Twilight in Jakarta

"Yes, he wrote it while under house arrest. A funny thing in retrospect is that the publication was directly funded by the CIA, which he didn’t know at the time. I just love this novel. It’s Balzacian in that it shows a vast cross-section of society, from the very poorest garbagemen to the middle-class bureaucrats who get caught up in the exigencies of corruption, to intellectuals, to the highest elected officials. It’s the whole sweep of the capital city in the early years of the Indonesian Republic, and the book really captured that moment for me. It reads as a great novel even if you don’t know much about Jakarta, but if you do, then it really brings to life some of the vigorous debates they were having at the time about what the nation could and should be—whether communism was a good idea or whether Islam was an appropriate motivating ideology. Lubis brings you right back to that period, the late 50s and early 60s, when people were figuring out what kind of ideas should be the locomotive of this nation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He also captures this climate of fear and suspicion and corrupt motives from right before the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was ousted in a violent CIA-backed coup. It was supposedly an anti-communist coup, but there are a lot of questions that remain about it. I especially love the poorest characters, whose day-to-day lives are perfectly and economically rendered. The novel opens, for instance, with a hungry garbageman smoking his clove cigarette and filling up his whole lungs with deep pleasure, which I inevitably recall the few dozen times a day one sees someone smoking with exactly that feeling in Jakarta today. Mochtar Lubis’s politics were not the same as mine; he was very inimical to communism, which is evident in some of the characterization. But I don’t necessarily care about that when reading a novel like this, which seeks to bring a whole world onto the page, and he does that so well. He would probably have seen that coming. I feel he might have taken it with a bit of sanguinity, because one thing you do take away from this novel is that across all these ideologies, the people who believe in them are so hollow. Everyone is scheming. The people who are pushing Islamism in the book aren’t pious Muslims. The intellectuals come off looking bad too; they just talk, talk, talk, and have no real interest in class analysis or solidarity. I think Mochtar Lubis would have seen some poetic resonance in the fact that both of these regimes hated him. By the time I moved to Jakarta in 2016, the debates that they were having in Twilight in Jakarta had been solidly settled. They did not want communism. In fact, they had a mass killing of up to one million suspected communists in 1965-6. Even today, there’s basically no left in Indonesia. Instead, people did come to a sort of consensus that Islam should be a part of their democracy. This is a somewhat new development that gained momentum after 1998, when the Suharto dictatorship collapsed. Since 1998, there’s been what’s referred to as a ‘conservative turn’ in Indonesia, with the rise of Islamist parties like the Prosperous Justice Party and sharia-inspired regional by-laws, like those mandating hijabs, for example. And there’s a general visibility of Islam in politics that wasn’t really part of Indonesia until this century. In the last presidential election, both candidates flew to Mecca (on private jets) three days before the voting, to broadcast that they were good Muslims. “They had a mass killing of up to one million suspected communists in 1965-6. Even today, there’s basically no left in Indonesia” So my book opens with the biggest Islamist protest ever in Indonesian history, with up to 500,000 people, by some counts, against Ahok, the Chinese-Christian governor of Jakarta. I got swept up in this whole political drama pretty soon after I moved there. It started a couple weeks after I arrived and became one of the big stories that I started covering. The protest was organized by a militia group called the Islamic Defenders Front and in researching the background of the group, I learned that its leader, Habib Rizieq Shihab, had studied in Saudi Arabia . I flagged this at the time as something interesting to follow up on later. While I was looking into the roots of this conservative turn in Indonesia, I also heard a lot about this concept of ‘Arabisasi’ or Arabization. It was this idea held by a lot of Indonesians that Saudi Arabia has somehow corrupted their country and ruined their local Islamic traditions. While intriguing, it was a very vague discourse and there wasn’t a huge amount of empirical stuff I could find to back it up. Then I thought, ‘I’m a journalist, I can answer this question!’ So I started reporting on what Saudi Arabia’s influence actually had been. What I found was so interesting. It was not a nefarious, unilateral, dark money campaign. It was actually this very rich, six decade-long bilateral relationship forged initially between Saudi King Faisal and one of Indonesia’s founding fathers, Mohammad Natsir. They had a strong personal relationship and Saudi money started coming into Indonesia as part of a global 20th century campaign to spread Wahhabi Islam worldwide. This money continued to fund quite a lot of things, like mosques and charities and schools and boarding schools and preachers and scholarships, throughout the Suharto years. By the time the dictatorship collapsed, it had seeded many different kinds of outlets of influence, from Salafi jihadist cells—like one that would later become responsible for the Bali bombings—to Islamist politicians who are not violent, but just want Islam to have a place in politics, to rabble-rousers like Habib Rizieq Shihab. This complicated Saudi influence was so interesting to me that I wrote a lot of articles about it, and reported from Indonesia and neighboring countries. It was a topic of some interest both in Indonesia and in America and so I thought to expand it globally. I found that what had happened in Indonesia had happened in many other countries, too. It was part of this global Saudi proselytization drive in the 20th century, especially in the post-colonial world in Asia and Africa, where a lot of hearts and minds were up for grabs. In absolute terms, Saudi soft power in Indonesia is down. They have not been spending as much money since 9/11 , a state of affairs aggravated by the 2014 oil bust and now this year’s oil price war. But the campaign has had many lasting effects, such as an unusually strong anti-Shia sentiment. Shia Muslims are a tiny minority in Indonesia and anti-Shiism is one of the signature effects of the Saudi campaign worldwide. There’s also an anti-Ahmadiyya movement, targeting another Muslim religious minority. To bring this major issue down to specifics: in the course of my book research, I found a single think-tank, consisting of one person, once funded by a Saudi businessman, who had published 17 polemical books about the Shia and Ahmadiyya in Indonesia, which became somewhat influential and eventually snowballed into some of the violent mob attacks against those communities in the last couple decades. “In the last presidential election, both candidates flew to Mecca (on private jets) three days before the voting, to broadcast that they were good Muslims” Also, personally, I don’t think Salafi jihadism would have found a home in Indonesia were it not for the small network of very committed jihadists who clustered around LIPIA, the Saudi University in Jakarta, and Ngruki, the Saudi-funded boarding school in Central Java, in the 70s and 80s and then, in some cases, also went to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen there. The people in these circles were really instrumental in seeding jihadism in Indonesia, and it was based on personal connections. I don’t think that would have really come together without the Saudi campaign either. I would say day-to-day it’s a much less violent place than anywhere I’ve lived before. It’s not physically confrontational in day-to-day life, I usually felt extremely safe as a girl traveling alone, and compared to America, which is admittedly a low bar, there is almost no gun violence. Especially in Java, people tend even to avoid verbal disagreements. But then there are these startling episodes of mass violence and sometimes mass hysteria—from the anti-communist mass killings to the violence in eastern Indonesia between Muslims and Christians in 1998, to student protests around the same time. The important novelist Eka Kurniawan is of the opinion, which comes through in his work, that Indonesia has these periodic episodes of madness. On the surface level, it can be a very communal, harmony-focused place, but then it builds up to this boiling point and there are episodes of truly awful, bloody violence."