Has anyone else noticed the number of people walking around dressed as if they were in the Middle East? The number of Joe Blows dressed in attire that is definitely not the norm for Indonesia? Have we not noticed the “mission creep” of the Middle Eastern-oriented religious “scholars” who are fast becoming mainstream in the country?


Is a lifestyle of strong conservatism, which flourishes in the Middle East, the type of future Indonesia wants? (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

What has happened to Indonesia? The nation of 365 ethnic groups and the same number of languages, the nation with a sophisticated cultural heritage that has for centuries been a wondrous garden of paradise, nurtured and cared for by a host of cultural gardeners and caretakers. A country progressing at breakneck speed into... well, the past. And not just the immediate past, either.

All of a sudden, the people of Indonesia are being manipulated or coerced into the ancient Middle Eastern way of life.

It is a bit of a worry. The Sufis who established Islam in this country all those centuries ago understood that cultural adaptation was necessary and formed the unique basis for the largest and most tolerant Muslim-majority nation on the planet. Indonesia is a country with its own beautiful and graceful culture, with unique art, poetry, tales of heroes and heroines, flying magicians and scary ghosts. It is a nation of diversity and incredible sophistication that developed empires like the Sriwijaya, the Majapahit and many more. A culture that has written and carved history going back to the fourth century.

The sheer magnitude of the archipelago and the beauty of the islands is mind boggling. It is populated by people who have struggled to maintain it as best they could under difficult conditions. People who have, through major adversity and back-breaking poverty, still managed to come up with the concept of gotong-royong, where communities look after their members and their locales with little or no outside help.

The pressures of economic development and the tsunami of democracy has overwhelmed us. It has swept us away in a miasma of high-pressure financial demands. The population has almost doubled in 30 years, reducing the amount of land and resources available and increasing the burden of poverty.

The mega-companies and conglomerates established from the 1970s to 1990s have grown and swallowed up everything in sight in the name of economic development. Meanwhile, the economy remains controlled by just 2 percent of the population.

A new generation has been able to go overseas to study — something that was almost unheard of in the ’80s. Indonesia has suffered from a brain drain to a degree, but a huge number of educated people do return home and work hard to develop the country. However, a few — actually not just a few but a whole mass — attend Islamic universities in the Middle East and return home with vastly different ideas for their country. They neglect the work of the Sufis, the Walisongo, and the population of this wonderful land. They neglect the way communities have continued to exist in an environment of change — where the country has shifted from an agrarian society to one based on productivity and progress. They do not realize the people of Indonesia have aspirations of wealth and safety, and wish to live a peaceful life in tune with the paradise in which we live. They misunderstand their own people and history and defile centuries of culture and trade it in for a foreign ideal.

Imbued with the ideas about the “purity” of Islam, the Koran, hadith and Shariah law, they believe the religion of Islam can only be celebrated when one adheres entirely to these tenets. In return, they see the population of Indonesia, living as it has done for millennia, become angry and would destroy it all for the sake of so-called purity of the faith.

They have been doing this for many years – very quietly and very successfully. A mission to Middle Eastern-ize Indonesia, with or without consent. People are suddenly changing. We have traded the fear of repression and reprisals of the Suharto years for fear of repression and reprisals from the imams. We have become subservient to the will of those who would have us believe that they are the only people who know the true word of God.

This is despite the fact that there are many larger and more sophisticated organizations that praise and welcome the idea of a positive mix of the secular and theological — organizations that originate in the same lands our “educated” returnees come home from.

Conservative Islam is like a mouse nibbling at the corner of a rice sack. A mouse that has very quietly and very subtly grown and reproduced and infiltrated the houses of the population of this country, whether we like it or not. It is a mouse that has turned into a herd of elephants, with an insatiable appetite for control, total submission and expansion.

The normally passive Indonesian way of life is powerless to resist and we have drowned in a wave of invective and orthodoxy. The gentle and accommodating Indonesia, so used to being cared for and nurtured by community spirit, finds itself in the grip of highly trained and manipulative men that would destroy everything the country represents and has fought and died for. Lakes of blood, oceans of sweat and heavens of tears, all shed to achieve success and prominence in the global community. All about to be snatched away at the finishing line, condemning us to a life of pious slavery. A life where we cannot celebrate the spectacular achievements of this great nation.

Sadly the gardens are withering. The caretakers being swallowed up and digested by developments they do not understand. These changes are so pervasive they will eventually take all attention away from the garden until it withers away to nothing more than a distant memory in a dusty foreign museum.

We are a nation born of our history, trapped by the past and being robbed of our future.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/talkb...se-lost/440205