Content area
Full Text
Introduction
If one is to believe terrorism experts and the media, the attacks of September 11 have brought about a new era of globalizing confrontation between the Western world and Islam. According to this view, the existing system of nation states, still part of two solid blocks during the East-West divide less than two decades ago, is under threat from rapidly spreading international networks of terror. Spanning from Europe to Australia and from Southeast Asia to Central Asia, networking has become part of a new world order that is as much obscure as threatening and evolves from the valleys of the Hindukush in Pakistan and Afghanistan as the dark centre of remote-controlled activities in this new international system of terror.1
This paper intends to argue from quite the opposite perspective. It wants to de-construct the "international approach" of terrorism experts such as Zachary Abuza by pointing at the local and regional causes for the emergence of Islamic discourses which only eventually become international ones. Rather than looking at the globalizing forces of terror like al-Qaeda, it argues that networking has often evolved from local settings which have developed into regional linkages; these lack, however, a specific international or even global flavor and are more often deeply embedded in society. The paper tries to tie this argument to the discourses in Southeast Asia which have emerged on various political, economic and cultural levels rarely separable from each other. They have played an important political role as have networks and trajectories of knowledge, which have led to the transfer of ideas and triggered debates on governance, new forms of statehood and even on the "Islamic state" being advocated by fundamentalists and militants alike but often being misinterpreted as the worldwide "Crucible of Terror".2
It is not so much an Islamic internationalism that is here being created, rather the nation state itself is being so transformed that it uses its institutions and organizations as a means to create inter-regional linkages. This happens both intentionally, e.g. by foreign policies that are articulately Islamic in nature, as in the case of Malaysia as an instrument to maintain the power of ruling elites, or - as is here argued - more indirectly through the authoritarian nature of the state, which leaves...