Al-Qaida merely a bump on the long road of Islam in Southeast Asia
By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun
Malaysia has seen a steady increase in Islamic conservatism that started with the overthrow of the shah in Iran in 1979 and the establishment of an Islamic republic.
But this movement accelerated in the 1990s in part because the Malaysian government allowed and sometimes encouraged male students to attend the radical Wahhabist religious schools, madrassas, in Pakistan which are funded by Saudi Arabia and which have produced not only the Taliban, but many of the terrorist recruits in Southeast Asia.
In Southeast Asia the era of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida has been a blip in a long history of often tense and sometimes violent relations between Muslims and their neighbours.
But there is no monolithic, region-wide picture of Islam in the region.
The cultural, political and economic implications vary widely from country to country.
And despite the tensions that have grated for, in some cases, a hundred years or more, they are in general a manageable fact of life.
The region contains the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, where 86 per cent of the 245 million people are followers of Islam.
Although Indonesia has been the scene of some of the worst al-Qaida-related terrorist attacks in the region in the last decade, the people in general follow moderate brands of Islam.
Those attacks were mounted by the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyyah (JI), which had staged bombings of the Jakarta Stock Exchange and of Christian churches in Java, Sumatra and Riau well before the 2001 attacks by al-Qaida on New York and Washington.
JI’s most serious terrorist action in the last decade was the October 2002 bomb attacks on tourist bars on the resort island of Bali which killed 202 people.
The Bali outrage was followed by attacks on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and on the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton business and tourist hotels.
But Indonesian security forces have been very successful in decapitating JI in a campaign which is thought to have seen about 700 alleged terrorists killed or detained.
There is an irony, however, that the coming of democracy in the late 1990s has produced in Indonesia a generation of politicians who proclaim a slightly more puritanical style of Islam than in the past for fear of being labelled irreligious.
There is similar pressure on politicians in neighbouring Malaysia where the 28 million Muslims are mostly ethnic Malays and make up just over half the population.
Malaysia has seen a steady increase in Islamic conservatism that started with the overthrow of the shah in Iran in 1979 and the establishment of an Islamic republic.
But this movement accelerated in the 1990s in part because the Malaysian government allowed and sometimes encouraged male students to attend the radical Wahhabist religious schools, madrassas, in Pakistan which are funded by Saudi Arabia and which have produced not only the Taliban, but many of the terrorist recruits in Southeast Asia.
These radical influences have had a profound effect on politics with the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) becoming a force to be reckoned with, especially in some of the more conservative provinces.
Even so, the PAS is a pragmatic Islamic party and is part of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition with an avowedly secular party and a largely Christian ethnic Chinese party.
Some politicians in predominantly Buddhist neighbouring Thailand see the shift to Islamic conservatism in Malaysia having a direct influence on the long-running independence insurgency in Thailand’s three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.
These three provinces, populated by predominantly Muslim ethnic Malays, were formally annexed by Thailand as part of a 1909 treaty with the British colonial rulers in what was then Malaya.
There have been movements for independence or autonomy ever since, mostly driven by the well-documented treating of the people of the three provinces as second-class citizens by the Bangkok authorities.
But the is no doubt the violence has increased dramatically following al-Qaida’s 2001 assault on the United States.
Well over 4,000 people have been killed by terrorist attacks on government officials, often school teachers shot by passing motorcyclists, and equally harsh reprisals by the security forces.
After much optimistic talk a couple of years ago, the government now concedes violence is increasing and there is no end in sight.
The Muslim independence insurgency in the southern Philippines, especially on the island of Mindanao, is even older, going back to the Spanish-American War of 1898.
It too has been influenced by the events of 9/11 and taken on a harsher tone. Abu Sayyaf, a group linked to al-Qaida and Indonesia’s JI, was founded in the 1990s and has engaged in more purely terrorist attacks than the established voice of local people, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
But, unlike in Thailand, there are real signs of a settlement in the Philippines and the terrorist groups are clearly withering.
