Evening with a jihadist, Ali Fauzi

An evening with a former jihadist

Last evening our Indonesian Fulbrighter friend, Habib, arranged an amazing encounter, one that will probably stay with us for the rest of our lives.  This university is engaged in a research project on terrorism, a project some seem to be approaching with some trepidation.  As part of the project, Habib went to Surabaya, a city on the northern coast of Java, to interview a man whose name is Ali Fauzi,  whose three older brothers were among the 2002 Bali bombers.  And this week when there was an attempted suicide bombing (a man on a bicycle who managed only to injure himself) in a town near Jakarta, aimed at the police, Ali was interviewed several times on television.  He dismissed the bombing as “a silly bomb.”

Last evening we sat in a café, and he gave us several hours of his time to answer any questions we might put to him.  Beginning at the age of twenty Ali was thoroughly trained as a jihadist fighter in camps in Mindinao, the Phillipines, and he went on to train others in Thailand, where he was caught and sent to prison for more than a year.  Somewhere along the line, he gradually came to change his understanding of jihad, which is often mistranslated as “holy war,” but really means “striving in the way of God.”  For his three older brothers, jihad meant terrorism, yet when they killed over 200 people in the Bali bombings, Ali Fauzi disagreed with their methods and felt jihad should only be waged in a real war, such as that in the war between Christians and Muslims being fought at that time in Ambon.  Even though it was Fauzi who had to collect the bodies of his three brothers and see that they were given burial once they were executed for their crime, he appears to harbor no bitterness about this loss.  Instead, a serene smile often brightens the face of this handsome man, now forty.

Ali wages a new kind of jihad, now dedicated to educating young people in his school and supporting his brothers’ widows and their nine children (he has four of his own).  When Maria asked him if he feared for his life in dealing with his former comrades in the Jamail Islamiyah movement, he said no; he has continued to be in dialogue with them, and sees them moving from violent jihad to what is called dakwah, which can be translated “preaching” but also includes showing others through example what is God’s way through peaceful means.