COVER STORY Standing Up for Islam
Muslims are fighting back—not just against the West but also against the militancy in their midst. A TIME Special Report on the diversity of Islam in Asia
After Bali
Asia—and the world—reels after a devastating attack (Oct. 28, 2002)
Indonesia's Rage Culture
Why does a moderate Islamic nation serve as a hotbed for religious extremists? (Oct. 28, 2002)
Taking the Hard Road
Indonesia's tough choice: crack down on extremists and risk backlash—or incur America's wrath (Sep. 30, 2002)
The Moderate Majority
Asia's progressive Islam can be a strong weapon against extremism (Oct. 28, 2002)
A Jihadi's Tale — page 3
How many Indonesians actually served in Afghanistan? Untold thousands, some radicals will reply. "A couple of hundred?" ventures Habib, an estimate supported by several experts. This makes him very rare indeed in a nation of 180 million Muslims. Habib is exceptional for another reason: he is actually willing to talk. Since the Bali blasts in October, Indonesian radicals who had once bragged about their mujahedin experience now refuse to speak of it or deny they've ever been in Afghanistan. Who can blame them? An arrested Bali attack suspect, Imam Samudra, supposedly honed his bombmaking skills in the country; another, Ali Ghufron, confessed to meeting bin Laden while fighting there. Riduan Isamuddin, a.k.a. Hambali, who as head of JI's Malaysia-Singapore chapter is wanted for terror attacks across the region, is also a mujahedin veteran.
The last time I see Habib he is leading the evening prayers at the small mosque in a corner of his walled family compound. His amplified voice booms through the humid night air, hypnotically repeating God's name until he is almost hoarse with emotion. When the prayers are over, the congregation disperses and a contented-looking Habib emerges in flowing white robes, clutching prayer beads and walking with the aid of a carved wooden stick.
We return to the veranda, where a simple meal of rice, chicken and fiery sambal is laid on mats before us. Habib removes his turban to reveal damp, thinning hair. He seems tired. As we eat he talks about corruption and poverty in Indonesia, and by the time the Arabian coffee arrives his previous air of religious contentment has evaporated. I belatedly comprehend that though Habib has realized his vocation, he is not at peace with himself but intensely disillusioned with the world beyond the walls of his bucolic Parung retreat. And that disillusionment began in 1991, the year he left Afghanistan.
Empowered by victory over the once mighty Soviets, many foreign jihadis returned home with dreams of toppling their own repressive governments and, funded by deep-pocketed Saudis, created their own militant groups. Habib harbored no such dreams. Fearful of Suharto's pervasive spy network, he spoke of Afghanistan to no one but his parents. It was as if he had never gone. But he watched with increasing dismay as Afghanistan descended again into warlordism and chaos. "We got rid of the Soviets but afterward there was no peace," he mourns. "The Afghans began fighting each other. I couldn't understand it. I asked myself, 'Is this the true Muslim way?'"
After five ascetic years in Afghanistan, Habib apparently had little problem fitting back into Indonesian society—and no qualms about capitalizing on its then booming economy. But war had killed his inner playboy. He married, became a father and started a successful business making bags for hajj pilgrims and golfers, then embarked upon what he depicts as a natural transformation from businessman to cleric. Dakwah, or proselytizing, had been a familial obligation since his grandfather's day, and Habib began touring mosques and prayer halls across Indonesia's main island of Java, preaching about how to lead a truly Islamic life.
His disenchantment survived the long-awaited collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998. The following years saw a resurgence in Islamic militancy, fomented in part by the return from exile of radicals such as Abubakar Ba'asyir, while violence between Muslims and Christians provided Habib with what seemed like an opportunity to wage another righteous war. Fellow mujahedin veteran Jafar Umar Thalib, the leader of the now supposedly disbanded paramilitary group Laskar Jihad, sent thousands of his warriors to exact revenge on Christians for the December 1999 bloodletting at Tobelo in north Maluku, when at least 500 Muslims were killed and another 10,000 forced to flee. Inspired (and perhaps envious), Habib assembled Laskar Jundullah, using stirring tales of his Afghan experience to recruit young men eager to prove their faith—just as his nameless mentor had done all those years before. Both groups escalated a conflict that would kill more than 5,000 people and create 500,000 refugees, but Habib makes no excuses. "If your mother or father are going to be killed," he asks, meaning fellow Muslims, "do you sit and do nothing?" Habib is reluctant to elaborate on Laskar Jundullah's bloody record in the Malukus. He admits he fought and killed there, yet prefers to credit himself—the honorable jihadi—with enforcing Islamic rules of war in a conflict waged with appalling viciousness by Muslims and Christians alike. He recalls one episode, when his men urged him to kill an old Christian woman fleeing a torched village where her entire family had just been burned to death. Habib let her go. "They asked me, ŒWhy didn't you kill her?' I told them, ŒWe are only at war with the men with guns,'" he explains proudly. To me, it spoke volumes about the conflict's brutality—and Laskar Jundullah's murky role in it—that Habib apparently expected praise for not murdering an old lady. The attempt by mujahedin veterans like Habib and Jafar to wage a jihad in the Malukus was not just bloody and inconclusive. For Habib, I sensed, it also somehow cheapened the memory of the war he had fought as a younger man. When I urge him to compare the Malukus with earlier times, he grows defensive. "It was not like Afghanistan," he says sadly.
I had once met Jafar Umar Thalib—like Habib, of Yemeni descent—and listened to two hours of his kill-a-Yankee, win-a-Honda-dream brand of populist militancy. He taught me nothing about Islam but a lot about hate. Habib was very different. He was not hate-filled, I realized, but angry. He was angry at what he viewed as the continuing inability of the world (he meant America) to distinguish between a Muslim and a terrorist. He was angry that jihad—a word which for him meant camaraderie, sacrifice, righteousness—had become, because of 9/11 and the Bali attack, synonymous with criminality. "I went to Afghanistan to defend religion and to help my Muslim brothers," he says. "But I also strongly condemn the Bali bombings. What will you call me?" He shoots me a challenging look. "Am I a fundamentalist? Yes. Am I a radical? I'm not sure what that means. Am I a terrorist? Absolutely not."
That makes it sound so simple. But no fundamentalist I'd ever met chain-smokes Marlboros or interrupts his own exegesis on Koranic rules of engagement to ask suddenly, "You like the Rolling Stones?" Because of the multifaceted life he has led, Habib is nearly impossible to categorize (and, after many hours in his company, equally impossible to dislike). He condemns the Bali bombings, sure, yet believes they were part of a "black campaign" by the U.S. to besmirch Indonesian Muslims and secure the archipelago as a future American military base. He is no fan of either Saddam Hussein or the Taliban ("They are not the face of Islam but the face of arrogance"), yet still regards bin Laden as a "Muslim Che Guevara" whose complicity in the 9/11 attacks remains unproved. He is proud that most Indonesians reject the hard-line Wahhabi creed in favor of a more tolerant form of Islam, yet believes the imposition of ShariŒa law—particularly its more gruesome punishments such as hand chopping—is the only solution to Indonesia's lawlessness. He is convinced that Abubakar Ba'asyir is "a good man" wrongly accused, and that JI is yet another U.S. fabrication.
It is perhaps to avoid such contradictions that Habib doesn't leave his compound very often these days, not even to see his wife and son who live just an hour or so away by car. Only here can he persuade himself that Islam is still the rhythm of life, not its deafening drumbeat or a rallying cry for ambitious politicians or the urban dispossessed or opponents to the evils of modernization and Westernization. Only here, with his gardens watered by running streams, can Habib wage his own private jihad in some kind of peace. "What is the real meaning of jihad?" he asks. "It is a holy path to Allah's blessing." A bat swoops low through the veranda, plucking an insect from the striplight. "The war with yourself," he reflects. "That is the hardest." For Habib Abdurrahman bin Ismail, jihad will never end.
