The latest monograph in MUP’s Islamic Studies Series is Imam Samudra’s Revenge by Angus McIntyre, an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change at the ANU.
From 2009 to 2012 Angus McIntyre worked on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project concerning the origins and development of Islamic terrorist behaviour in Indonesia. His Academic Monograph Imam Samudra’s Revenge has roots in his contributions to this joint endeavour.
It examines why Samudra bombed nightclubs in Bali paying due regard to the social and political context provided by both his experiences as a youthful member of the Darul Islam movement in Indonesia and Pakistan, and the outbreak of religious violence in Indonesia from 1999.
Here is a selection of insights from the monograph:
Religious evolution
“More influential in his life was the mysticism of Banten’s traditionalist Islam to which he was introduced by his father. Its significance lies not in its continuing influence upon him, but as a legacy of his boyhood that his later search for a purer form of Islam obliged him to repudiate. It is not irrelevant to this account of the formation of his identity that Abdul Aziz was a twice-born Muslim who rejected the traditionalist Islam of his early years making way for his subsequent embrace of, first, Salafism and then, in adulthood, global jihadism.”
Training in Pakistan
“Like the vast majority of his Indonesian colleagues, he trained at Camp Saddah in Parachinar, Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan. Moreover, he saw no military action. Although it was normal for the trainees to be taken on excursions to a place of battle in Afghanistan during holidays in their three-year course, this did not happen in the case of Samudra’s cohort due to the overthrow of Afghanistan’s Najibullah government by the Afghan mujahidin in April 1992. According to Ali Imron, another member of this group:
At that time we wanted to enter Afghanistan. Russia had already withdrawn leaving behind the Communist Government of Afghanistan [of Najibullah]. But it did not last as they were defeated by the mujahidin. This meant that our excursion did not take place. The one of our number who wept as a consequence was Imam Samudra. That is what he was like.”
Hatred of the West
“Imam Samudra’s hatred of the Western powers is also evident in his various outbursts, not to mention declarations to that effect, such as the following, which he shouted out while being escorted through Bali police headquarters in Den Pasar:
‘Hey Bush, John Howard [Australian prime minister], like this,’ he said, running his hands across his throat in a threatening gesture. Then he called out to the crowd: ‘You (are) also next. I get. Gun, gun for you. Don’t forget (this is a) terrorist country. Life for life. Soul for soul. I am a killer for you. As long as you kill our Muslim country, we also attack your country and your people,’ he yelled before being led to another police building.
On a later occasion, while being escorted to court, Samudra again expressed his hatred of the US president in terms that suggest that for one (psychotic?) moment he imagined himself to be the Mahdi leading the army of the faithful to secure the triumph of Islam at the end of time: ‘Just watch, Bush will soon be destroyed. I have sent 5,000 soldiers down from the sky to destroy him … God willing, the soldiers of Allah will prevail.’”
Yet Partial To a Western Lifestyle
“This ambivalence was especially true of Imam Samudra who, as the above account of his life shows, aspired to purity yet was also deeply attracted to and immersed in the overlapping worlds of Western and Indonesian popular culture. More particularly, to judge by the recordings and DVDs police found in his house, he admired the American singer and entertainer Britney Spears, and had watched or intended to watch The Fast and the Furious, an American car film of 2001 starring Vin Diesel. Also, a police computer expert, Drs E Brata Mandala, found on Samudra’s computer what he described as ‘a pornographic picture which came from the internet.’ And his email address was the very unSalafi-like dafi_lover@lovemail.com.”
Imam Samudra’s Revenge is out now.
