The “Glocalized” Origins of the Darul Islam Counterculture

Abstract

This chapter sets the context for the Indonesian case study by analyzing the origins and nature of Islam as it first emerged within the particular socioecological and political environment of seventh-century Arabia. It traces Islam’s arrival and spread throughout Southeast Asia particularly from the late thirteenth century onward, in the process becoming glocalized and developing two broad regional strains of Islams, so to speak. The first strain, deeply influenced by South Asian Sufism, was a largely tolerant traditionalist Islam, characterized – in Hofstedian terms – by collectivism, large power distance, and weak uncertainty avoidance. The second strain emerged from Middle Eastern modernist currents that displayed three conceptually distinct yet frequently commingled tendencies or orientations: a puritanical Wahhabism, a mimetically driven Salafism, and a politically activist Islamism. These modernist tendencies, while themselves indigenized to some degree within the Indonesian islands, nevertheless on balance retained – as in the Middle East – the traits of collectivism, large power distance, and relatively strong uncertainty avoidance. Southeast Asian – and Javanese – Islam is consequently not at all monolithic but diverse and richly textured. It is from such a complex glocalized Indonesian Islamic milieu that the tight Darul Islam Counterculture eventually emerged. This comprised certain iconic historical figures and institutions that formed the cognitively radical social mix which in turn berthed the Darul Islam Charismatic Group – the complex, self-organizing, and adaptive superorganism that ultimately spun off the violent, cognitively extremist cells that have captured today’s headlines.