Religious Violence and Conciliation in Indonesia

Abstract

Religious Violence and Conciliation in Indonesia: Christians and Muslims in the Moluccas. By Sumanto Al Qurtuby. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2016. Hardcover: 215pp. Between 1999 and 2001, rival ethnic and religious communities fought violent conflicts in five Indonesian provinces which led to large-scale loss of life, displacement and destruction. In the decade and a half since then, a series of in-depth quality academic studies have given us a good understanding of the causes and dynamics of most of these conflicts. However, among these conflicts the one in Maluku Province--perhaps the most severe of the five--has been relatively understudied. With Religious Violence and Conciliation in Indonesia, Sumanto Al Qurtuby has done an excellent job of helping to fill that gap. Indeed, he has written one of the best studies of the Maluku conflict. By synthesising previous literature and adding new insights from his own extensive fieldwork among both Muslims and Christians in Maluku, Al Qurtuby provides a detailed account of the origins, distinctive evolution and resolution of the conflict. Much of the book is riveting, containing new and important information which will be very useful for scholars of Indonesia, conflict, peacebuilding and religion. One main focus is on the role of religion--"religious networks, organizations, discourses, and practices" (p. 5)--in provoking the violence and in facilitating its end. Unlike many polemical studies which see religion as either all important or irrelevant to conflict, Al Qurtuby takes a nuanced and healthily sceptical approach to his analysis. Chapter One provides a dramatic account of the early stages of the fighting and its rapid spread to the villages and islands outside Ambon City. The author vividly illustrates the various roles of important actors in the conflict, particularly in the way they used religious scripture and doctrine to first justify the violence and then to end it. The author provides a detailed comparative discussion of the use of religious scripture and concepts of jihad and holy war by Muslim and Christian leaders which this reviewer has not seen in any other study. He shows how local Muslim leaders saw and framed the conflict as jihad from its earliest days, well before the entry of the Java-based Laskar Jihad. Yet the arrival of that militia and others such as Laskar Mujahidin brought the ideas of Sayyid Qutb and other Salafi scholars into the conflict. Grasping the exact role of religion in facilitating collective violence is one of the most challenging tasks for a scholar of religious conflicts, but Al Qurtuby pulls it off admirably. There is fascinating new information throughout the discussion of all phases of the conflict. The author finds that local fighters lost enthusiasm for the conflict once they realized they were being manipulated by those in power, surely a hypothesis worth testing against other cases. …