INTRODUCTION

The Indonesian Anti-Terrorism Agency (Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terorisme, or BNPT) argues that Islamist terrorists had previously focused on “hard power”, such as bombings of Western-related targets, or suicide bombings, to attain their objectives. But in recent years, due to state repression and dwindling public support, terrorists have abandoned this strategy, and now resort instead to “soft power”. Soft power here refers to the use of non-violent means to achieve one’s interests. Terrorists now use the Internet, including social media, or join community organizations which they utilize later on, to gain support for their cause. Be that as it may, the Internet has become a strategic tool not only for terrorists but for radical Muslims as well, who use it to disseminate their intolerant ideas of Islam. While terrorists use and advocate violence, radical Muslims promote non-violent religious extremism.

Between January and December 2022, BNPT identified some 600 social media accounts and websites that promoted religious radicalism. In that period, these websites and social media accounts posted more than 900 pieces with radical content, including expressions of intolerance and takfiri (the act of labelling others as apostates). The agency also found almost the same number of websites and social media accounts in the previous year.

Our research examines the role of moderate Muslim media websites in battling against Islamic online extremism. The NU Online, Islami.co, and IBTimes.id are affiliated with the two largest Muslim organizations in Indonesia (Nadhlatul Ulama [NU] and Muhammadiyah). These are among the most popular moderate Muslim media websites in Indonesia. This article looks at the websites’ effectiveness in battling online religious extremism. It also examines the challenges they face in dealing with religious extremism and how they have weathered those challenges. We argue that their efforts have not been very effective. This is due to structural and cultural problems impeding the websites’ operations. Two major challenges faced are limited funding for the outlets, as well as these outlets’ failure to connect with the urban young.

Many Indonesians, especially youth and students, seek knowledge, including learning about Islam, from the Internet, and many do so from radical social media accounts and websites.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • It is worrying that, in many cases in Indonesia, exposure to the Internet, especially social media, increases knowledge seekers’ religious radicalism. This exposure has not only resulted in increased radicalism but also compelled some individuals to turn to violence in the name of Islam.

• • Moderate online media institutions have not been effective in counteracting the online dissemination of extremist religious content. The content disseminated by radical websites is still being popularly consumed, albeit those moderate Muslim websites have put in considerable effort to counteract radical narratives.

• • This report argues that this ineffectiveness is due to structural and cultural challenges. The structural challenges include limited funding and sensitivity towards the policy of umbrella organizations. Cultural challenges include passiveness in corporate culture, alongside the “ivory tower” traditions among journalists which leaves them out of touch with Muslim communities.

• • The government of Indonesia can assist moderate Muslim media websites in fighting radical narratives, for example, through better funding to them.

Due to its strategic location, maritime Southeast Asia serves as an economic hub that connects the East and the West, with the Straits of Malacca serving as an important route for business access. Maritime Southeast Asia remains essential today, if not more significant, as the economies within the region continue to grow faster than many other regions in the world. Its strategic location and the advancement of its combined economy make the region a premiere meeting point, offline and online, for many people worldwide as more people look for investment opportunities and leisure activities in more prosperous Southeast Asia.

Apart from its economic and strategic positioning, maritime Southeast Asia is a significant area for analysis as the region also serves as a hub for the cross-pollination of ideas. During the Cold war period (1945–91), Southeast Asia became the battleground for the forces of neo-liberal capitalism and communism. But an equally interesting scope of scholarly interest is the development and exchange of religious ideas, particularly concerning Islam. Azra’s (2004) study The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, among others, remain one of the most important contributions capturing the network of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Maritime Southeast Asia is home to the largest Muslim society in the world, namely Indonesia. Eighty-nine per cent of its 281 million people are Muslims. However, the community is not homogenous, depending on where they live, and the extent to which they immerse cultural and ethnic influences into their religious life. Some would reckon that the country is also changing, from one that was referred to as the smiling face of Islam to one that is currently experiencing a conservative turn (Van Bruinessen 2013; Feillard and Madinier 2011); or a hotbed of political Islam and radicalism (Ayoob 2008).

Maritime Southeast Asia is also home to the relatively homogenous and traditional Islamic polity of Brunei Darussalam, which ties the concept of the monarchy to Islam and Malay culture. Based on its 2021 census, Brunei has a population of 333,600 citizens, 89 per cent of which are Malays (Department of Economic Planning and Statistics, Brunei 2023).

Internet-based schisms within the most prominent Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), have been a subject of interest among scholars, particularly between two factions: NU Garis Lurus (NU Straight Brigade) (Iqbal 2020) and NU Garis Lucu (NU Funny Brigade) (Hoesterey 2021). In the 2015 NU congress held in Jombang, East Java province, these social groups competed for power. NU activists who felt that NU was more liberal, established the NU Garis Lurus and campaigned through conservative social media outlets. Their sympathizers ran for NU’s top post, challenging chairman Said Agil Siradj, an NU veteran activist seen to be promoting liberal ideas. Running in the election provided NU Garis Lurus with a platform to increase its influence within the organization. Through the media, they expressed a barrage of criticism that NU leaders had given in to Western ideas of secularism, pluralism, and liberalism (SEPILIS) (Rohman 2020, pp. 269–71).

Alarmed by NU Garis Lurus’ influence, the NU liberal camp fought back. Young activists at NU established the NU Garis Lucu, a social media community that “used satire and humour to temper the accusations of NU Garis Lurus and to mobilise social media as a uniting force within Nahdlatul Ulama and Indonesia more broadly” (Hoesterey 2021, p. 85). These youth activists demonstrated that the anti-NU Garis Lurus movement did not represent NU’s structure. Hence, the dispute between NU Garis Lurus and NU Garis Lucu is not a social dispute that pits “structural NU” against “cultural NU”; rather, the dispute is an internal schism among the different factions within NU. “Structural NU” refers to a group of NU activists whose members assume formal positions in NU’s organizational structure and who are therefore influential among NU members. On the other hand, “cultural NU” refers to a group of NU activists who do not assume formal positions in NU’s organizational structure, but they wield considerable influence among NU members due to their expertise in Islam or their exemplary behaviour.

These kinds of discourse contestations among different camps within NU are old contestations that are translated, emphasized, and amplified through new platforms such as social media, in addition to mainstream media. This internal contestation is not novel in NU. Political schisms are not unusual and are most evident during the NU congress which is held every five years. One notable schism occurred ahead of the 1984 congress.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • Various motivations underlying terrorism uncovered by recent scholarship include the radicals’ desire for Muslim unity, political interest, yearning to correct social and economic deprivation in the Muslim world, and simply anti-Westernism.

• • This article focuses on the radicals’ call for Muslim solidarity and how this tends towards becoming their primary motivation for perpetrating terrorism. It discusses how radical groups and individuals exaggerate the perceived oppression of Muslims worldwide and how this encourages their sympathizers in planning, fundraising and/or executing terrorist attacks.

• • The so-called ummah solidarity discourse is coupled with the prevalence of the dogma that Muslims are targets of Western or foreign oppression. This has legitimized jihadist terrorists’ use of violence and facilitated the recruitment of new terrorists.

• • Besides regular crackdowns on terrorists and putting limitations on access to radical websites and other Internet sources, this article contends that the Indonesian security apparatuses and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must work with the embassies from India, China and Myanmar based in Jakarta to nullify any likelihood of terror attacks on their embassy compounds or their citizens.

INTRODUCTION

Existing scholarship on terrorism has pointed out various motives underlying violent acts. Notably, Kruglanski, Bélanger, and Gunaratna (2019) argue that such intent could stem from perpetrators’ unfulfilled basic needs, their exposure to violent and extremist narratives since they were young, and the outreach by terrorist networks to them. Additionally, an insightful study by Putra and Sukabdi (2013, p. 84) provides a more region-specific example. Through conducting in-depth interviews with forty religious terror activists in Indonesia, they identified three prevalent motivations for violence: (1) the perception of Indonesia being in a state of war, thus legitimizing defensive actions; (2) the belief in the nobility of suicide bombing; and (3) the view of the West (as a whole) as an invader of Muslim countries and a representative of evil, with the Indonesian government being seen as its corrupt ally.

Mufid et al. contest the notion that poverty and social inequality are the sole drivers of terrorism, positing instead that the confluence of structural factors at the global, national, and subnational levels is what leads to such acts. Based on their study involving 110 terror perpetrators, Mufid et al. suggest that perceived structural factors, such as the West's domination of the global economy and politics, along with its military intervention in Arab countries, provoked the terrorists to act (Mufid et al. in Sukabdi 2021, p. 4). Mufid et al. further classify the terrorists’ motivations into five distinct categories: (1) religious-ideological; (2) solidarity-driven [individuals participate in the acts of terrorism to express sympathy for fellow believers whom they perceive as victims of conflict]; (3) separatist [the terrorist's desire to establish an Islamic state]; (4) “mob mentality” [spontaneous acts of terrorism]; and (5) situational [referring to, for example, individuals convicted of terrorism charges due to associations with others].

This article focuses on the role of ummah solidarity [or Muslim community solidarity], as a motivation for terrorism. According to Mufid et al., 20 per cent of their 110 respondents admitted to engaging in acts of terrorism driven by this sense of community solidarity (Mufid et al. in Sukabdi 2021, p. 4). This motivation is only surpassed by ideological and religious motives, which were cited by 45.5 per cent of respondents. Other motives were: mob mentality (12.7 per cent), revenge-seeking (10.9 per cent), situational (9.1 per cent), and separatism (1.8 per cent).

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Choi Shing Kwok

Series Editor:

Ooi Kee Beng

Editorial Committee:

Daljit Singh

Francis E. Hutchinson

Norshahril Saat