In 1998,
President Suharto’s 32-year dictatorship collapsed in four days of
violence, East Timor broke away in a bloodfest in 1999, and Islamists
launched a sustained terror campaign across the archipelago.
Jemaah
Islamiyah, an Al-Qaeda affiliate, bombed a Bali nightclub in 2002,
killing more than 200 people. Operatives then struck the JW Marriott
Hotel and the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. They even detonated a bomb
in the Jakarta Stock Exchange car park while I was on the 14th floor. I
took that personally.
Indonesia responded with competence and
force. Arrests, intelligence penetration and targeted operations
followed. It paired this with deradicalization programs that treated
Islamism as a security threat and ideological pathology. There will be
worse places to look when the time comes to deradicalize Gaza, and Judea
and Samaria.
Islamists moved into politics, contested municipal
elections, embedded themselves in nationalist parties and learned the
grammar of local governance: zoning, licensing and “public morality.”
Then came the regulations. No full sharia
law, but a diluted variant: restrictions on alcohol, curfews dressed up
as public safety and moral ordinances targeting unmarried couples. Each
nudged the system toward an Islamist vision.
Across Java,
municipalities introduced dress codes, curfews and social restrictions.
Padang in Sumatra required Quranic literacy for students and civil
servants. Local authority was used to normalize Islamic religious norms
through bylaws and ordinances.
This is what totalizing ideologies
do when denied decisive victory. They settle for partial control and
accumulate power over time. They think in decades, while Western
politicians think in electoral cycles.
The West is not immune. A
telltale sign is when municipal politicians—tasked with mundane duties
such as sanitation, transport and zoning—develop an intense interest in
Israel and Jews. Foreign policy is not their domain, yet they import it
into local politics to recast elections in sectarian terms.
Britain offers a clear illustration. Tower Hamlets in London has not adopted sharia.
That’s not the point. It has become a case study in sectarian municipal
politics. The mayor of the London borough, Lutfur Rahman, was removed
in 2015 after a court found corruption, electoral fraud and religious
intimidation. Inspectors described a “toxic” political culture requiring
central oversight.
In Manchester and surrounding boroughs in the
north, councils routinely wade into Middle Eastern politics through
Israel-related motions and boycott campaigns. These are framed as moral
stances. In reality, they are loyalty signals. Birmingham and Bradford
have seen school governance controversies, debates over segregation and
community influence shaping policy. Not sharia law, yet clearly ideological contestation expressed through local institutions.
