Within hours of the bombings at Kuta's Sari nightclub and Paddy's Bar in Bali on 12 October 2002, the once busy Laskar Jihad website was shut down. Five days later, the organisation itself was disbanded. As Noorhaidi Hasan explains in his book, Laskar Jihad, the organisation had, however, begun to implode some time before the bombings. A combination of leadership conflicts, financial woes and most importantly, the end of its raison d'être – the conflict in the Moluccas – with the signing of the Malino Accord earlier in the year had brought the organisation to this point in a relatively short space of time. Moreover, in a post-September 11 world, Laskar Jihad found itself on a United States government list of radical Islamist groups with suspected links to al-Qaeda. In response to pressure from the US to act against such groups, Megawati's government detained many of its members for questioning, together with those from other groups including Jemaah Islamiyah. In Indonesia itself, it also faced growing opposition from liberal Islamic groups like Liberal Islam Network (JIL). Just as the story of Laskar Jihad's demise is very much one involving both global and national influences within which the roles of the media, politics and the cult of celebrity are central – as Hasan details so well in his book – these were also critical factors in its rise just four years earlier.

Since the events of September 11, the demand in the west to better understand Islam and particularly its radical, militant fringes has been great. In terms of knowledge and understanding of Indonesian Islam, the mainstream literature in the west has for a long time largely relied on representations limited to Clifford Geertz's abangan and santri dichotomy. For students of Indonesia during the New Order period, the co-opting and control of religion within the national ideology of Pancasila further supported this general lack of knowledge. The rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism globally and in Indonesia in the past decade, together with the bloody Christian–Muslim violence in the Moluccas and Sulawesi, has changed all that. In the study of Indonesia, it has become necessary to look more closely at Islam in its many facets — spiritual, political and international. Up until quite recently, this area of study and research has remained a field of investigation undertaken by few scholars and mostlythose from within Indonesia. Today the study of Islam in Indonesia is squarely at the centre of scholarship about and knowledge of Indonesian politics, culture and society.

Hasan's compelling book is an education in the Salafi movement in Indonesia focusing on the ways in which it shifted so quickly from its long-protected ‘stance of apolitical quietism’, to support the formation of its own militant jihadi wing in 1999 known as Laskar Jihad. It is also a study of Indonesia's tumultuous and transitional political and social history from 1998 until 2002, under three vastly different presidents. As many observers of this period of Indonesia's recent history relate, the reformasi period of transition allowed space and opportunity for many new players within politics and society. Hasan further points out that within this context, the state is not the only actor that can impose an agenda — others too find they have the power and agency to manipulate and mobilise.

The awakening or abandoning of the Salafi apolitical stance, however, began before reformasi in the last year or so of the Suharto government as, in the midst of the economic crisis, he made last ditch attempts to garner hardline Muslim support. Together with organisations including the Indonesian Committee for the Solidarity of the Muslim World (KISDI), the Indonesian Council for Islamic Propagation (DDII) and figures like Prabowo and Fadli Zon, the Salafi were brought into this elite company via their charismatic emerging young leader Jafar Umar Thalib.

The book's most important contribution perhaps, is in the close study and depiction of Jafar Umar Thalib. From his Yemeni background, Saudi connections and Afghan war experience, to his publishing, preaching and role as educator in Indonesia in the late 1980s and 1990s, Thalib's biography as told here is both emblematic and distinctive. It presents us with an insight into those many men from Indonesia and elsewhere in the Muslim world, who followed a similar path to Islamic militantism and anti-west radicalism during the 1980s and 1990s. But it also highlights how critical was the presence of such an exceptional charismatic personality and leader in order to mobilise so many in a short period. Hasan's rare access to and interviews with the young Laskar Jihad cadre themselves, further provides the reader with a rare glimpse into the worlds of men we too often dismiss with brands and stereotypes as ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’. Whilst the movement within which they were a part was undeniably global in its reach, concerns and backing, Hasan depicts Laskar Jihad as very much a product of the national political, religious and social conditions in Indonesia at that time. Most of the thousands of young recruits who volunteered to fight in the Moluccan conflict were, Hasan observes, the product of the failed modernisation programme of the New Order regime. The disillusionment and disappointment of these newly urbanised young men in the face of unfulfilled promises of affluence and success led them to search elsewhere for fulfilment and sense of purpose in the community. Hasan's belief that ‘jihadi Islam remains on the political periphery’ (p. 221) in Indonesia gives some comfort; however the question remains of course, where are these men today and in what cause or community are they finding their sense of purpose?