That in itself is highly ahistorical. Yes, some conflicts would remain, but it is a fact that movements like Islamicism emanate from their points of origin and make efforts to indoctrinate and recruit. The main point of origin is the Middle East.......
What is “Islamicism”?
If you mean that Islam originated from the Middle East and spread to SE Asia, that is correct, but that happened in the 12th and 13th centuries. Modern SE Asian Islamic radicalism did not spread from the Middle East, it evolved in response to local conditions in Indonesia and the Philippines. When the nascent Islamic radicalism of SE Asia encountered the growing radical movements of the Middle East in the 1970s the two developed a certain amount of linkage and cooperation, which has continued. It would be completely incorrect, though, to describe SE Asian Islamic radicalism as some sort of contagion that spread from the Middle East.
If you want to trace the development of Islamic radicalism and politicized Islam in Indonesia, you go back to the Darul Islam rebellion in 1948, in which Islam emerged as a unifying factor in the struggle against Dutch colonial rule. In the Philippines you could go back to 1566, when Miguel de Legaspi arrived with instructions to kill or convert every Mohammedan he could get his hands on, though it might be more practical to start in 1946, when a Muslim region with strong cultural and economic ties was arbitrarily merged with a traditionally hostile Christian political entity to the north.
I don’t see what’s “ahistorical” about any of that, nor do I see how anyone could claim that these events were consequences of anything that happened in the Middle East.
Some Americans, mainly those who haven't bothered to learn about the history of and conditions in SE Asia, have tried to portray the Islamic radical movement there as a dependent offshoot of the Middle Eastern Islamic radical movement, even to the extent of describing prominent groups as Al Qaeda "cells". It's an argument based on ignorance, and contributes nothing to the search for a reasonable approach to the very thorny problem of managing terrorism in SE Asia. |
