For more than a decade, Indonesia, the country with the world's largest Muslim majority, has nurtured a democracy, which has been praised at home and abroad as an exemplary case of Islam and democracy, an example that Arab countries, amid the Arab Spring, could reflect on.
However, Egypt's military coup that ousted the democratically elected president Mohamed Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood government, which resulted in the massacres only weeks later, should raise issues beyond Islam and democracy.
As the Arab Spring ended in catastrophic bloodshed without a clear outcome, why only compare the compatibility of Islam and democracy? After all, both have never been independent variables anyway.
Two countries: both with a dominant Muslim majority; equally strategic in their respective regions; with military politics born out of the historic struggles and populist regimes (Sukarno, Nasser); experienced rule under authoritarian regimes for decades with profound military involvement in government (Soeharto, post-Nasser); and Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwanul Muslimin) components with similar ambitions; in addition to both having considerable sectors of secular urban middle classes and mass workers.
Yet, it is the differences that matter. If all politics are local, it is the differences rather than the similarities that ought to be the crucial parameters.
Egypt's June 30 event was surely a coup, a military take-over of legitimate state power even if technically not of a classic type as a week-long-ultimatum was issued before they replaced the government. Though, the rest is a common pattern: mass arrests, repression, massacres of opponents, interim leaders and pledge of elections.
However, one key feature has been that the coup was preceded by urban protests, labor unrest and social dissatisfaction vis a vis Mursi regime. Whatever the means they actually used to depose the government, the act of a coup was somehow construed to provide a semblance, a shadow if you will, of the legitimate will of the people. In addition, they claimed that Mursi was a "criminal" and had illegally helped Palestine's Hamas.
Whether this would make the act legitimate — which did not — is another matter, but that semblance did provide the coup planners with a chance and leverage to impose their will, which they succeeded in.
And when they face ongoing resistance among Mursi's supporters and others, the new military power-holders are clearly ready to effectively propagate and exploit the fear of "terror" to crush all opposition.
Similar, in the mid-1960s, the Indonesian Army, provoked by the Sept. 30 movement, had acted on such a semblance of "legitimacy" by construing, exposing and campaigning the assassinations of the generals, portrayed as a celebration of brutal killings, and the movement's plan to change the government — a "pretext" (John Roosa, 2006), that is, to mobilize the society against the communists, which turned the country into a bloody archipelago.
Egypt's top generals reportedly regularly met with opposition leaders at the Navy Officers' Club outside the capital in which some consensus had been achieved that the military would step in if the opposition — which included the Salafi Muslim group — could put enough protesters on the streets.
The Egyptian military has throughout history been united in consolidating its institutions and intervention in domestic politics. By contrast, the Indonesian Military has, on the whole, historically grown volatile, continually demonstrating disunity. It was involved in most of the nation's political issues and upheavals, including in separatist rebellions.
Once the 1965 genocide evolved, the military became the political elite par excellence and, amid the deteriorating economy, started to develop and sustain a pervasive state based on "floating mass" policies by cutting off all links with mass-based politics.
In Egypt, just as the military was apparently able to sustain its strength, reports suggest that president Mursi's political party's sectarian game, amid the deteriorating economy, has after 18 months resulted in ineffective administration.
Hence, while Egypt's military was united, they were able to capitalize on the broadly based rejection of Mursi's policies, although it remains unclear how the diverse groups from among the secular urban section and at grassroots level were organized.
The Egyptian military, as Tariq Ramadan (2013) put it, has always remained strong in the politics simply "because it never left it".
That's obviously also the case in Indonesia. But Soeharto's army, once banning the grassroots interest politics, had since the mid-1960s ruled over and controlled the masses. And it was not until the 1980s that the generals themselves were able to build some unity, making it easy for Soeharto all the while to dictate them until indeed he turned to political Islam for support at the end of that decade.
True, in both cases, political Islam has gained some importance, but in the Egyptian case, the idea and social movement of the Muslim Brotherhood had been banned ever since its founding by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. The Brotherhood, a historic competitor, became an enemy of the state just as — much earlier than, but possibly in a similarly intensive way as — the communists had been for the Indonesian Army in the-1960s.
What the Egyptian military apparently feared was that the Brotherhood came into power to meet popular expectations of greater welfare and democracy. Mursi's failure thus became a critical moment. In post-independence Indonesia, that moment came as soon as the Army clashed with the communists in the 1960s and won.
By 1998, with their great patron gone and popular demands heightened, the Indonesian generals, having eliminated their enemy, only had to adapt themselves into democratic procedures and institutions. They left formal military structures and Soeharto's apparatus, Golkar, as soon as they could maintain their interests through old networks and new political parties.
By then the Indonesian counterpart of the Brotherhood, the Justice Party (PK), was born, whose successor is now drowned in graft scandals and declines.
The political actors in the two countries thus went through very different timing and trajectories.
Leaving the regional and international context aside, it is the historic course and the resulting political conjuncture that seem most decisive – even if in both cases there remains the dream of "Islamic state" amid a flourishing democracy.
The writer is a journalist who lives in Amsterdam.
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