ABSTRACT
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Bali bombings of October 2002, Western audiences and policymakers have tended to look anxiously at Muslim Southeast Asia, concerned that it might become a “second front” in al-Qaida’s war with the United States. Although there is a terrorist fringe in some parts of Southeast Asia, in recent years its scale and effectiveness have—with the tragic exception of southern Thailand—declined substantially. Once home to one of the region’s largest jihadist networks, Indonesia has implemented one of the most successful antiterror campaigns in the Muslim-majority world. Each of the national elections held in Malaysia and Indonesia since 1999 has demonstrated that conservative Islamists’ efforts to convince the Muslim electorate that state enforcement of shari‘a law should be a national priority have met with limited or declining success. At a time when Western analysts of the post-“Arab Spring” Middle East have grown concerned about the prospects for sustainable democratization in that region, Malaysia and, more clearly, Indonesia have demonstrated that Islam and electoral participation are by no means antithetical.
