This is a valuable book by a well-informed author, translated well and presented in a style that non-specialists and specialists alike will find accessible. Solahudin is a senior journalist who has researched Indonesia's violent terrorist movements since the Bali bombings of 2002. His book was originally published in Indonesian in 2011. The translator, Dave McRae, is now with the Lowy Institute; he holds a Ph.D. from the Australian National University and spent several years in Indonesia with the International Crisis Group and World Bank. His own book on interreligious violence in Poso (A few poorly organised men) has just been published.

Solahudin's principal contribution is to set out the ideological and family lines that lead from and link independent Indonesia's first Islamist terrorist movement — the Darul Islam of the 1940s–early ‘60s — to the extremist groups that have become more prominent since the end of the Soeharto regime in 1998. It is, as the author says, ‘a history of the jihadi movement in Indonesia, from Darul Islam through to Jema'ah Islamiyah’. While these links are familiar to specialist scholars, there is, I think, no other book-scale discussion that sets them out as clearly as Solahudin does here. By following both the people and the ideas, Solahudin fills a gap in the literature.

The book seeks the deeper roots of Salafism and jihadism in Islamic tradition, reaching back to Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). In Indonesia, the story begins with the Padri movement in West Sumatra over two centuries ago, from which Solahudin quickly moves to the reformist movements of the early twentieth century. This earlier history is a small part of the book, but an important one, for it reminds readers that the ideas that motivate extremists are not something recent, that they have roots in religious thinking which is validated by a long history — as, of course, are the contending Islamic traditions that reject such interpretations.

There are inherent risks in writing about such a topic, for this is a field plagued by secrecy, misinformation, and disinformation. Solahudin relies on a wide range of sources, including interrogations of captured individuals and interviews with major players. The book is about clandestine, violent movements that engage in criminality and mayhem, whose enemies include repressive governments and their agents (who sometimes infiltrate or befriend terrorist groups if it suits them) — including police of legendary levels of corruption and brutality — the records of whose interrogations are subject to grave doubts about their veracity and the likelihood of whose interviews being candid and reliable must be doubtful. Solahudin is clearly aware of all that and proceeds cautiously, but has to do what he can with what he has. Recognising that, a reader cannot help feeling uncomfortable when a source is described as, for example, an ‘unknown person's interview with Sunarto and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir’.

It would be rare to find a book that is free of errors, but there are only few here: a reference to the Suharto ‘state's recognition of traditional Javanese mysticism as a religion (p. 103)’, which never happened; instead, it was recognised as ‘belief’ (kepercayaan) and therefore a matter of ‘culture’ rather than religion. There is no ‘mausoleum built for the Suharto family in Yogyakarta’ (p. 122): that grand site is on the slopes of Mt Lawu near Solo. There is also confusion about the fate of the 1979 terrorist Warman: on p. 73 he is shot dead in a dramatic shoot-out in 1981, but on pp. 90–1 ‘not long after [1979], Warman was captured by security forces’ and imprisoned. I do not know what Solahudin is referring to when he says (p. 80) that in 1973 the government ‘removed religion as a foundation for development in the Broad Outlines of State Policy’; the Soeharto regime sought to manipulate and control religious life, but I am not aware that it had once nominated religion as ‘a foundation for development’. There is no mistranslation here, for Dave McRae has correctly rendered Solahudin's original statement that the government tak lagi menempatkan agama sebagai landasan pembangunan.

For all of the book's virtues, an important aspect that is not adequately discussed, unfortunately for non-specialist readers, is the broader social context. These extremist movements operated in a context of deepening religiosity, of an ever-more Islamically defined social, cultural, and political order. It is that which has given them greater potency than they might have if they were trying to operate in a secular society. Readers interested in the issue of Islamic extremism may therefore find it useful also to turn to a fine book which lacks Solahudin's longer historical perspective, but gives more attention to the wider social context since the late Soeharto era: Andrée Feillard and Rémy Madinier's The end of innocence? Indonesian Islam and the temptations of radicalism (2011). According to Feillard and Madinier, by the way, Warman was ‘captured and killed in 1981’ (p. 304).