasserted itself. Some days I did nothing at all, on others nothing of consequence. There was always another book worth reading, another freelance magazine article, tempting as much for the familiarity as for the income, to dash off. Against this backdrop, Richard had taken on a certain outsized importance in my life. I had enjoyed his first two novels, which touched upon a subject many people found uncomfortable, the peculiar predicament of Indonesia’s wealthy yet persecuted Chinese minority. Richard was at work on his third book. He had an agent in Spain and attended the Frankfurt book fair every year. He invariably made me feel poorly read, but I took a perverse pleasure in this, as though the repeated reminders of my unfamiliarity with the oeuvre of W. G. Sebald and A. L. Kennedy and Banana Yoshimoto, or more precisely that this mattered to me, hinted at an ambition less whimsical than it appeared. I began to think of Richard and Djenar—they were usually inseparable—as a bridge between the world of reporters and the world of writers. Their company strengthened the illusion that I had made the passage from one to the other, and I instinctively sensed that keeping that illusion alive was vital if I was not to simply give up. That both were larger than life figures in Jakarta helped. The glamour of their circle came as a welcome relief from the usual expats with their tired stories about scuba diving courses and bargain spas. This was the other Indonesia, the part whose aspirations belonged in Vanity Fair rather than in the Koran. What set Richard and Djenar apart from elites in other Muslim countries, with the possible exception of fiercely secular Turkey and Tunisia, was not the fact of their existence—who hadn’t heard of booze-fuelled parties in north Tehran or the libertinism of the posher parts of Karachi—but that there was nothing furtive about them. In Jakarta, as the camera crews swarming around Djenar underscored, a certain boldness still belonged in the public square.

Around me UB40’s ‘Red Red Wine’ rose thickly above the clink of beer glasses. The gathering’s sense of style showed on its feet: slim black stilettos, heavy buckled dress shoes, red canvas Adidas sneakers. I crossed a landing colonised by the star of the film Ca-baukan (in curly-toed cowboy boots) and his fans, and found Richard on a dim balcony in earnest conversation with a somewhat scruffy man he introduced as an up-and-coming writer. Richard held forth on his newest discovery, a Spanish existentialist of apparently vast profundity. Were we familiar with his work? We didn’t know what we were missing.

The second floor of the disco formed a thick U-shape overlooking the dance floor. From where we stood we could see Djenar, on the opposite arm of the U, autographing books with a silver pen. She paused, broke the seal on a pack of Dunhill menthols, and lightly tossed the crumpled foil to one side. She lit her cigarette almost in slow motion before turning to accept a bouquet of marigolds and spiky green bulbs from three svelte women in black; each received a light peck on either cheek.

A makeshift stage on the dance floor below was decorated with naked white mannequins arranged like crash-test dummies, their arms and legs and necks at impossible angles. The cover of Djenar’s book, a bright red background with PlayStation controls superimposed on a blurred pair of breasts, filled a large screen above them. After a few minutes the music died, the red on the screen faded, and an amateur video came on. It began with a man at a urinal, his pants down, his arse partially exposed; then it cut to a long-haired man in a denim jacket seated on a toilet.

‘Who is that?’ I asked Richard.

‘Moammar Emka. He wrote Jakarta Undercover.’ It was a bestselling exposé of sexual hijinks in the capital.

The rest of the brief film continued in a similar vein, a blur of urinals, toilet seats and frothing beer mugs punctuated by testimony from Djenar’s friends and admirers. Then the birthday girl made her appearance onstage. The audience hushed and the sounds of clinking glasses faded. Djenar arranged herself artfully on a spotlit chair, one side of her leather skirt falling away to reveal a length of black-stockinged thigh, and began reading aloud about sucking thirstily on a penis.

By this time I had lived in Jakarta three years, but my relationship with the city went back further. Between 1980 and 1983 my father, a diplomat, was posted at the Indian embassy and I had spent a year here in 1981 when I was twelve. That Indonesia was better off than India was obvious even then. In Jakarta, Levi’s jeans or Boney M cassettes didn’t carry quite as much cachet as they did in New Delhi. The cars, mostly Toyotas and Hondas with the occasional Mitsubishi, showed up the backwardness of Delhi’s ancient Fiats and Ambassadors. On the badminton court you saw Yonex in carbon graphite instead of Pioneer Sports in crude steel. Even the maids were better dressed, and for the most part better humoured as well.

I was homesick—evidence of Japanese industry didn’t quite make up for friends left behind—and glad to return to India after a