220 islam, politics and change
not make people conclude that the Acehnese are necessarily receptive
to fundamentalist or Islamist propaganda from outside; for that the
opinions about what constitutes proper Islam are too wide apart. This
was, as David Kloos points out, a mistake made by former Jemaah
Islamiyah leaders when they set up a training camp in Aceh, discovered
by the Indonesian authorities in 2010. Earlier, in 2002, al-Qaeda leaders,
investigating the possibility of setting up a base in Aceh probably made
the same wrong assessment. The discovery of the training camp and the
military operations against it form the point of departure of David Kloos’
analysis. Taking place near the village where he was doing fieldwork, the
events allowed him to gain a first-hand insight into people’s reaction and