The argument that religious identities are haunted by anxieties is firmly grounded in anthropology, psychology, and social theory. The evidence for such anxieties in Indonesia comes from close reading of Islamic publications in Indonesia and of ethnographic accounts of localities that subsequently experienced episodes of religious violence. There is abundant descriptive evidence of these anxieties in ethnographic accounts and discourse analysis, much more than what readers will find in my book.
The real question, however, is not descriptive but explanatory—how can we link these anxieties to specific episodes and forms of violence? The core puzzle animating my book is the shifting pattern of religious violence: How can we explain shifts in the locations, perpetrators, targets, and forms of violence, in the processes of violent mobilization, and in the “religious” nature of the violence? How can we explain the shift from riots in 1995–97 to pogroms in 1998–2001, to globalized jihad from 2002 through 2005?
I argue that shifts in the structure of religious identities, and the specific anxieties to which they gave rise, constituted necessary but not sufficient conditions for the religious violence observed: Fortunately, there is much more anxiety than actual violence. But why did certain shifts (and the specific anxieties they generated) enable certain patterns of violence, but not others? Riots—attacks on department stores, shopping malls, churches, and government buildings—unfolded in the context of specific anxieties accompanying the unprecedented ascendancy of devout Muslims into the urban middle class, the business world, and the political elite, anxieties about the moral costs and compromises of upward social mobility, anxieties disavowed in the riots through the destruction of property.
By contrast, pogroms—murderous attacks on individuals and communities—arose amidst uncertainties and anxieties accompanying the shift from centralized authoritarian rule to decentralized democracy and the removal of a fixed, authoritative source of recognition and reinforcement for existing hierarchies of religious authority and boundaries of religious identity in Indonesia. At their most acute, these anxieties—and the violence they inspired—focused on uncomfortably intimate religious “Others,” whose forced removal worked to reaffirm religious boundaries and authority structures.
Finally, “global jihad” emerged against the backdrop of dramatic decline, disappointment, demobilization, and disentanglement from state power for forces claiming to speak in the name of Islam. Terrorist attacks on Christian and Western targets in Indonesia—as elsewhere around the world—reflected desperate efforts to rearticulate inter-religious antagonisms and reignite religious struggles that had lost their capacity to inspire and animate Muslims.
Contrary to Marc Howard Ross's assertions, my book does situate these specific arguments against the backdrop of broader—and broadly parallel—trends elsewhere in the Muslim world, and within the broader intellectual context of scholarship on religious violence. In my book, my response to the important questions he raises, and in my forthcoming work, I have also tried to suggest how these arguments might be applied—through sociological, ethnographic, and textual analysis of the very structures of religious identity and authority—to other instances of religious violence around the world today.
