[LINK] "Chinese Preachers Bridge Indonesia’s Ethnic Gap "

[rfmcdonald]

The phenomenon of ethnic Chinese converting to Islam that Aubrey Belford describes in Indonesia is at least as much symbolic of the assimilation of Indonesia's Chinese minority as co-nationals as anything else: most Chinese in Indonesia are nearly all Buddhist and/or Christian, as the author notes. Might there be similar phenomena at work in neighbouring Malaysia, demographically and culturally somewhat similar to Indonesia but with a Chinese population proportionally ten times as large?

In Indonesia’s crowded world of celebrity Muslim preachers, it often pays to have a trademark. For Koko Liem, his ever-present Chinese-style outfits — garish satin tunics paired with matching skullcaps — play the role.

Whether in television appearances or Koran recitals, the approach of Mr. Liem, a 31-year-old convert to Islam from Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority, is undeniably kitschy. In multihued permutations of his signature garb, he mixes preaching with guest appearances on dating and talk shows and promotes a religiously themed text-messaging service through his Web site.

Mr. Liem is one of a small but significant group of ethnic Chinese preachers to emerge over the past decade with a simple message: that being a member of Indonesia’s dominant majority — Muslims — and its historically most maligned minority — Chinese — need not be mutually exclusive.

“Clerics don’t only have to wear turbans. I’m a Chinese cleric. This is how I am,” Mr. Liem said at his home outside Jakarta, bouncing around boyishly on the couch in a crimson version of what he calls the “Koko Liem Costume.”

To outsiders, that assertion may seem unremarkable, even banal. But in Indonesia, it represents a powerful break with the past.

Pogroms and prejudice against Chinese have been a constant theme in Indonesian history. Discrimination peaked under the three-decade rule of the dictator Suharto, who banned the public expression of Chinese culture, language and religion. Despite being widely despised for holding a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth, Chinese were also, somewhat paradoxically, treated as potential sympathizers of the China-linked Indonesian Communist Party, which was wiped out in the 1965-66 purge that left more than half a million people dead.

In the economic chaos that led up to Suharto’s fall in 1998, riots and mass rapes drove many Chinese into exile abroad. There are no solid figures for how many Chinese live in Indonesia today, but they are generally believed to make up 2 to 3 percent of the 235 million people in Indonesia. Most Chinese here are Christians, Buddhists or followers of traditional beliefs; very few are Muslim.

In contemporary democratic Indonesia, official discrimination is gone, and Chinese culture has dramatically emerged from the shadows — although disparaging remarks are still heard about the Chinese, who are often stereotyped as greedy and deceitful. Megawati Sukarnoputri, the former president, made Chinese New Year an official holiday in 2002, and since then, it has been granted perhaps the highest honor possible in this country’s shopping mall-dominated, traffic-clogged capital: holiday sales and ubiquitous themed advertising.

“You see now on TV shows, there are many Chinese presenters, Chinese singers, also in the movies,” said Benny Setiono, the head of the Chinese Indonesian Association. “Before there were no Chinese in all this. Now they’re everywhere.”

Mr. Liem — who converted from Buddhism as a teenager in northern Sumatra and took shelter in his Islamic boarding school outside Jakarta as anti-Chinese mobs raged in 1998 — said his role was to teach the universality of Islam. “If a Chinese person becomes a Muslim, and he understands the religion, even to the point of being a cleric like me,” Mr. Liem said, “people are more awed and moved: ‘He’s just a Chinese, who wasn’t a Muslim before. Now he is one, and his religion is greater than ours. He can lecture on religion, he can memorize the Koran, what can we do?”’