Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (2 page)

Map of Indonesia.

It was like other frontier zones between the modern and premodern worlds, where historical time is awfully compressed: along the Amazon or Congo, in the shantytowns that service the “exotic” tourist resorts that have become a big part of the world’s largest business, or along the U.S.-Mexico border of the Rio Grande. In these places, modern civilization hardly developed. It mostly just happened, without the thick web of human relationships, ideas, and artifacts that make cultural life comfortable to mellow and mature. Ever new, always in decay, as Claude Lévi-Strauss—who commiserated with me that he only wanted to be a musician but having no talent became an anthropologist instead—once mused about the sad urban tropics of the New World.
⁴
There will be no steps worn by generations of pilgrims here.

In our shopping-mall world, exotic cultures are either charming and sensual, like that of the Tahitians, or decorative and exploitable, like that of the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest. But the mild euphoria of West meeting Other is short-lived for someone who lingers too long. The gods of these other cultures are clichés, even for the descendants of the ancestors who worshipped them—a mix of existential angst and touchy-feely happy hermeneutics about harmony and oneness with nature and one another. The real gods, of passions and war, of weather and chaos, and the care and consolation of celestial cycles, are dust-dead or mummified in museums. Now, as the long, easy hegemony of the West over the world lurches to an end, the newly decadent and the exotic are left free as orphans. Hardly anyone cares to exploit their labor, integrate or understand them, or even notice if they were to drop off the face of the earth.

I came to Poso, a small town in Central Sulawesi that probably contains more violent Islamist groups per square meter than any other place on earth. I saw no blowpipes but many waists sporting the padang, a machete-like metal knife, and Kalashnikovs hanging over the shoulders and backs of numerous young men. Some groups still preyed on others, now killing them for their faith rather than for their meat. The groups in this little Eden of hell often call themselves “Lashkar this” or “Lashkar that,”
lashkar
being a derivation of the Arabic for “army” (only when I went to Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir did I find a comparable concentration of
lashkars,
as they are called there). Shortly before I arrived, two blasts in the market of the nearby Christian town of Tentene killed twenty-two people. Soon after I left, three Christian girls were beheaded on their way to school and there was another bombing. A police investigator sent me pictures of the girls’ headless bodies in their skirts and blazers. I thought of my own girls and felt sick at hell’s ravenous appetite. Not to be outdone, Christian militia beat and beheaded a couple of Muslims. This was after the Indonesian government executed three Christian militiamen, including a cleric, for leading a mob that massacred more than two hundred Muslims in a boarding school during a previous bout of religious war that killed more than a thousand people of both faiths. Sometimes, the
lashkars,
like bloodied sharks, would turn upon their own kind.

There’s nothing peculiar to Sulawesi in all of this, save the tropical lull of its Venus flytrap beauty. The modern Balkan tribes of Europe have behaved no differently. And the greater national tribes have recently done these sorts of things on an industrial scale. Ever since the Upper Paleolithic, when our hominid forebears began forming larger groups that could dominate any threat from wild animals, people had become their own worst predators. It is the larger family, or “tribe,” and not the mostly ordinary individuals in it, that increasingly has seemed to me the key to understanding the extraordinary violence of mass killing and the murder of innocents.

By “tribe” I don’t mean the usual anthropological sense of a small-scale society that is organized largely on the basis of territory and kinship, especially corporate descent groups like clans and lineages. Most of the Muslims in Central Sulawesi are not tribal in this narrow sense. They are recent immigrants from different parts of Java, and some of the Christian fighters are imported from East Timor. There is an extended sense of tribe similar to philosopher Jonathan Glover’s outlook in
Humanity,
⁵
his very disturbing chronicle of twentieth-century atrocities. This broader idea of tribe refers to a group of interlinked communities that largely share a common cultural sense of themselves, and which imagine and believe themselves to be part of one big family and home. Today the “imagined community,” as political scientist Benedict Anderson once referred to the notion of the nation,
⁶
extends from city neighborhoods to cyberspace.

The Jewish and Arab peoples, to give an example, are still tribal in both the narrow and the extended sense, each believing itself to be genetically linked and to share a cultural heritage. This is so despite the fact that the actual genealogical relationships invoked by Jewish Cohens (including descendants of the Hasmonean high priests), Levites, and Israelites or by Arab Adnanis (including Mohammed’s tribe, the Quraish) and Qahtanis are mostly historical fictions. In the extended sense, Nazi Germany imagined itself in terms of a tribe, the fatherland, and pushed the Soviet Union away from pretensions of universal brotherhood and back to a Mother Russia, which, with the Stalin priesthood, in fact mobilized tribal passions for sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War. The United States, which originally had few tribal sentiments because of its immigrant beginnings, has become increasingly tribalized through its widening economic and political power clashes around the world. Americans increasingly fear immigration and assimilate this into the fear of terrorism to form the new tribal concept of “homeland” security. By invoking the tribe, people needn’t listen to argument and are ready to rally themselves in defense of their imagined family’s honor and home against real or perceived enemies: from the hamlet wars of Jews and Arab tribes around Jerusalem to continental conflicts for the sake of America’s homeland, Russia’s motherland or China’s fatherland.

There are important historical differences between these various tribal imaginings, which I will later discuss in detail. But regardless of these differences, political scientists might interpret all such tribal appeals as a way of “reducing transaction costs,”
⁷
shortcutting the need to persuade and mobilize people. The call to jihad in Poso is tribal, even though most of the jihadis who are here have come to the call from elsewhere.

In 1998, a Muslim candidate was elected local governor, marking the fact that the immigrant Muslim population had surpassed the local population that had been converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century by missionaries from the Reformed Church of Holland. (Muslims now number 45 percent of the total population in Poso regency; Christians, 42 percent; and the rest are Hindu and Buddhist.) There are various stories about how the violence began at Christmastime in 1998, which happened that year to coincide with Ramadan, the holy Muslim month of fasting. One oft-told tale is that during the Muslim night prayers, some Christians were drinking and making a ruckus in the front yard of a mosque. The mosque’s warden asked them to leave. The next day, the Christians waylaid the warden on the street and taunted him about eating pork for breakfast, then beat him. Next, furious Muslims attacked Christian shops selling alcohol and also the oldest church in Poso. Tensions rose, and one day in April 2000, Christian bands invaded the town and attacked Muslim residents and shops, mostly with stones, torches, and wooden staves. Retaliation begat retaliation. Local ironsmiths began improvising homemade guns and bullets, and by the end of the year, tens of thousands of refugees were on the move and hundreds were dead on both sides. As word spread, Muslims from as far away as Spain came to fight for their brethren in the name of jihad. Despite intervals of long quiet, Poso was still the most active conflict area in Indonesia over the next decade.

In Poso, I ran psychological studies of Muslim mujahedin like Farhin on the role of sacred values in limiting rational choice, based in part on some of the initial results I had from my previous work with Palestinians. I would give each Indonesian holy warrior a questionnaire to complete. They soon began talking among themselves about what answers they should give, so I had them go off into separate places and promise not to talk. They dutifully complied. Some asked if they could consult their religious leaders about this or that question. When I said no, they accepted without protest. Except for the fact that they were mujahedin, they behaved no differently from my students.

Question A: “Would you give up a roadside bombing if it meant you could make the only pilgrimage to Mecca?” Most answered yes.

Question B: “Would you give up a suicide bombing to instead carry out a roadside bombing if it is possible?” Most answered yes.

Question C: “Could you give up a suicide bombing if it meant you could make the only pilgrimage to Mecca in your lifetime?” Most answered no.

From the perspective of the rationality that is thought to underlie standard economic or political calculations, this is not a reasonable set of responses. Rationality requires logical consistency in preferences: If A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, then A must be preferable to C. Here, however, we have A (pilgrimage) preferred to B (roadside bombing), and B preferred to C (suicide bombing)—yet C preferred to A. I’ll have more to say on the peculiarities and consequences of this sort of “moral logic” later in this book.

The nonrationality I am interested in exploring is not merely a formal or analytic one. It is also eruptive and emotional. As Farhin and I descended from Poso, we came to the former site of the first training camp in the area that Farhin set up for Jemaah Islamiyah. The people living near the site are mostly Balinese. Farhin had rightly anticipated that no one would look for a jihadi camp in the middle of a Balinese population. If today there is a gentle people, it’s the Balinese. Especially in Central Sulawesi, they have kept their good humor and grace as war swirls around them. We happened upon a Balinese wedding near the campsite. It was a colorful Hindu ceremony, elegant and delightful.

I turned to Farhin.
“Helu kthir”
—very beautiful and sweet—I said in my broken Levantine Arabic, which I had picked up many years before when I lived with the Druze people.

“Wahsh!”
he rasped. (Animals!) “Look at their women; I swear by God that if I had a bomb I would use it here.”

I stopped in mid-chortle, the instant I noticed the heavy-lidded look that I had seen in the eyes of killers before, in Guatemala, and would see again in Pakistan.

“Farhin, issa nahnu asadaqa?”
(Now, we are friends?)

“A habibi.”
Yes, my beloved. He grinned as his eyes and voice lightened.
“Mundhu bada’a al-hawa yajruju min sayara.”
—“After the wind left the car,” which was his broken Arabic, picked up from Arabs at the Saddah training camp near the Khyber Pass in the later stages of the Soviet-Afghan war, for “Ever since the flat tire” that we had fixed while laughing at one another.

“Would you kill me for the jihad?” I asked.

“No problem,” he said, this time in English, and with a laugh. Then that look again:
“Aiwah, sa’aqtruk.”
(Yes, I would kill you.)

I thought I had come to the limits of my understanding of the other and could go no further. There was something in Farhin that was incalculably different from me … yet almost everything else about him was not.

“In all those years, after you and the others came back from Afghanistan, and before JI started up, how did you stay a part of the jihad?” I asked.

“We Afghan Alumni never stopped playing soccer together,” he replied matter-of-factly. “That’s when we were closest together in the camp”—then a megawatt smile—“except when we went on vacation, to fight the communists.”

“Vacation?” I asked, puzzled because Farhin had deadpanned the word.

He smiled. “Holiday, yes, that’s what we called the fighting. Training wasn’t such fun.”

“Fun? Do you think war is fun, Farhin?”

“War is noble in a true cause that is worth more than life. Fighting for that is a strong feeling, strong.”

“And what really kept you together?” I asked again just to be sure.

“We played soccer and remained brothers—in Malaysia, when I worked on the chicken farm [of exiled Jemaah Islamiyah founder Abdullah Sungkar], then back in Java.”

Maybe, then, it was something about the relation between God and soccer that was eluding me. Maybe people don’t kill and die simply for a cause. They do it for friends—campmates, schoolmates, workmates, soccer buddies, bodybuilding buddies, paint-ball partners—action pals who share a cause. Maybe they die for dreams of jihad—of justice and glory
—and
devotion to a familylike group of friends and mentors who act and care for one another, of “imagined kin,” like the Marines. Except that they also hope to God to die.

Then it came on me as embarrassingly obvious: It’s no accident that nearly all religious and political movements express allegiance through the idiom of the family—brothers and sisters, children of God, fatherland, motherland, homeland. Nearly all major ideological movements, political or religious, require the subordination or assimilation of the real family (genetic kinship) to the larger imagined community of “brothers and sisters.” Indeed, the complete subordination of biological loyalty to loyalty for the cultural cause of the Ikhwan, the “Brotherhood” of the Prophet, is the original meaning of the word
Islam,
“submission.”