The Straits Times, Monday, March 6, 2006
Burden of being married to a jihadist
Noor Huda Ismail , For The Straits Times
BARCELONA - LAST year, I was invited to a monthly discussion at the Khadijah
Mosque, one of the most active mosques in Singapore. Half of the audience
comprised female religious teachers who give religious counselling to, and help in the
rehabilitation of, the families of Jemaah Islamiah (JI) detainees.
One woman expressed concern that very little attention had been paid to
understanding the role of wo! men in the terrorist group.
She was right. Our knowledge is limited.
But after the arrests - in two separate cases late last year and this February - of five
women who have recently been charged with smuggling bomb detonators and
explosive materials from Malaysia into Indonesia, the Indonesian police are gaining a
better understanding.
'Our investigations into these two cases show that terrorist groups are likely to be
using women to assist them,' National Police spokesman Brigadier-General Anton
Bachrul Alam was quoted as saying by the Jakarta Post.
One of the most common ways women have come to join the group is through
marriage. Sometimes, they marry known jihadists to provide support at home. And
som! etimes, they marry and work alongside their husbands.
The classic example is that of the Al-Qaeda point man in South-east Asia, Hambali,
now in custody. Hambali married Noralwizah Lee Abdullah, whose father is Malay and
mother a Chinese who converted from Buddhism to Islam.
Like her husband, Lee would eventually also be known by several aliases, such as
Acang, Lee Yen Lan and Awi. She was actively involved in the recruitment of women
to the group.
The pair met in the early 1990s in one of the small women corps under the tutelage of
JI founders. She was in one such group when Hambali came to a meeting.
My interviews with one of the lecturers in that circle revealed that one topic of the
lecture was Women A! nd Jihad. Lee was eventually arrested with her husband in
Ayutthaya, Thailand, in 2003.
Next on the list would be Omar al-Faruq, an Al-Qaeda representative in South-east
Asia, who married Mira Agustina, the daughter of Haris Fadhilah. Fadhilah was a
hardcore Darul Islam militia leader who fought and died in Ambon.
In this case, it was an arranged marriage between a jihadist and the daughter of a
jihadist.
A Spanish security analyst here in Barcelona told me that Parlindungan Siregar, an
Indonesian national who studied at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1987, had
gone to Poso to run military training classes. To give his operation a greater chance of
success, Siregar married the daughter of an Indonesian who had fought in
Afghanistan, Omar Bandon. Siregar is a frien! d of Abu Dahdah, the head of Al-Qaeda
in Spain.
Mr Ken Conboy, in his book The Second Front, meticulously cited Indonesia's
intelligence body BIN's report that a Melbourne resident, Jack Terrence Thomas (alias
Jihad Thomas alias Abu Khair Ismail), married the daughter of a retired Indonesian
police officer in Makassar. The Australian authorities believed that Thomas had
ventured into Kandahar for paramilitary instruction in mid-2001. The fact that he
married the daughter of a police officer was to maximise connections.
JI leader Noordin Mohd Top married a girl from Riau who is a sister of Muhammad
Rais, a JI member who was arrested by Indonesian police just a couple of months
before the Marriott Hotel attack in Jakarta. The stoic Rais studied at the Ngruki
Islamic boarding school, my alma mater.
During a break from his destructive planning, Noordin laid low while casting for new
targets. Surprisingly, during that time, he married his second wife, Munfiatun Al Fitri,
at a secret ceremony arranged by JI members in Surabaya in 2004. Al Fitri graduated
with a degree in agriculture from Brawijawa University in Malang, East Java, and
taught Arabic at Pondok Pesantren Miftahul Huda, Subang, West Java.
One may be curious as to whether there is any example of women's participation in
war in classical Islamic history. I found fascinating the story of women from the time
of Prophet Muhammad who fought in his wars, cited in a brief treatise, Manaqib al
sahabiyyat (the English title of which is The Merits Of The Women Companions Of
The Prophet Muhammad).
The treatise was written by the 13th-century Muslim moralist Abd al G! hani bin Abd
al Wahid al Maqdisi.
Al Ghani wrote that a woman called Nusayba was said to have gone out to help the
wounded during the Battle of Uhud (626), but then took up sword and sustained 12
wounds. She was quoted as saying that there were four women with her. She took up
the sword; another, who was pregnant, had a knife, and they fought alongside the
men.
In the same vein, modern feminist Aliyya Mustafa Mubarok, in her collection
Sahabiyat Mujahidat (The Fighters Of Women Companions Of The Prophet
Muhammad), has gathered a list of 67 women who, according to her, fought in the
wars. But the women fought under legal order from authorised religious figures such
as Prophet Muhammad himself or the caliphates, against foreign occupation of their
countries.
I wonder, today! , what the justification is in Indonesia for women to partake in
violence, since it isn't under any threat or foreign occupation. For the Quranic
injunction is: 'Do not transgress: truly God does not love the transgressor', while the
Prophet says: 'None of you believe until you love for your neighbours what you love for
yourself.' It is only by distorting and abandoning Islam's true teachings that anyone
can kill innocent civilians. Moreover, Muslims clearly are the biggest victims of this
terror. In fact, Muslims are killing Muslims.
Silhouetted against lush paddy fields in Cigarung village in West Java in mid-2005, the
son of Heri Golun, the suicide bomber who attacked the Australian Embassy in
Jakarta in September 2004, cuddled me. He is a sweet baby boy. I can't imagine what
his mother is going to tell him in the future about his father.
Now that the husband is gone, she is carrying the burden of shame. What a life.
Noor Huda Ismail is a postgraduate student in international security studies at St
Andrews University in Scotland. He can be reached at noorhudaismail@yahoo.com
Copyright © 2004 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reversed.
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