One man’s extraordinary journey from middle Australia into the heart of Indonesia’s Islamic world. Or was it into the heart of darkness? Eric Ellis joined him among the believers

ITS MIDNIGHT on a velvety Jakarta Sunday and a beaten-up Kijang, the Indonesian Everyman’s car, sputters up to the checkpoint that protects Indonesia’s best hotel, the Grand Hyatt.

The rustbucket’s arrival springs the bored guards to attention for the car, more its passengers, looks suspicious – six Islamist missionaries, their leader in flowing beard and white robe, and me, being dropped off by these true believers. At the very least, our group is a puzzling departure from the sleek Porsches and Ferraris of Jakarta’s Armani-clad elite usually waved through here.

As security is trained to see it, we may have driven straight from Suicide Bomber Central. Indeed, as many investigators into Indonesia’s recent terror attacks would also argue, it has; ten sweaty hours from the impoverished Islamist heartland of south-west Java, from poverty-stricken villages like the one the self-styled teenage martyr Iqbal, who blew himself up in Kuta’s Paddy’s Bar, was recruited from to be South-East Asia’s first suicide bomber in 2002. Hyatt security knows that by terror’s timetable Indonesia is due another spectacular attack. And that places like the Hyatt, where Westerners gather, are regarded by extremists as maksiat, godless places of vice. Their TV news and their politicians tell them that the masterminds of such attacks look a lot like the burly, bearded man in the front seat. “We don’t usually get to places like this,” that man, Luqman Hakim, remarks almost apologetically. The Hyatt’s air conditioning, clean sheets, a beer and a baconburger are still some way off for me.

As the guards crawl over Luqman’s car, their puzzled ‘who’s the bule, the foreigner?’ thought-bubble is obvious. They don’t mean me, dressed as Westerners do, but Luqman, robed in what in these days of religious profiling is the suspicious garb – or, as Dean Jones might see it, with the suspicious beard - of extremist Islam. Then again, he could simply be an ustadz, a pious Islamic scholar, except to these blokes the faithful elders they’ve encountered are usually Indonesian, not portly white guys with Australian-accented Bahasa. Luqman takes the intrusion in his stride, gathering his salt-and-pepper beard in a fist - the length the Koran strictly prescribes it to be - in a gesture that after a week travelling with him and his flock through West Java and Aceh I now recognise as an instinctive tic, his re-affirmation of his faith. He gives a resigned shrug. “I’m well used to this.”

Luqman Hakim is not your usual ustadz, the Arabic term Indonesians give to their spiritual Islamic scholars. He was born Gregg Landy, into the 1948 hardscrabble of suburban Ashfield, in Sydney’s inner west, the son of a Liberal-voting Welsh-Australian primary school headmaster and a Labor-voting kindergarten teacher mother, now an 87 year-old Sylvania Waters widow who calls her long-absent son Gregg. Educated at Fort Street High, ANU and Sydney University, and a big fan of the Newtown Jets, Landy was raised in a waspy middle Australian milieu not unfamiliar to a certain pugnacious prime minister.

But where one made a beeline for The Lodge via suburban solicitordom, Landy has been a Muslim since 1975. At university in the turbulent 1960’s, where his fellow student firebrands might’ve embraced hippieism, smoked some dope and embraced free love en route to yuppiedom, Landy sacrificed himself to the life of a deeply devout acetic, an Islamist missionary defending the faith from those he perceives would harm it who, as he sees it, include people like John Howard.

“I had lots of questions of Islam and when I put the questions and answers together, there was nothing wrong with Islam, everything made perfect sense.” he says. “No-one among friends and family knew that I was contemplating taking Islam, nobody counselled for or against, I arrived at it at my own speed, through my own spiritual and intellectual framework.”

Today, his life work - “my only priority” - is to provide Islamic-oriented literacy and numeracy for Indonesian children neglected by what he regards as the faithless Indonesian state. He urges those same kids to pray at every opportunity, badgering them as might a mother anxious for her to eat their greens. Asked about extremism, he says that terror is unIslamic. He subscribes to the various conspiracy theories that 9/11, the Bali bombings et al are the work of Israel’s Mossad, the CIA, Britain’s MI5, Australia’s AFP or a combination of all “out to discredit Islam.” He’s good friends with, and a defender of, people like Jemaah Islamiah’s Abu Bakr Bashir – Luqman visited Bashir in gaol five times, a photo of one visit adorns his educational foundation’s calendar – and Habib Rizzieq, the leader of Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders’ Front, the group which likes to smash up bars and escort their unbeliever patrons to the airport because they pollute the purity of the Islamist state they want for Indonesia. Both men, Luqman says, have been framed, their true and blameless calling manipulated by foreign governments and their Indonesian lackeys.

Luqman Hakim Gregg Landy’s journey to and through Islam has been - and still is – a complex one. While he’s lived in Indonesia for three decades and, with three current wives (one state-legal, two allowed by Islam) and eight kids has been utterly integrated into its Islamic society, the mostly Islamic state regards him and his religious-educational activities with suspicion.

Where Jakarta has awarded citizenship to other long-resident foreigners, it has occasionally locked Luqman up and, he says, harasses him and his flock. He’s forced into periodic visa renewal runs to Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, expensive trips he combines with fund-raising for his Jakarta-based foundation, Jakarta International Muslim Society (JIMS), which runs more than 80 pesantrens, Islamic boarding schools, and orphanages in the desperate villages of Aceh and West Java, unreached by formal state education, which Luqman says is not Islamic enough anyway. Luqman likes to joke when he passes through immigration that he’s “from JI..” before adding an “..MS” to complete the initials of his foundation, JIMS. Gags like that, I explain, can put one behind bars these days, particularly when said by people who look like him. No problem, Luqman says, “I’ve been gaoled for my beliefs before,” explaining with a frisson of paranoia that “secret police” across the region conspire to closely track his activities.

But he’s right when he says he doesn’t see the inside of five-star hotels. His Indonesia is a largely illiterate one that exists well below the poverty line, out of view for most Indonesian officials. He lives and works in appalling conditions, because he can’t afford it any other way. JIMS runs on less than $1000 a day, about $12 per average school each of 300 students, the money provided by donors he’s constantly hassling for funds, but who rarely provide. His ten year-old foundation is threatened with closure almost every day, from lack of funds or a hostile state. Many of his teachers haven’t been paid for months but they soldier on because to them – and as Luqman constantly tells them – an Islamist education is paramount, penury and sacrifice must be the will of Allah, and that one day it will be better. Even though it rarely is.

Luqman jokes that Cyclone Tracy and Indonesia’s independence hero Sukarno are responsible for his conversion to Islam. Gregg Landy was 17 and contemplating his future in 1965 when Sukarno was toppled in Indonesia’s so-called ‘Year of Living Dangerously.’ “Indonesia was very much in the news and I wanted to know more about the neighbourhood,” he says. He enrolled in Oriental Studies at ANU where he was introduced, academically, to Islam by a former Dean of the School of Asian Studies, Professor Anthony Johns. Landy, who believes he’s a distant cousin of the runner and the recently-retired Victorian governor John Landy (the ex-governor denies knowing him), had been experimenting with various ‘isms’ - religious, political and personal – but was intrigued by Islam.

“I was in a personal search for truth and a value system that would last me through life,” he says. “I was looking for something different, I suppose.” A student firebrand, he was also exercised by the gathering Vietnam War and what he says was “the hypocrisy of government, of normal middle class Australia” toward it. His Bahasa skills were noticed by the RAAF, which offered him a job. “I didn’t appreciate my air force killing people in Vietnam. I told them what they really should be doing. They told me I wasn’t ready.”

After graduation, he got a job teaching at the Darwin Community College, the forerunner of today’s Charles Darwin University, because it was closer to Indonesia and “less stifling” than Canberra. He was on leave visiting a girlfriend in Jogjakarta when Tracy devastated Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974. Where most Darwinians were evacuated to Perth and Brisbane, Landy stayed put in Java, and has pretty much been there ever since.

In Jakarta, there was The Epiphanous Moment.

“One morning I had a very strong sensation of a burning churning feeling in my stomach and chest, like molten steel,” he recalls. “It was hot, not painful, which I knew was a physical impossibility.” To Gregg Landy it was the call of Allah. “I instinctively took that as a sign that I just had to become a Muslim that day. So I did and soon as I became a Muslim later that day that feeling went away.”

We are discussing his conversion in the rundown house in Central Aceh that JIMS has rented for $20 a week for staff building a tsunami victims orphanage the Lebanese Association of Australia has funded. The house’s former owners perished in the waters. As if on cue, the muezzin begins the adhan, the summoning of the faithful to prayer, in the mosque across the street.

The Bulletin: “How does one become a Muslim?”

Luqman: “The actual process is reciting words in Arabic, the meaning of which is ‘I say with conviction that there is no ilah (deity) except Allah, there is no God, no Sustainer, no Great Decider except Allah and I say believing it to be true with conviction that Mohammed is his messenger, la ilaha illallah Muhammadur rasulullah.’”

The Bulletin: “You just say that to yourself, or in front of some Islamic authority?”

Luqman: “You can say it anywhere. Allah doesn’t need a certificate or witnesses.”

As many victims of Indonesian terror would argue, with friends like Bashir and Rizzieq, maybe Indonesian security is right to be wary. After four days with him as an “honoured guest” in the wretched kampungs of Banten, and another four days a month earlier in Aceh, I can’t decide. I’d spent a year tracking him down across Java, and then another six months winning his confidence to agree to an interview.

Once secured, he embraced me with gusto. This was a chance, he said, to show the “True Islam” of Indonesia to Western media and other non-believers that demonise his faith, to show the 80 schools that he runs, the impecunious conditions he, his teachers and students endure, the necessary spadework JIMS does in places where Jakarta has neglected to provide the most basic of infrastructure, places where Luqman worries that Christianity would take hold if it wasn’t for missionaries like him re-affirming the faith. There’d be seminars and questions after evening prayer, more his flock asking me he hoped than me of them.

 “We don’t get Western journalists here too often, except when they are looking for people governments claim are terrorists,” he observed. “They will want to know from you why they are being victimised by the West.” If Allah wills, he half-joked, I might even convert to Islam, as he did 31 years ago. To bring others to Islam is, he explains, the duty of all who take the true faith. So is reminding lazy Muslims and the young that its time to pray, when many seem more interested in my mobile than his mosques.

With the broadest of possible minds, it was a heady week of trying to decipher how a fellow Australian born into the dormant Christianity most Australians have in the distant background of our lives, how a man who could’ve been my father or elder brother, has arrived at the place he has, and how a Westerner could choose to live in such squalor.

But after a week at close quarters, I’m troubled that I’m not sure what to make of him. Sometimes he’s an intellectual, other times he sounds like simply wacky. Sometimes we are close, other times we both wonder why we are talking to each other. Is he banal, a personality not fully formed, or has he found a more profound calling that non-believers just can’t get? As deepest Java envelopes us, our mutual Australian-ness is sometimes a comfort but equally a reminder of how far we are from each other.

We debate in hours-long car journeys bouncing through impassable jungle roads, laughing as we ride bumps no transmission should traverse, him exclaiming “Allahu Akbar” and me “Christ” to shoulder the jolts. We stop for prayer in rural mosques, and he walks me through the rituals of Islam, as the brothers embrace me as a fellow traveller with genuine warmth.

In tsunami-ravaged Meulaboh on the Aceh coast, a well-funded Qatari charity Luqman drops in on looking for funding gives us a bed, because that’s what good Muslims do. But sleep here is impossible, Luqman rising through the night to ablute and pray, explaining that yes, good Muslims pray five times a day to Mecca but the truly faithful do it seven times, and must rise twice during the night to do so. Every time he convinces me his faith is moderate and that there was no place in Islam for the terror many now associate its extremist fringes with, he’d blur the issue by casually remarking what a “great man” Abu Bakr Bashir is. Or forwarding to all on his mobile’s buddy list the SMS sent by Amrozi claiming Bashir has been stitched up. He doesn’t see the contradictions.

The Bulletin: How do you find Bashir?

Luqman: “Excellent. Honest. Sincere. Devout. Devoted, an excellent person, the epitome of an alim ulama (senior Islamic scholar), very knowledgeable person, a storehouse of knowledge about Islam. Bashir’s demonisation is just an American-Australian political plot. They know very well he’s not a terrorist. He has the perceived ability, perceived by them, to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia and this is what terrifies the West. Indonesia is at the behest of the Americans like every other government in the world. We have our ear to the ground here, we are in contact with a lot of Islamic groups in Indonesia….Abu Bakr Bashir has never ever been involved in terrorism, ever. He counsels the terrorists against it because he knows it’s not Islamic.”

Luqman doubts Muslims were involved in 9/11 or the Bali bombings, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, evidence he doesn’t recognise. “It was only George Bush who said 19 or 20 people who were Muslims whose names were such-and-such were involved,” he insists, citing “reports from the internet” that half those implicated in the 9/11 plot have been seen in US consulates around the world protesting that they are not dead. “I tend to believe the conspiracy theory because the conspirators are so clever you’ll never get to the bottom of it.” On Bali, he says “non-Muslims are not going to appreciate this but looking at it from the Islamic point of view what goes on in nightclubs such as in Bali is maksiat. These are godless places, there is no worship of Allah so in that way some Muslims would say they had it coming to them.” I explain that I closely reported the 2002 bombings, and the aftermath. “I don’t say that, because terror has no place in Islam. And Abu Bakr Bashir will tell you the same thing.”

From the point of view of responsible journalism, its hard to countenance much of that, to give such wildly-sourced conspiratorial idiocy any oxygen. But, believe what you may, its impossible to ignore when a Luqman Landy says it. To the thousands of poor young Muslims who attend JIMS’ madrassas and others like them in Indonesia, people like Luqman are authority figures, regarded as abi, an Arabic deferential meaning father that young Indonesians confer on an elder of obvious Islamic fibre.

Moreover, Luqman’s a haji, a pilgrim to Mecca draped in the robes of an Islamic scholar. To many Muslims, a faith such as his rarely comes more profound or proven. To an impressionable teenager from West Java hanging off his every word, those robes speak to his higher authority, and a perceived greater wisdom. That Luqman is a foreigner from a wealthy country, and one in frequent dispute with Indonesia, gives that heady cocktail an extra twist of influence. He insists his pesantrens offer a secular curriculum that stresses Islam and, the rare times asked, that they teach that Osama bin Laden’s version of Islam is unlawful by the Koran.

But here again, a disturbing twist. In one of his houses in Banten, after another long day touring his schools, he billets me in his ‘good room;’ its got a Western-style bed, albeit a filthy one that smells and looks like its been soaked in a generation of sweat. The walls and door are festooned with pictures of Osama exhorting in captioned Bahasa that if Muslims are not with him, they are against him. It sounds like something George W. Bush said.

After a sleepless, mosquito-ravaged night as his guest, I ask Luqman over breakfast why his house has images of Osama when he’s just told me he’s illegal in Islam. This complex contradictory man shrugs. “I don’t have a problem with them being there.”