Allah’s Aussie
One man’s extraordinary journey from middle Australia into the heart of Indonesia’s Islamic world. Or was it into the heart of darkness? Eric Ellis joined him among the believers ITS MIDNIGHT on a velvety Jakarta Sunday and a beaten-up Kijang, the Indonesian Everyman’s car, sputters up to the checkpoint that protects Indonesia’s best hotel, the Grand Hyatt.
The rustbucket’s arrival springs the bored guards to attention for the car, more its passengers, looks suspicious – six Islamist missionaries, their leader in flowing beard and white robe, and me, being dropped off by these true believers. At the very least, our group is a puzzling departure from the sleek Porsches and Ferraris of Jakarta’s Armani-clad elite usually waved through here.
As security is trained to see it, we may have driven straight from Suicide Bomber Central. Indeed, as many investigators into Indonesia’s recent terror attacks would also argue, it has; ten sweaty hours from the impoverished Islamist heartland of south-west Java, from poverty-stricken villages like the one the self-styled teenage martyr Iqbal, who blew himself up in Kuta’s Paddy’s Bar, was recruited from to be South-East Asia’s first suicide bomber in 2002. Hyatt security knows that by terror’s timetable Indonesia is due another spectacular attack. And that places like the Hyatt, where Westerners gather, are regarded by extremists as maksiat, godless places of vice. Their TV news and their politicians tell them that the masterminds of such attacks look a lot like the burly, bearded man in the front seat. “We don’t usually get to places like this,” that man, Luqman Hakim, remarks almost apologetically. The Hyatt’s air conditioning, clean sheets, a beer and a baconburger are still some way off for me.
As the guards crawl over Luqman’s car, their puzzled ‘who’s the bule, the foreigner?’ thought-bubble is obvious. They don’t mean me, dressed as Westerners do, but Luqman, robed in what in these days of religious profiling is the suspicious garb – or, as Dean Jones might see it, with the suspicious beard - of extremist Islam. Then again, he could simply be an ustadz, a pious Islamic scholar, except to these blokes the faithful elders they’ve encountered are usually Indonesian, not portly white guys with Australian-accented Bahasa. Luqman takes the intrusion in his stride, gathering his salt-and-pepper beard in a fist - the length the Koran strictly prescribes it to be - in a gesture that after a week travelling with him and his flock through West Java and Aceh I now recognise as an instinctive tic, his re-affirmation of his faith. He gives a resigned shrug. “I’m well used to this.”
Luqman Hakim is not your usual ustadz, the Arabic term Indonesians give to their spiritual Islamic scholars. He was born Gregg Landy, into the 1948 hardscrabble of suburban Ashfield, in Sydney’s inner west, the son of a Liberal-voting Welsh-Australian primary school headmaster and a Labor-voting kindergarten teacher mother, now an 87 year-old Sylvania Waters widow who calls her long-absent son Gregg. Educated at Fort Street High, ANU and Sydney University, and a big fan of the Newtown Jets, Landy was raised in a waspy middle Australian milieu not unfamiliar to a certain pugnacious prime minister.
But where one made a beeline for The Lodge via suburban solicitordom, Landy has been a Muslim since 1975. At university in the turbulent 1960’s, where his fellow student firebrands might’ve embraced hippieism, smoked some dope and embraced free love en route to yuppiedom, Landy sacrificed himself to the life of a deeply devout acetic, an Islamist missionary defending the faith from those he perceives would harm it who, as he sees it, include people like John Howard.
“I had lots of questions of Islam and when I put the questions and answers together, there was nothing wrong with Islam, everything made perfect sense.” he says. “No-one among friends and family knew that I was contemplating taking Islam, nobody counselled for or against, I arrived at it at my own speed, through my own spiritual and intellectual framework.”
Today, his life work - “my only priority” - is to provide Islamic-oriented literacy and numeracy for Indonesian children neglected by what he regards as the faithless Indonesian state. He urges those same kids to pray at every opportunity, badgering them as might a mother anxious for her to eat their greens. Asked about extremism, he says that terror is unIslamic. He subscribes to the various conspiracy theories that 9/11, the Bali bombings et al are the work of Israel’s Mossad, the CIA, Britain’s MI5, Australia’s AFP or a combination of all “out to discredit Islam.” He’s good friends with, and a defender of, people like Jemaah Islamiah’s Abu Bakr Bashir – Luqman visited Bashir in gaol five times, a photo of one visit adorns his educational foundation’s calendar – and Habib Rizzieq, the leader of Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders’ Front, the group which likes to smash up bars and escort their unbeliever patrons to the airport because they pollute the purity of the Islamist state they want for Indonesia. Both men, Luqman says, have been framed, their true and blameless calling manipulated by foreign governments and their Indonesian lackeys.
TBC..
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