(Jakarta, 27 April 2016) The convergence of a non-violent hardline campaign against Shi’ism with a new determination of pro-ISIS groups to wage war at home is increasing the possibility of violent attacks on Indonesia’s Shi’a minority.
The Anti-Shi’a Movement in Indonesia, the latest report from the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), examines the history of anti-Shi’a movement in Indonesia and the reasons for its newfound intensity. Three distinct groups are involved: Saudi-oriented Salafis who see Shi’ism as a deviant sect; a conservative fringe of the large Muslim social organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) that is worried about competition from Shi’a schools, especially in East Java; and those influenced by ISIS propaganda that Shi’a are enemies who must be killed. The last is by far the smallest but several anti-Shi’a plots have already been foiled by police.
B. Saudi Arabia and the Salafis in the 1980s
At the same time that the Iranian revolution was causing concern in government circles, it was triggering a reaction in Saudi-supported Salafi circles. Chief among the Salafi-Influenced groups was Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII), an organisation established in 1967 by Muhammad Natsir, the former leader of Masyumi. DDII’s link to Saudi was clear: it served as the Indonesian representative of Rabitah Alam Islami (World Muslim League), the Mecca-based organisation dedicated to strengthening Saudi Arabia’s cultural and religious influence in the Muslim world through the propagation of Wahhabism.39
DDII’s da’wah agenda was related as much to Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical interests as to the local context. In the 1960s and 1970s when the Saudi leadership was preoccupied with curtailing the in uence of Gamal Abdul Nasser’s “Arab Socialism”, DDII focused on combating Commu- nism in Indonesia, just as Soeharto was purging the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).40 Once Nasserism failed, the Iranian revolution threatened Saudi Arabia’s supremacy as the leader of the Islamic world. The Saudi government began to use various charity organisations to curtail Iranian influence by supporting anti-Shia campaigns, and DDII soon adopted this agenda. One scholar writes:
No doubt encouraged by their Saudi and Kuwaiti sponsors,[DDII] polemicized against Shi’ism as a fatal deviation from Islam and published an unending series of anti-Shi’a tracts and books. Their activities appeared to be focused increasingly on perceived threats: threats from within (Shi’a, Islamic liberalism) as well as threats from without: the Christian and Jewish threats to the world of Islam.41
In 1982, DDII’s monthly magazine, Media Dakwah, published what appears to be its first anti-Iran/anti-Shi’a article entitled “Iran Ready to Wage Ideological Invasion”. In explaining the threat of Khomeini’s Shi’ism to Muslim countries, the article argued that the imamah doctrine propagated by Khomeini entailed an expansionist ambition to “conquer the entire Islamic world [and] rule over the entire 900-million population of Muslims in the world”.42
The anti-Shi’a campaign during this period was characterised by intellectual challenges to Shi’a doctrines, often by distorting them in a way designed to incite fear and hatred among Sunnis. The focus on the imminent danger of revolution may have reflected Saudi support, but it was also a way that DDII could present itself as a “friend” of the government in the context of Soeharto’s wariness of Islamic movements. DDII was established as a non-political movement precisely to avoid the fate of its predecessor, the Masyumi party. The 1990s saw the campaign change into more direct political lobbying for a ban on Shi’ism.
