Time Asia Magazine, Monday, March 3, 2003
A Jihadi's Tale
What drives so many Muslims to find peace in a holy war? Andrew Marshall seeks to
understand the path taken by an Indonesian cleric
KEMAL JUFRI/IMAJI PRESS FOR TIME
[Photo: Long Road: Habib's spiritual journey converted him from playboy to cleric]
Habib Abdurrahman bin Ismail serves coffee in tiny cups etched with Arabic
blessings, coffee so strongly perfumed that perhaps it liberates a memory, because
soon Habib is talking about his Afghan war and about how a man smells just before
he dies. "It was the strangest thing," he says, recalling a bloody firefight at
Mahmud-e-Raqi, a town northeast of Kabul. "If a Muslim brother was about to be
martyred, even before the bullet hit him, he would smell wonderful, like dupa [an
Indonesian incense]. Then we knew death was close."
"And after the bullet hit him?"
Habib's kohl-rimmed eyes fill abruptly with tears: "The smell grew stronger."
Today death is far away. Shaded by rambutan trees, Habib and I sit on the veranda of
his neat, one-story house in Parung, a 90-minute drive from Jakarta. Habib, 42, who
dresses in Middle Eastern robes and turban, with his straggly beard authoritatively
flecked with gray, left his native Indonesia in 1986 to spend five years fighting with the
Afghan mujahedin against Soviet forces. Jihad, he tells me, "is probably in my
genes."
I had sought out Habib to better understand what propelled him down the turbulent
path to radical Islam. In many ways his is not a typical jihadi's tale. Fundamentalists
are born into poverty, we're told, or raised in strict religious environments, while
Habib's background was neither. Habib was raised as a Muslim, yes, but he was also
a son, a student, a businessman, a driver of fast cars and a fan of Western rock
before experiencing an epiphany that sharpened his sense of his Islamic self and set
him on the road to jihad. Now a cleric who preaches about obeying the Koran and
following the Sunna, the customs of the Prophet Muhammad, Habib is secure in his
belief that his Islam is the one and true faith. But beyond that, he does not see the
world in the stark, apocalyptic terms we've come to associate with a jihadi; he is no
longer waging a battle to the death against infidels. Yet Habib's peripatetic life helps
explain the visceral appeal of jihad to some Asian Muslims—at a time when many
Muslims perceive their faith to be under threat by the U.S.-led war on terror, and
especially with another Gulf War looming. What was it that persuaded Habib, like so
many Asian Muslims before and after him, to fight to defend Islam before he could call
himself a true Muslim?
Certainly his pedigree is impeccable. Habib claims direct descent from the Prophet
Muhammad himself by way of a Yemeni missionary who settled in Indonesia 13
generations ago. One of Habib's 17th century ancestors raised a 9,000-strong army of
holy warriors to avenge Dutch colonial atrocities in the Maluku Islands. Family history
repeated itself. At the end of the 20th century, Habib would also become the
self-styled commander of his own paramilitary force, called Laskar Jundullah, or Army
of Allah, with hundreds of troops recruited and trained personally by him to fight
Christians—again, in the Malukus. (It is unrelated to the Sulawesi-based Laskar
Jundullah whose alleged co-founder Agus Dwikarna, a convicted terrorist, is in jail in
Manila for possessing explosives.)
Yet spending time with Habib can make him seem paradoxical about his faith—like
when I tell him which Jakarta hotel I'm staying at. "That's near the Pink Panther Club,"
he remarks. "You know it?" I didn't, but he did, along with every other nightclub in
Indonesia's notoriously hard-partying capital. That's how I find out that Habib
Abdurrahman bin Ismail was once a big-time playboy. Later he produces a photo
album that dramatically illustrates the before and the after. Its last pages show him
standing with two of Indonesia's best-known Islamic extremists, one of whom served a
10-year jail sentence for the 1985 bombing of the Buddhist temple of Borobudur, and
was now guarded by Habib's troops. Its opening pages hold a photo of a much
younger Habib, with long hair and a rakish moustache, sprawling in T shirt and jeans
across the hood of a large, red automobile. "Mercedes-Benz, a 1971 model," explains
Habib fondly. "I love European cars."
What caused such a transformation? The son of a bureaucrat, Habib was studying
business at a Jakarta university when, as he tells it, a "miracle" happened. But then
those were miraculous times. Habib's formative student years coincided with the
Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, two hugely influential events
that gave Muslims from Morocco to Mindanao a new sense of both power and
victimization and signaled the birth of Islamic radicalism as we know it today.
Habib starts to tell the story of his journey into radical Islam, but first—another jarring
note—his housekeeper arrives with his smokes. "Aha!" he cries, relishing my obvious
surprise as he slowly peels the cellophane from a fresh packet of Marlboros. "You can
write it all down in your little notebook: ŒHabib ... smokes ... American ...
cigarettes.'"
Then the jihadi lights up and, amid richly competing aromas—Arabian coffee and
American tobacco—starts again.
It begins after midday prayers at Al-Azhar mosque in south Jakarta, with a young
student—long hair, blue jeans, moustache—being confronted by an Indonesian man
some 12 years his senior seeking recruits for the war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan. "What are you doing while your brothers are being slaughtered?" the
man reproaches him. "Don't call yourself a Muslim until you do something meaningful
for Islam." Habib becomes furious, thinking, "ŒHow dare he talk to me that way?' I
come from a religious background!" It is the mid-1980s, and Habib has just met the
man who will alter the course of his life.
Habib's background is indeed religious, but not austerely so. His grandfather was a
pious man who had visited many Muslim countries as the captain of a German-owned
merchant ship, and who lived to the age of 97—just long enough to teach his grandson
some first words of Arabic. Habib's late father made him recite a portion of the Koran
each evening until the boy knew most of it by heart. When he was 10, Habib
accompanied his father on the hajj. It was the same year a fanatic attacked the holy
Kaaba, and with the atmosphere among the pilgrims particularly tense, Habib stuck
close to his father's side. "I remember walking through the market, hearing him talk
Arabic for the first time," he recalls. The rest was a blur of relatives—doting Arabs who
boasted the same name as the Indonesian boy and the same illustrious bloodline. For
the first time Habib became aware of his place in a larger Muslim world.
Though born in Ambon, Habib grew up in Jakarta in relative prosperity—"not rich like
Osama," he winks, "but still good." Good enough that his father could buy him a
secondhand Mercedes to tool around town after he enrolled in a business course at a
private university. He also taught himself guitar. "This is Indonesia!" he cries. "You're
not a man if you don't play the guitar." Or if you didn't dance: at that time the film
Grease ruled cinemas across the globe. "Those were the John Travolta days," says
Habib.
But his Travolta days were numbered. In 1979 the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran was
deposed and Ayatullah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran to proclaim an Islamic
republic. For Muslims the world over, the Iranian revolution was an inspirational event
that demonstrated that Islam could reinvent itself into a cleansing, populist force with
the power to topple repressive regimes. "We all loved Khomeini," says Habib. "I had a
big poster of him in my room. I remember my father telling me, ŒKhomeini is a very
brave man for standing up to the Americans.' It was an amazing time. I went to the
Iranian embassy in Jakarta to get free books about Khomeini. The people there asked
me, ŒAre you ShiŒa, then?' And I replied, ŒSure. What the heck?'"
The euphoria didn't last. The same year ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
At home, Islamic opposition to Suharto's rule was growing increasingly violent and
would peak in September 1984, when troops opened fire on Muslim demonstrators at
Tanjung Priok in Jakarta, killing 33 people. In the following years Suharto's security
apparatus snuffed out almost all Muslim agitation and sent many radicals into exile.
Among them was a still obscure Muslim cleric called Abubakar Ba'asyir who later
earned global notoriety as the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the
regional terror outfit believed to be behind the Bali bombings and other atrocities.
Abubakar—who, like Habib, is of Yemeni descent—fled in 1985 to Malaysia, which
would soon become a breeding ground for radical Islamic groups from across the
region.
The seeds of another form of extremism were also sown in these turbulent years.
Saudi Arabia regarded the ShiŒa revolution in Iran as a direct challenge to its
puritanical interpretation of Sunni teaching, known as Wahhabism—the same creed
spouted by Osama bin Laden and other extremists. The Saudi government channeled
millions of petrodollars into a campaign to prevent the spread of ShiŒism worldwide,
especially in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, this campaign included distributing leaflets
condemning any deviation from Wahhabi teaching, building mosques and paying
Indonesian students to attend the hard-line Al-Jamia Al-Islamia University in
Medina—"Wahhabi U.," as Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group's Jakarta
chapter calls it. It is no coincidence that most radical groups in Indonesia today have
ideological affinities with Wahhabism.
The young Habib is not immune to the Islamic fervor of the times, yet dares not
participate even in the comparatively tame Islamic student group on campus. He has
a lot to lose. "The pressure of the Suharto regime on the Islamic community was
huge. I was just a young man who went to discos and movies.
"I had a good life," he recalls. And while he is moved by Afghanistan's plight, he
sneers at news that Muslims from other countries have begun to fight alongside their
Afghan brothers. Why fight someone else's war, he wonders?
Then comes the chance encounter at al-Azhar mosque and Habib feeling that
somehow the spiritual foundations of his secure life have been shaken. The young
student can't sleep, and soon returns to confront the mujahedin recruiter who dared
challenge his Muslim credentials. Instead of debating with the jihadi, he finds himself
unusually desperate to prove his faith to this unsettling newcomer whose Afghan
experience, in the eyes of the younger man, lend him a Sufi-like power and
mysticism. As it dawns on Habib that pedigree alone does not make him a good
Muslim, he finds himself considering an idea he had previously dismissed as "stupid":
fighting in Afghanistan. But is this his true path? First, he prays for a sign. That night,
his globe-trotting grandfather appears to him in a dream and says, "You have my
blessing." Habib rushes to the mosque the next morning to tell the mujahedin
recruiter. Both men burst into tears and then embrace. And that's it: the inner conflict
resolved in a transforming moment, when Habib decides to park his red Mercedes and
walk the path of a born-again Muslim. He leaves for Afghanistan the day after his
exams, telling his tearful parents, "My fate now belongs to God."
For Habib and uncounted hundreds of Southeast Asians, Afghanistan is the ultimate
culture shock: an alien landscape of forbidding mountains, plunging ravines and valley
floors stretching off into shimmering dust; a country so cold in winter that snow falls
waist-deep, and so hot in summer that you don't perspire because the sweat
evaporates as it leaves your pores. The food is bad and sickness inevitable. Yet Habib
finds such hardships inspirational: jihad was never going to be a night out at the Pink
Panther Club. "From beginning to end," he now enthuses, a distant look in his eyes,
"it gripped my heart."
The year is 1986, and 25-year-old Habib is en route to war. He has joined the
Peshawar-based mujahedin faction Jamiat-i-Islami. Here he is lectured on jihad and
taught how to use the AK-47 he bought upon arrival. "It was with me day and night,
like a wife," he recalls. To the west of the city lies the Khyber Pass. Beyond, the front
awaits.
Anyone reporting the war in the 1980s encounters Muslims from across the globe:
Bangladeshis, Lebanese, Chinese Uighurs, Sudanese, Saudi Arabians and even the
occasional Thai or Malaysian. But Indonesians are seldom met, and rarely spotted on
the front line. "We Indonesians were small and physically weak," says Habib. "All we
had was our courage. So very few of us went in the front line. We were cooks or
medical staff, or else we carried ammunition."
During his first bitter Afghan winter, a Soviet missile tears into a Kandahar-bound
truck, part of a convoy carrying mujahedin medicine and food supplies. Fifteen
mujahedin are blown apart. This is the young Habib's first taste of real battle, and he
feels fear and revulsion—and also a new type of sadness not only at the martyrdom of
15 fellow fighters but because he himself has not been martyred. Later he will have
the chance to fight—and to kill. "I'm not proud of doing that," he now says, "but I'm
proud that I did my duty." Despite having Allah on their side, not all of Habib's fellow
jihadis are brave. Some are courageous. But he notices that others, when they are
ordered to stand up and shoot, piss themselves with fear. "We didn't win because of
one or two men," he insists today. "We won because of Allah." In Afghanistan, Habib,
born and bred a Muslim, realizes the true dimensions of that faith. Jihad, a holy war
fought and won by righteous Muslims against godless Soviets, is a purifying ritual,
and he believes he learns of both the brutality of man and the sweetness of Allah. No
experience will ever come close. "Experts still wonder how the mujahedin beat the
Soviets," Habib marvels. "It was because the Soviets fought for rubles, and we fought
for what we believed."
How many Indonesians actually served in Afghanistan? Untold thousands, some
radicals will reply. "A couple of hundred?" ventures Habib, an estimate supported by
several experts. This makes him very rare indeed in a nation of 180 million Muslims.
Habib is exceptional for another reason: he is actually willing to talk. Since the Bali
blasts in October, Indonesian radicals who had once bragged about their mujahedin
experience now refuse to speak of it or deny they've ever been in Afghanistan. Who
can blame them? An arrested Bali attack suspect, Imam Samudra, supposedly honed
his bombmaking skills in the country; another, Ali Ghufron, confessed to meeting bin
Laden while fighting there. Riduan Isamuddin, a.k.a. Hambali, who as head of JI's
Malaysia-Singapore chapter is wanted for terror attacks across the region, is also a
mujahedin veteran.
The last time I see Habib he is leading the evening prayers at the small mosque in a
corner of his walled family compound. His amplified voice booms through the humid
night air, hypnotically repeating God's name until he is almost hoarse with emotion.
When the prayers are over, the congregation disperses and a contented-looking Habib
emerges in flowing white robes, clutching prayer beads and walking with the aid of a
carved wooden stick.
We return to the veranda, where a simple meal of rice, chicken and fiery sambal is
laid on mats before us. Habib removes his turban to reveal damp, thinning hair. He
seems tired. As we eat he talks about corruption and poverty in Indonesia, and by the
time the Arabian coffee arrives his previous air of religious contentment has
evaporated. I belatedly comprehend that though Habib has realized his vocation, he is
not at peace with himself but intensely disillusioned with the world beyond the walls of
his bucolic Parung retreat. And that disillusionment began in 1991, the year he left
Afghanistan.
Empowered by victory over the once mighty Soviets, many foreign jihadis returned
home with dreams of toppling their own repressive governments and, funded by
deep-pocketed Saudis, created their own militant groups. Habib harbored no such
dreams. Fearful of Suharto's pervasive spy network, he spoke of Afghanistan to no
one but his parents. It was as if he had never gone. But he watched with increasing
dismay as Afghanistan descended again into warlordism and chaos. "We got rid of
the Soviets but afterward there was no peace," he mourns. "The Afghans began
fighting each other. I couldn't understand it. I asked myself, 'Is this the true Muslim
way?'"
After five ascetic years in Afghanistan, Habib apparently had little problem fitting back
into Indonesian society—and no qualms about capitalizing on its then booming
economy. But war had killed his inner playboy. He married, became a father and
started a successful business making bags for hajj pilgrims and golfers, then
embarked upon what he depicts as a natural transformation from businessman to
cleric. Dakwah, or proselytizing, had been a familial obligation since his grandfather's
day, and Habib began touring mosques and prayer halls across Indonesia's main
island of Java, preaching about how to lead a truly Islamic life.
His disenchantment survived the long-awaited collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998.
The following years saw a resurgence in Islamic militancy, fomented in part by the
return from exile of radicals such as Abubakar Ba'asyir, while violence between
Muslims and Christians provided Habib with what seemed like an opportunity to wage
another righteous war. Fellow mujahedin veteran Jafar Umar Thalib, the leader of the
now supposedly disbanded paramilitary group Laskar Jihad, sent thousands of his
warriors to exact revenge on Christians for the December 1999 bloodletting at Tobelo
in north Maluku, when at least 500 Muslims were killed and another 10,000 forced to
flee. Inspired (and perhaps envious), Habib assembled Laskar Jundullah, using stirring
tales of his Afghan experience to recruit young men eager to prove their faith—just as
his nameless mentor had done all those years before. Both groups escalated a
conflict that would kill more than 5,000 people and create 500,000 refugees, but Habib
makes no excuses. "If your mother or father are going to be killed," he asks, meaning
fellow Muslims, "do you sit and do nothing?" Habib is reluctant to elaborate on Laskar
Jundullah's bloody record in the Malukus. He admits he fought and killed there, yet
prefers to credit himself—the honorable jihadi—with enforcing Islamic rules of war in a
conflict waged with appalling viciousness by Muslims and Christians alike. He recalls
one episode, when his men urged him to kill an old Christian woman fleeing a torched
village where her entire family had just been burned to death. Habib let her go. "They
asked me, ŒWhy didn't you kill her?' I told them, ŒWe are only at war with the men
with guns,'" he explains proudly. To me, it spoke volumes about the conflict's
brutality—and Laskar Jundullah's murky role in it—that Habib apparently expected
praise for not murdering an old lady. The attempt by mujahedin veterans like Habib
and Jafar to wage a jihad in the Malukus was not just bloody and inconclusive. For
Habib, I sensed, it also somehow cheapened the memory of the war he had fought as
a younger man. When I urge him to compare the Malukus with earlier times, he grows
defensive. "It was not like Afghanistan," he says sadly.
I had once met Jafar Umar Thalib—like Habib, of Yemeni descent—and listened to two
hours of his kill-a-Yankee, win-a-Honda-dream brand of populist militancy. He taught
me nothing about Islam but a lot about hate. Habib was very different. He was not
hate-filled, I realized, but angry. He was angry at what he viewed as the continuing
inability of the world (he meant America) to distinguish between a Muslim and a
terrorist. He was angry that jihad—a word which for him meant camaraderie, sacrifice,
righteousness—had become, because of 9/11 and the Bali attack, synonymous with
criminality. "I went to Afghanistan to defend religion and to help my Muslim brothers,"
he says. "But I also strongly condemn the Bali bombings. What will you call me?" He
shoots me a challenging look. "Am I a fundamentalist? Yes. Am I a radical? I'm not
sure what that means. Am I a terrorist? Absolutely not."
That makes it sound so simple. But no fundamentalist I'd ever met chain-smokes
Marlboros or interrupts his own exegesis on Koranic rules of engagement to ask
suddenly, "You like the Rolling Stones?" Because of the multifaceted life he has led,
Habib is nearly impossible to categorize (and, after many hours in his company,
equally impossible to dislike). He condemns the Bali bombings, sure, yet believes
they were part of a "black campaign" by the U.S. to besmirch Indonesian Muslims
and secure the archipelago as a future American military base. He is no fan of either
Saddam Hussein or the Taliban ("They are not the face of Islam but the face of
arrogance"), yet still regards bin Laden as a "Muslim Che Guevara" whose complicity
in the 9/11 attacks remains unproved. He is proud that most Indonesians reject the
hard-line Wahhabi creed in favor of a more tolerant form of Islam, yet believes the
imposition of ShariŒa law—particularly its more gruesome punishments such as hand
chopping—is the only solution to Indonesia's lawlessness. He is convinced that
Abubakar Ba'asyir is "a good man" wrongly accused, and that JI is yet another U.S.
fabrication.
It is perhaps to avoid such contradictions that Habib doesn't leave his compound very
often these days, not even to see his wife and son who live just an hour or so away by
car. Only here can he persuade himself that Islam is still the rhythm of life, not its
deafening drumbeat or a rallying cry for ambitious politicians or the urban
dispossessed or opponents to the evils of modernization and Westernization. Only
here, with his gardens watered by running streams, can Habib wage his own private
jihad in some kind of peace. "What is the real meaning of jihad?" he asks. "It is a holy
path to Allah's blessing." A bat swoops low through the veranda, plucking an insect
from the striplight. "The war with yourself," he reflects. "That is the hardest." For
Habib Abdurrahman bin Ismail, jihad will never end.
—With reporting by Zamira Loebis/Parung
From the TIME ASIA Magazine issue cover-dated March 10, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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