El Indio: The True Caliphate
A fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria holds an ISIS flag and a weapon on a street in the city of Mosul, June 23, 2014. (Reuters Photo)
When a car bomb blasted the gates of the Australian embassy in Jakarta on Sept. 9, 2004, then-foreign minister Hassan Wirajuda denounced the Jemaah Islamiyah as the terrorist organization behind the heinous crime that killed nine and wounded some 150 others.
He was the first Indonesian government official to patently call the JI a terrorist organization. In a conversation I had with him at that time, he also stressed that the goal of the JI was to establish a caliphate in Muslim Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Southern Philippines and Southern Thailand.
I've been wondering since then what kind of a caliphate the JI or any jihadist organization in this part of the world would put together. A recent study by the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) concluded that the caliphate espoused by the JI had been vague until it became the focus of the "broader jihadi agenda."
That larger agenda is the "khilafa" that would be established by the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), the Al-Qaeda spin-off that has seized parts of Syria and a large swath of north and western Iraq.
A map of that dream caliphate is circulating. It has provoked a stir because it covers the Atlantic coast of North Africa, the entire Middle East and all the way eastward to include South Asia, including India and Sri Lanka, and, of course, Southeast Asia.
Is it authentic? No matter. It's consistent with jihadi talk on the Internet. Why doesn't it include once-Moorish southern Spain? Actually, there's Internet chatter about extending it to Europe.
Expect a reaction in Buddhist Myanmar and Sri Lanka. I hope it will not be used as an excuse for drawing knives against Muslim minorities in those countries. That will only fire up the caliphate dream.
What's meant by "caliphate" anyway? There's no universally agreed meaning. To many Westerners it's a medieval, backward terrorist state that's particularly oppressive to women. To the ISIS fighters, it's the pan-Islamic state that would reign on the basis of their fundamentalist interpretation of the Shariah — which amounts to the same thing.
To many moderate Muslims, the caliphate was the reign of the well-guided immediate successors of the Prophet — the golden age of Islam that is lost forever. Hence, I like to think the caliphate can only exist today in the heart of a Muslim who follows the Prophet's example of compassion.
That's not the caliphate for which the ISIS fighters are beheading their captives by the hundreds. In Iraq and Syria they are fighting for a cold-blooded global caliphate, along with hundreds of militants from Southeast Asia. IPAC believes more than 100 Indonesian jihadists are fighting there. Some of them and an unknown number of Malaysians and Filipinos must be marching under the banner of the ISIS. TIME Magazine reports that dozens of Americans and Canadians are also there. And some 500 British. Some 700 French and 320 Germans. All in all 12,000 foreigners from 81 nations are battling alongside local Islamists.
But the ISIS can't last the way it is. It's too cruel to sustain the support of a population. It has too many powerful enemies. One day it will crumble as a quasi-state and morph into a network much like its estranged mother, Al-Qaeda. Most of its 12,000 foreign fighters will go back home to wreak havoc on the societies that nurtured them.
Unless they are prevented. Many are simply arrested upon their return. A way must be found to reintegrate them into society. To persuade them, through the same social media that recruited them, that the caliphate of our time lies in the imitation of the compassionate ways of the Prophet.
And that it has nothing to do with beheading people.
Jamil Maidan Flores is a Jakarta-based writer whose interests include philosophy and foreign policy. He is also an English-language consultant for the Indonesian government. The views expressed here are his own.
Posted by: "Sunny" <ambon@tele2.se>
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