http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2261&Itemid=594
Book Review: The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with
Islam
Written by John Berthelsen
Monday, 25 January 2010
By US Sen. Christopher S. Bond and Lewis M. Simons, 276 pp. John Wiley &
Sons, Inc. Available through Amazon, US$18.94. In Singapore, S$26.59
See the book excerpt here: Is Southeast Asia the Next Front?
Alarmed by reports of rising fundamentalist Islamic activity in the
nations of Southeast Asia, US Sen. Christopher Bond and Pulitzer Prize-winning
foreign correspondent Lewis Simons traveled through Mindanao in the
Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Southern Thailand to attempt to
ascertain the level of rising jihadi activity in those countries.
The result is The Next Front, a well-researched 276-page book published
earlier this month by John Wiley & Sons. Given the fact that it was co-written
by a veteran Republican US senator, it is a book that proceeds from one
premise: What does this mean to America?
Despite the generally alarming feel to the book - the front flap says
Southeast Asia will be the next front in the fight against global terrorism -
it is quite a sober examination, much of it built on an exhaustive tour of the
region in which the two actually talked to human beings - a physician whose
wife was raped and whose son was murdered by Abu Sayaf insurgents in Mindanao,
a Jihadi who helped to assemble a massive car bomb that blew up outside the
Philippine embassy in Jakarta and killed two people and severely injured 20
others, a successful Muslim lawyer who defends Islamic clients in Jakarta
courts, Malaysia's former Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and many more.
It is a book built more on anecdotal evidence on the ground than deep Google
searches or policy reviews in US embassies or consulates. And, one gets the
feeling, it is far more Simons' work than Bond's.
Simons has been a respected foreign correspondent since 1967 throughout
Asia, for the Associated Press, the Washington Post and Knight-Ridder before it
collapsed into the McClatchy Newspaper chain. He won the Pulitzer for
delineating the billions of dollars that former Philippine strongman Ferdinand
Marcos and his wife, Imelda, stole from his country. And, one gets the
feeling, one of his major jobs was to keep the saddle and bridle on Bond. "The
authors continue to disagree sharply with each other over the advisability of
the United States having gone to war in Iraq," they state in the conclusion.
Bond, vicechairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, is an unadorned
hawk who refused to sign on to a major Intelligence Committee report accusing
US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of hyping
intelligence to get the US into the Iraq War.
Nonetheless, the book draws some thoughtful conclusions about what the
United States gets wrong not only in Southeast Asia but the world in general.
"The disconnect between Americans and Muslims is based almost entirely on
American's certainty that they stand in defense of freedom and human decency
and Muslims' equal assuredness that Americans adhere to a double standard that
is wholly biased against them," they write. "These antagonistic convictions,
taken together, constitute powerful glue that holds organizations such as the
MILF together and draws them into closer contact with Muslims of the worldwide
ulama."
They quote an attorney in Mindanao quite appropriately: "You Americans
lack any sense of history. That's why you're in such trouble in Iraq and the
rest of the Middle East. All you know and care about is what you consider the
moment's reality on the ground. But that's all wrong. Muslims today are trying
to project their history onto their future, and if Americans don't understand
that, you don't understand anything."
It is quite clear, the authors write, "that American exceptionalism will
not forever shield us from history's harsh lessons. To come to terms with the
world's Muslims, we are going to have to learn from and pay respect to their
history."
So, at the end of the book, how justified is their alarm about the
Muslims of Southeast Asia? There have been serious incidents over the past few
years that, if American newspaper editors ever actually paid any attention to
the region, should have US readers shivering in their easy chairs - if they
would bother to read newspapers, that is.
There is no better example than the church burnings that took place in
Malaysia at the early part of this month. What made the news was the fact that
11 Christian churches in a predominantly Muslim country were attacked with
Molotov cocktails after the Prime Minister tacitly gave approval to Islamic
worshipers outraged over the use of the word Allah for God in the Malay
language sections of the Catholic Herald newspaper. (Read The Fallout from
Malaysia's Allah Flap, Asia Sentinel, Jan. 20, 2010, for additional details).
What none of the stories tell, (admittedly including the Asia Sentinel
story cited above), is that these 11 incidents do not appear to have been a
mass movement in Malaysian society. They were instead a handful of occurrences
committed by hotheads. The bulk of Malaysian Muslims were horrified by them,
if the country's multitude of blogs were any measure, or the dozens of letters
to editors and others. In fact, after the first burnings got underway, teams
of Malay Muslims took to the streets to protect Christian churches. In both
Indonesia and Malaysia, seeming religious protest is largely driven by
political agendas rather than religion, except in the case of bombers who
targeted the Bali nightclubs and hotels in Jakarta. They were rounded up rather
effectively and were a tiny cell.Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines is more a bandit
gang making money off ransome.
The moderate attitude is prevalent across much of Southeast Asia.
Indonesian Muslims, despite headlines of repressive movements in Aceh and other
areas, remain tolerant as they grow more prosperous, although their concept of
themselves as part of the larger global Muslim community continues to grow.
Previously, the authors write, "people greeted each other in the
vernacular selamat pagi, never the Arabic salaam aleikum. They thought of
themselves first as ethnic Malays and only then as Muslims. All that, and much
more, is shifting dramatically as the Muslims of Southeast Asia turn
increasingly to the Middle East to reaffirm their identity."
Part of the answer to American concerns is one they really probably never
thought of. That is that Southeast Asia, as it grows more prosperous and
slowly slips into the Asian ambit of China, is probably less preoccupied with
America than it has been for many decades. The growing economies of the region
are delivering their own promise to the citizens, except in the trouble spots
of southern Thailand and Mindanao, where Muslims are truly trapped by the
predominant Buddhist and Catholic cultures respectively as second-class
citizens and where they stand little chance of breaking out of their poverty
and isolation. But the bulk of the millions of Muslims in Malaysia and
Indonesia are getting ready to join the middle class. They see the promise of
better times. That ultimately is what is most likely to keep them out of the
ranks of the jihadis.
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