By Sadanand Dhume

As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in comparing Indonesia to Morocco: “In Indonesia Islam did not construct a civilization, it appropriated one.”

In India, a strain of Islamic orthodoxy was sometimes in open conflict with Hinduism. But in Indonesia, the new faith sat comfortably atop a Hindu-Buddhist past. Like most Indians, and unlike the Arabs, most Indonesians continued to believe that there are many paths to God. Indeed, until recently, Indonesian Islam – steeped in a culture of music and mysticism – was synonymous with tolerance. By and large, the one-in-eight Indonesians who are Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Animist, rarely faced discrimination, much less religious violence.

Most strikingly, Indonesians did not confuse being Muslim with being Arab. Their national airline is named Garuda. The national epic is the Mahabharata. In Bahasa Indonesia, the word for heaven is surga, the word for hell neraka.

But this culture of pluralism and tolerance can no longer be taken for granted. Today, Indonesia is struggling to cope with the same conflict between moderate and radical Islam that has ripped apart Muslim communities from Morocco to Mindanao. Radical Muslims, those who seek to order every aspect of society and the state – from burqas to banking – by the medieval dictates of sharia law remain in the minority, but their numbers are growing. Moreover, these believers make up for numbers with zeal, organization and the conviction that history is on their side.

For Indians the drama unfolding in Indonesia is especially urgent because the conflict there is as much cultural as political, a battle between a native, deeply Indicized Islam and a strident Arab import. Over the past 30 years, Arab names have gradually edged out Sanskrit ones in kindergartens. Headscarves have mushroomed on college campuses. In offices, the greeting assalamu alaikum has become an alternative to the religiously neutral selamat pagi, or good morning. The traditional tiered-roof Javanese mosque has given way to the ubiquitous onion dome. For the first time, a generation of Javanese children is growing up unfamiliar with Arjuna and Bhima from the Mahabharata.

The political consequences of this broad cultural shift are already apparent. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s ruling coalition includes the Prosperous Justice Party, a highly disciplined cadre-based organization whose roots can be traced to the banned Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. In recent years, a demand that Indonesian Muslims follow sharia law has resurfaced.

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