Inside Indonesia Book Review: Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion
in Aceh [
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Tapol
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Oct 12, 2009 00:58 PDT
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From Joyo
Inside Indonesia
Issue 97: July-Sept 2009
[This report published
October 10, 2009]
Islam and Nation
Review: Edward Aspinall’s ambitious study of the Acehnese
rebellion provides valuable insights into this complex conflict
Reviewed by Steven Drakeley
Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia.
by Edward Aspinall
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009. 312 pp.
I always invite my students of Southeast Asian politics to
reflect upon the similarities and differences between the
rebellions in Aceh, Patani, and Mindanao. Protracted conflicts
involving rebellions against central governments by Muslims,
they involve complex concepts and questions, including those of
identity (nationalism, ethnicity, and religion) and
state-building in the wake of the decolonisation process.
Brighter students become intrigued by the starkly different
trajectory of the Aceh case, including the ‘puzzling situation’
of ‘how a society famed for its Islamic piety gave rise to a
guerrilla movement that ended up rejecting the Islamic goals of
its forebears’, as the cover blurb of this new classic puts it.
My future students will find in Aspinall’s excellent study many
of the answers to the questions raised during their reflection
on the rebellions. They will find much else besides.
Although expressed with characteristic modesty, this is an
ambitious study. Aspinall has set out to provide a balanced and
thorough historical narrative of the Aceh conflict, while
simultaneously discussing the Acehnese case in relation to a
broad array of theoretical debates and comparative studies
associated with Islam, nationalism, civil wars, and internal
conflict. The objective is not merely to employ these
theoretical perspectives as analytical tools to facilitate his
study of Aceh, which he does to great effect. The aim is also to
contribute - through his treatment of the Acehnese case - to the
broader comparative debates. Based on years of painstaking
research, including several hundred interviews conducted in Aceh
as well as in other countries such as Sweden and Malaysia, this
study succeeds in attaining its lofty aims. In the process
Aspinall has delivered an abundance of important insights,
packaged into a sustained and subtle series of interconnected
arguments elegantly presented which add greatly to our
understanding of the conflict in Aceh and to its apparent
resolution.
Amongst his key findings, Aspinall shows how a series of
contingent circumstances and some specific decisions by key
individuals led logically (but certainly not inexorably) to the
re-emergence of an Acehnese rebellion in 1976 in a separatist
and nationalist form as GAM (the Free Aceh Movement); rather
than reviving as something along the lines of its earlier
Islamist form (despite the strong family links between Darul
Islam and GAM participants). He goes on to persuasively explain
how the intrinsic logic of GAM’s goal of an independent nation
state compelled the construction of a nationalist narrative and
an Acehnese identity sharply differentiated from Indonesia.
Combined with other factors, including its internationalist
strategy and certain sociological changes, this propelled GAM
further in a nationalist and secularist direction. Later the
same factors, combined with shifts in the political context,
notably the collapse of the Suharto regime, propelled GAM
towards adopting a democracy and human rights discourse.
Paradoxically, at first glance, Aspinall goes on to show how
‘some of the ingredients that had helped GAM’s growth as a
nationalist insurgency also proved critical to its decision to
abandon the independence goal’.
There is much more for those interested in the Aceh conflict,
including sophisticated and unromanticised analyses of GAM’s
(relative) success as an insurgency, and of its
multi-dimensional nature including its sometimes ambiguous
relationships with the state apparatus. The book also succeeds
admirably on its comparative studies level, sustaining a rich
and fruitful dynamic between the particulars of the Acehnese
context and ‘wider theories about nationalism, its relations
with religion and about civil war’. Those interested in these
wider questions rather than in Aceh per se will surely find this
work equally rewarding.
I took (only) this book with me to read on a recent short visit
to Aceh, my first since 1978. Quite apart from the book’s
intellectual worth, I am immensely grateful to its author for
providing such a ‘page turner’ for the flights and airport
waiting - not a comment that can often be made about academic
studies. ii
Steven Drakeley (S.Dra-@uws.edu.au) is a lecturer in Asian
and International Studies in the School of Humanities and
Languages at the University of Western Sydney.
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