The End of Innocence

These two French authors, one based in Paris and one based in Jakarta, have assembled a deceptively good book on the question of radical Islam in Indonesia. Originally published in French by the Institut de Recherche sur l’Asie du Sud-Est Contemporaire in 2006 under the title La fin de l’innocence, this translation is also a serious extension of the book, especially in the last two chapters. The book is deceptive precisely because its important revisions and new ideas are not as visible in the earlier chapters. The authors start from a very problematic question, almost a ‘what went wrong’ for Indonesian Islam: they set up their introduction with the surprise of international observers as radical Islam managed to ‘transform the spice islands to a hotbed of jihad’ (p. 1) in the late 1990s transition to democracy. For most close observers of Indonesian Islam, this is the wrong way to approach religion in the archipelago, but many looking with a comparative or policy lens might seek an explanation as to how Indonesia reached the Muslim-driven violence around 2000, and the first three chapters of the book do an admirable job answering this problem on its own terms. Relying on published literature (frequent references to Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia [Princeton, NJ: 2000], Adam Schwarz, A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability [Boulder, CO: 2000], and the International Crisis Group reports are striking) for these early chapters, the authors carefully unpack the known history of many radical groups

Democracy · Democratization · Indonesian · Innocence · Islam · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Radicalization · Sociology · Terrorism · Theology · Asian Studies and History · Islamic Studies and Radicalism · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious Studies