The political crises of the late 1990s and the outbreaks of terrorist violence in the 2000s drew a growing number of political scientists into the study of Muslim politics in Southeast Asia. These two books by Gordon P. Means and Duncan McCargo demonstrate that the “poli sci turn” in the study of Southeast Asian Islam has had diverse but beneficial effects.
An emeritus professor from McMaster University in Canada, Means is no newcomer to Southeast Asian studies. He began his dissertation research on Islam and politics in Kuala Lumpur in 1954. The author of a well-regarded book on Malaysian politics, Means also conducted research in Indonesia during the 1970s. More recently, he carried out research for his new book over a period of three years while a visiting scholar in Singapore and Malaysia. None of Means's previous works ever attempted anything on the scale of this book. Its aim is to provide no less than an account of Muslim politics in Southeast Asia from precolonial times to today.
After a first chapter that explains its ambitions, the book is divided into thirteen chapters. Chapter 2 examines the indigenization of Muslim culture and politics in the first centuries after the religion's arrival in Southeast Asia. To effect this comparison, Means provides a brief but cogent summary of the circumstances of the Qur'an's revelation, the conflict surrounding succession to the Prophet Muhammad, and debates over Islamic law (shari'a) and Muslim governance. Although some readers might quibble with a few of the details with regard to shari'a, the overall account is clear and convincing. The author's reflections on the early Islamic period provide an excellent perch from which to understand the peculiar synthesis of the universal and local in Southeast Asian Islam.
Chapter 3 provides a similarly clear-headed overview of Islam under colonial rule, from the “factory-fort” colonization of the Portuguese to the bureaucratic empires of the British and Dutch. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the late colonial and postcolonial situation in Indonesia and Malaysia, highlighting the ways in which anticolonial movements and the postcolonial state heightened divisions in each country's Muslim community, as well as between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Chapters 6–8 are the book's analytical pivot, showing how interactions between a hegemonic state pluralized an already divided Muslim populace, setting the stage for the emergence of different varieties of political Islam in the 1990s, ranging from pro-democracy reformists to radical Islamist insurgents. The same themes are then taken up from the late 1990s to the present in the book's final three chapters. Chapters 6 and 12, then, look at political Islam in New Order and post-Suharto Indonesia. Chapters 7 and 13 address the same themes in Malaysia under and after Mahathir. Chapters 8 and 14 stand back and examine Muslim politics in the Southeast Asia region as a whole, with an eye toward explaining the origins and future of transnational jihadism.
In painting this impressively broad canvas, Means steers clear of grand theory, opting for an events-driven narrative, complemented with short historical juxtapositions of Southeast Asia against the Middle East and South Asia. As is inevitable when working through as many secondary sources as Means examines, the detail of his argument stands or falls on the sources used. Means's account is at its best when speaking about topics on which scholarship is more or less agreed, such as Wahhabi influences in Southeast Asia (pp. 151–53), or the impact of the Afghanistan insurgency on Southeast Asian radicalism (pp. 161–3). When examining recent incidents of religious violence on which there is no scholarly consensus—such the Dayak–Madurese violence in Central Kalimantan during the 1990s (p. 178, where Means incorrectly reports that Laskar Jihad militants had a hand in the violence), or the relationship of the Laskar Jihad militia to the Jemaah Islamiyah (p. 176; Means reports that the two groups were allied, but their leaders loathed each other), Means occasionally relies too heavily on Western terrorism experts, some of whom lack the local knowledge required to be credible. These examples of analytical overreach are surprisingly rare, however, in a book of this range and complexity.
Chapters 8–11 step back from the book's broad regional comparisons to look at separatism and rebellion in the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and Aceh, Indonesia, respectively. The account in these chapters, too, is rich and balanced, albeit occasionally prone to overemphasizing al-Qaeda influences. Here and in the book as a whole, however, Means has performed a major service for students of Muslim politics in Southeast Asia. This is an extraordinarily synthetic work that deserves to read by all specialists of Southeast Asia. With a few caveats on questions of terrorism, this work is also eminently well suited for adoption in university classrooms.
While Means addresses the broad sweep of Southeast Asian Muslim history, Duncan McCargo's Tearing Apart the Land focuses on Muslim politics in one country in modern times. The case is the Malay Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand, arguably one of the least understood conflicts in contemporary Southeast Asia. Some terrorism experts have explained the awful violence raging in the region since 2001 (and all the more brutally since 2004) as a matter of al-Qaeda mischief, pure and simple. Others have seen the violence as a result of the growing influence of Saudi-backed Wahhabism. All analysts agree, however, that the outcome of the conflict in southern Thailand will have momentous implications for Thailand and Southeast Asia as a whole.
McCargo is a professor of Southeast Asian Politics at the University of Leeds and the author of several highly regarded works on political parties, media, and democratization in Thailand. The author makes no claim of being a specialist of Islam, and he is careful not to extend his observations too far beyond his Thailand case materials. However, the materials he has gathered are original, fascinating, and important. From 2005 to 2006, and under dangerous circumstances, McCargo carried out field research in Thailand's three Malay-dominated southern provinces. His investigation took place in the aftermath of a spike in insurgent violence, which had begun to target Buddhist civilians and monks as well as security forces. The violence was in part a response to crackdowns by security forces in 2004, in which large numbers of Muslim protestors were killed. Under these difficult circumstances, McCargo rented an old Mercedes and traveled across the south, ultimately conducting some 270 semistructured interviews (p. xiv).
The book is divided into a thematic introduction and conclusion, in between which lie four chapters on Islam, regional politics, the security forces, and insurgent organization, respectively. McCargo's research on Islam dispels the claim that the violence in the south was the handiwork of al-Qaeda masterminds or Saudi-influenced conservatives. As in nearby Malaysia and Sumatra, the Muslim community in southern Thailand is divided between “new group” (kaum muda) modernists and “old group” (kaum tua) traditionalists. The traditionalists, McCargo shows, are by far the larger of the two communities, controlling most of the region's congregational mosques and Islamic boarding schools (pondok). The modernists appeared on the scene only in the 1920s and 1930s. However, from the 1980s on, their ranks and complexion were changed with the arrival of a new generation of Saudi-educated salafi reformists. Led by the Saudi-trained founder of the Yala Islamic College, Ismael Lutfi Chapakia, the salafists were at first intolerant on matters of dress, local custom, and religious education. Sobered by the scale of traditionalist resistance, Lutfi and his colleagues eventually softened their attitudes. Today, modernists of a modified salafist variety control the commanding heights of Islamic higher education. They also enjoy the favor of the Thai state, which welcomes the modernists' emphasis on general as well as religious education.
The recent upsurge in violence in the south, then, was not engineered by internationalist jihadis or salafist conservatives. Notwithstanding some jihadist terminology, there is little in the militants' anonymous leaflets that bespeaks an al-Qaeda worldview. Rather than being the result of salafist or al-Qaeda elements, McCargo shows, the upsurge in the violence reflects a broader fractionalization of authority in the Malay Muslim community, combined with a crisis of state legitimacy exacerbated by the missteps of successive Thai governments. Most of the militants are youths linked to a radicalized wing of the traditionalist community. The Thai state's efforts in the 1990s to co-opt traditionalist leaders backfired, estranging these youth from the state-backed Muslim elite. “Society in the Malay Muslim provinces had lost its moral center,” McCargo observes. As a result, “By 2004, Patani was open territory for extremists” (p. 54). The radical ground was made all the more fertile by Thailand's tycoon politician, Thaksin Shinawatra. He put aside the palace's effort at a “virtuous politics” (p. 9) in favor of repressive measures that only played into the hands of hard-line militants.
In the last chapter prior to his conclusion, Means analyzes the statements, tactics, and organization of the militants. Their stated aims are “sketchy” (p. 152), and, to judge by the statements McCargo analyzes, their knowledge of and commitment to Islamic law are minimal. They appear to lack a formal leadership structure, and are instead a “network without a core” (p. 169). McCargo's convincing conclusion is that their cause is not transnational jihadism but a “political one that centers on local questions of legitimacy” (p. 187).
McCargo has sifted through the details of this tragic conflict with extraordinary diligence and insight. The result is a small masterpiece of investigative rigor and balance. It is an especially welcome corrective to those tempted to see the hand of al-Qaeda in all Muslim insurgencies.
