The Arab-Muslim culture that has been brought to Indonesia is doomed.

When foreigners look at the behaviour of conservative Muslims in Indonesia there is sometimes a tendency, when faced with their archaic, paranoid, or irrational attitudes, to pour scorn and ridicule. Perhaps it is better though to go beyond this, to attempt to empathise with such people, and in doing so gain a glimpse into their world, see what fears they have, and maybe see that many of those fears are in fact very real, very here and now, and then we may gain some understanding of the position of traditionalist Muslims in the modern world, and their strange, sometimes violent, behaviour, will not be so hard to fathom.

As news outlets never, ever, tire of saying, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation on earth with about 80% of its 220 million people being classified as Muslim, although probably only about half of these are actually practising Muslims. With such numerical strength how can such people feel so insecure, so threatened, so fearful of the future, how can some among them even resort to the most appalling acts of terror in a desperate defence of their way of life and history?

The traditional culture of Java, its language, customs, and religion are on a proto scrapheap, destined to be swallowed up by the tide of globalisation and American cultural power. This is what motivates the fear and loathing of the west and America in the minds of conservative Islamic figures in Indonesia.

Whether we approve or disapprove of the process of globalization is irrelevant, it is, short of the intercession of some catastrophe, unstoppable, and this of course intensifies the fear of it among its victims. What we are now seeing is a mass extinction of languages, cultures, peoples, tribes, and old ways of life on an unprecedented scale, and at a furious pace.

Some cultures, like the Chinese, are remarkably adaptive and able to assimilate these external influences and run with them. Hindu Indian civilisation may also prove to be one of the survivors. But the Arab and Islamic civilisation, which Indonesia has had the terrible misfortune to have been saddled with, only in part to be true, but a growing-in-power part, is proving to be profoundly troubled by the assault of globalisation and fears for its survival.

And in many ways a typical devout Muslim in Indonesia feels to be in alien territory whereever he turns. There are women in clicking high-heeled shoes and short skirts, garish advertisements for this and that employing western (low) standards in advertising, wide access to that most corrosive of tradition-destroying agents, explicit pornography, the law of his country is not that of the law of Islam, those who have the real wealth of the country are not Muslims but pork-eating Chinamen, and so on.

What would you do in this situation? Fight back, make a desperate last stand, turn back to the 7th century, wage jihad. Or be more moderate, renounce violence and make fuddy-duddy statements about the corruption of youth by Playboy, attempt to win a few token victories for a lost cause. Or yield, accept the process, commit suicide. The choices are not attractive because the process of the destruction of traditional cultures does not allow for much room to manoeuvre.

Tags: Culture, Globalization, Islamic, Islamization, Moderate, Muslim, Religion, Western