Before I flew to Ambon two weeks ago, the only
thing I knew about the city was that it had been at the centre of the worst
violence between Muslims and Christians in Indonesia's history. The violence
spread when Islamic militants from around the country flocked to Ambon to begin
cleansing Christians from the Maluku islands (the Moluccas), one of the few
places where Christians live in large numbers in Indonesia.
Indonesia may have the largest Muslim population in
the world – 220 million – but the country is so diverse and so large that it
also has one of the largest Christian populations in Asia – 25 million,
far more than the 14 to 15 million Christians in Australia.
One sure way to stimulate
religious faith is to suppress it, and the muscularity of the mainly
Pentecostal and Protestant Christianity in and around Ambon was evident during
the drive from the airport. We passed church after church, far larger than the
average church in Australia, all with soaring spires.
In Ambon my wife and I had
a guide, Anastasia, a Christian with a shock of wavy black hair, a ready
smile and, as we would discover later, a lovely, smoky singing voice. When I
eventually asked if her family had been directly affected by the bloodshed in
Ambon, she told me her mother had been murdered – shot dead for being a
Christian. Their local church was burnt to the ground. Her school was burnt
down.
For her safety, Anastasia was
sent to Bali to finish high school. She became one of the more than one
million refugees from the violence, the largest internal displacement ever seen
in Indonesia.
From Ambon we travelled by ship
to the Banda Islands, known for centuries as the Spice Islands, with their
incredible impact on history. We visited the oldest nutmeg plantation in the
world, run by the same family of prominent Dutch trader Pieter van den
Broecke since about 1620, whose portrait hangs in the living room of his
13th-generation descendant, Ponky van den Broecke, who owns and runs the
plantation.
Despite his jaunty Dutch
name, Ponky is very Indonesian and his personal history is tragic. During
the violence that started in Ambon, armed Muslims sought to cleanse the Banda
Islands of Christians. All the women in his family were murdered. His wife. His
two daughters. His mother. His aunt.
To avoid being driven from 400
years of family tradition and to protect the life of his surviving son,
the 14th generation, van den Broecke converted to Islam.
The murdered members of his
family were among more than 5000 people killed in the four-year conflict, both
Christian and Muslim. All this happened on Australia's doorstep, while we were
celebrating the 2000 Olympics.
Despite this setback Indonesia
has been able to accommodate democracy and diversity in a way that every Arab
Muslim state has failed to do. This is in large part because of its enormous
regional diversity, with 300 ethnic groups spread across 6000 islands. Strong
local traditions and beliefs, separated by the sea, made Islam adapt to the
archipelago as much as the people adapted to Islam.
Indonesia's ability to contain
religious violence while so much of the Muslim world has been engulfed by it is
partly explained in a superb book by Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia Etc,
published last year: "Most Indonesians support the idea of religious
freedom in general, but members of the great orthodox Sunni majority are not
going to storm the barricades and confront a handful of fanatics who have shown
they are willing to maim and kill."
She witnessed the influence of
fundamentalism gaining ground: "The newly returned hajis [returning from
pilgrimage to Mecca] wanted to purge their local religion of all the flavours it
had picked up while stewing for centuries in the rich cultures of the islands…
in favour of… pure, identikit Arab Islam."
This is the new reality in the
globalised world. Wherever there are Muslims in large numbers, there will be a
strand of religious fundamentalists who view Muslims as oppressed by infidels
and who read the Koran as a call to arms, providing the justification and
vindication for violence.
The pattern is repeated
constantly.
When politicians, academics,
journalists and muftis repeat the mantra that the massacres of innocents by
Muslims does not represent Islam, they are promoting one of the great lies of
our times.
President Barack Obama is the
chief and serial perpetrator of this lie. He repeated the pattern on Friday and
Saturday, after the massacre in San Bernadino, in which two Muslims
methodically planned and carried out a Paris-style massacre that left 35 people
dead or wounded.
Anyone willing to fight and die
for their religion cannot be rationalised away as psychopaths. Given the
thousands of attacks against civilians made in the name of Islam over the past
20 years, there would have to be a wildly disproportionate numbers of
psychopaths in the Muslim populations to justify the argument that Muslims who
kill are not real Muslims.
What keeps the violent
fundamentalism to no more than a strand is that the Koran also contains
numerous invocations of compassion, a softer version which suits the nature of
most people. Most want to live and let live. We all understand that.
I've just spent 10 days
surrounded by Muslims and been treated with warmth and acceptance at every
turn, as I was on two other trips in recent years. This time I saw dozens of
Christian and Muslim students socialising together in Ambon. I'm already making
plans to return to Indonesia, whose success is important to Australia for so
many reasons.
Paul_Sheehan Sydney Morning Herald Illustration: Michael Mucci
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