In Reply to: theoretical ? Maybe Cliff or anyone posted by Hillary on Monday, 3. October 2005 at 09:34 Bali Time:
This is what I've picked up from my Muslim friends. I'm by no means an authority on Islam.
Theoretically, all good Muslims should spend Ramadan doing a lot of praying, self reflection and purifying their own spirits. I think a lot of people ask for forgiveness during this time, if they feel they have wronged someone during the year.
Islam, like all religions, is a religion of peace. Like all religions, it has a lot of good ideas and some really weird ones.
Like all religions, it has small groups of followers who miss the big picture and focus on certain passages and interpret it to suit their own needs. (Something that doesn't help is that it's illegal to preach Islam in any language other than Arabic. There's a spiritual leader who just got a few years in the slammer for translating the prayers into Indonesian.) Not only are there many Indonesians who don't understand Arabic, there are many who are illiterate, or close to illiterate. So if a spiritual leader tells them what the word of God is, they don't have the means to question it. Usually that's not a problem, because, like all religions, the prayers/services are geared towards forming a strong and positive community.
But there are some radical groups who tend to go a bit nutty around this time of year. I don't mean terrorist nutty -- the terrorists have deviated so far from the tenets of Islam that no-one can really predict what they are going to do, though they tend to get the bad stuff done before Ramadan (or Lebaran, as they call it in Indonesia). Maybe they think they can purify themselves immediately afterwards. But who knows? They're psychopaths.
The nutty Muslims during Lebaran tend to be a few groups who run around burning pubs and brothels that refuse to close for the fasting month. There's one group in particular that has been active in Jakarta, and they've done a bit of damage -- mainly to property, though. Self-righteous bullying sort of stuff.
There was a spate of pub-burning in Bali a few years back, but that was before I'd ever been. I've heard a few different versions of who did it... some say the Javanese Muslims did it, others say it was the Bali mafia. An ojek even told me it was the CIA. But he was wearing a Babylon 5 t-shirt, so I couldn't quite take him seriously. (It's just one of my prejudices.)
The thing is, it's hard to get a strong sense of what really motivates the dumbasses, because you never get to hang out with them. It's always the insular groups of people. Most Indonesians have friends and neighbours of all religions and get along fine. Muslims give gifts to their Christian friends at Christmas and vice versa at Idul Fitri. And they don't really know what the problem is with the nutters either, coz they don't hang out with them either. there are plenty of theories, but they all basically get down to the same thing: they're nutters. Small-minded, insular, insecure, self-righteous nutters.
Chinese Indonesians seem to cop a bit of grief still, mainly coz they are seen as being wealthier (which is generally true) and because there's still some residual communist fear left over from the Suharto days. But again, it's a vague sort of prejudice, and generally they all get along until someone has a problem with a particular individual, and then they'll say "he's Chinese, and Christian" in order to get others on side.
But at the heart of the matter, it gets down to the fact that there's a lot of hungry people, plenty of diffent groups to blame for it, and a few knob-ends who understand how to exploit that situation. Until everyone is well fed or everyone (not just 99.99% of people) acts decently, there will be sporadic violence at any given time. And even after that, things can go wrong. But the worldwide pattern seems to be poverty + inequity + a knobend = trouble. The trouble keeps people divided and wary of each other, so they never have a chance to really band together and solve the real problem.
So I guess the short answer is that religion is used as one excuse for people who already have a propensity for violence, and a perceived (or real) just cause to use it.
And I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that you never hear about a lone gunman on a shooting spree, or a lone serial killer in Indonesia. But then, no-one ever seems to do anything alone over there.
There is a risk of terrorism or some other trouble in Indonesia at any given time. The odds of it happening to you specifically are very small. So, on a self-preservation level, the overwhelming odds are that when something like this happens again, you'll live to be horrified once more.
I don't know if any of that helps you at all. I do know that for the next month people all over Indonesia will be spending Lebaran praying for peace, and I hope their prayers are answered.