A few years before the world went mad, Ketut had a Javanese girlfriend, a Muslim. As their relationship grew, she became sad. "It's a shame I can't marry you," she would sigh.

There was no need to ask why not. Although she was liberal, never wore the veil in Bali, she made it clear that he was an infidel. He was a Balinese Hindu and, unless he changed, they had no future.

"Would a Muslim man ever change to the religion of his wife?" Ketut asked.

"Of course not," she answered. "Islam is the true religion. And I will not become Hindu."

Ketut thought about the problem for a few days. Islam was brought to Indonesia by Arab traders, gained a foothold in Sumatra in the 13th century, spread to the coastal areas of Java, then eroded the great Hindu Kingdom of Majapahit in the early 16th century. The aristocracy of the Majapahit, the priests, jurists, artists, artisans, painters, sculptors, architects, goldsmiths, gongsmiths, writers and dancers were, for the most part, unwilling to accept Islamization. They fled to the nearby island of Bali and the protection of its King Waturrenggong.

King Waturrenggong had "lion-hearted courage, incomparable daring, and magical powers" in battle. He unified the aristocracy with the people and built a military and cultural bulwark against Islam, stopping it from spreading to the shores of "Paradise." His priest and teacher, the Just-Arrived-Magic-Powerful-High-Priest Nirartha, floated to Bali on a palm leaf, another refugee from Java. Nirartha redesigned the temple system in Bali so that each village would have its own temples, forging a closer bond between the people and their Hindu gods, a bond unlike that of any other Hindu Kingdom, and one which Islam would find difficult to sever.

It was this exodus and the fear of Islam that created in Bali the paradise that Western tourists have been admiring since the mutiny of the first Dutch explorers in 1597, when many of Captain de Houtman's European sailors refused to leave the island that was so beautiful, where women bathed nude in the rivers, where the King's chariot was pulled by white buffalo and his retinue was made up of 50 dwarves whose bodies had been bent to resemble traditional dagger handles.

The historic hatred of Islam by the Balinese is one of the reasons Ketut admired his girl, that she had been willing to come here from Java on her own, to risk ancient racism in order to enjoy the much higher standard of living and greater freedoms that Bali offers in comparison to the other islands of Indonesia.

"Very well," he said after a few days of thinking, "let's both become Buddha."

No, she had answered. Nor Jewish, Jainist or Zoroastrean. Not even Christian which, to Ketut, seemed very similar to Islam, especially in its need to proselytize and spread. It was Islam or nothing. So Ketut ended the relationship, but without acrimony. He had seen too many Muslim daughters in Bali pulled along the pavement, their fathers dragging them by the hair, beating them senseless, outraged at their dating an infidel. It is difficult to be strong in the face of such pedigree.

Muslims live now in Bali -- Bali is part of Indonesia, after all, and Indonesia is 90 per cent Muslim -- they come despite local objections, though they are at times subject to vandalism and random attacks by young Balinese. Most come for the freedom, some come to see the enemy, a few do both in a psychologically unstable mix.

"I see her in the village sometimes," Ketut concludes. "She is the fourth wife of a Muslim man. He lives in another city and rarely sees her or their child. And I think she is very unhappy, but she wears the veil now and has become much more fanatical."

Today, Ketut is again unhappy about fanatical Muslims. He runs an Internet café and a tourist agency. It used to be a good business. Americans stopped coming a year ago, afraid of Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front, and other radical Islamic groups in Java who have threatened to "sweep" all Westerners out of Indonesia.

Who will come now?

Villages in Bali have put their traditional guards on alert, the Balinese People's Council has promised to fight any hostile Javanese, and the Balinese are ready to release 600 years of antagonism against Java.

"If the Javanese come to sweep, we will make lawar out of them," Ketut said a year ago -- in the aftermath of the first "sweeping" threats, before losing a friend in Saturday night's bombing. Lawar is a type of haggis made out of pork stomachs. "Maybe it would be good, maybe it would begin a war for independence. The Balinese are quiet, quiet, until they decide it is time for puputan. The Javanese remember this."

Puputan is a suicidal fight to the death which, historically, has seemed necessary once every 50 years or so. In 1906, the Balinese royalty burned its own palaces, then, wearing their finest jewellery and waving golden swords, the Rajah led the royalty and priests out against the modern weapons of the Dutch. 4,000 Balinese died in 1906 and a larger number in a similar puputan in 1945, falling again under the guns of the Dutch.

Suicidal armies scare the Muslims as much as they do the West. Unlike radical Islam, however, in Bali it is not the uneducated and abused who become human bombs; it is the priests and leaders themselves.

The battle between Bali and Islam that began 600 years ago has never really been put to rest. For centuries, Balinese medicine men continued to fight against Muslim medicine men from Java and Lombok. Curses were thrown back and forth over the narrow Bali Strait, Islamic clerics put love spells on Balinese women to fall in love with Muslims, and Balinese holy men rubbed the affected in pigs' blood to undo the spell.

Now the war that has been waged for centuries within the invisible dimension has surfaced.

In Indonesia this means the government doesn't clamp down on "sweeping" threats, that years of Islamic bias in all aspects of Indonesian public life have become more and more institutionalized, and that Islamic political parties are increasingly pressing for Koranic law to become the law of Indonesia, whether the subjects be Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or Animist.

From love spells and pigs' blood, the war has moved to car bombs in front of discos. But if the war comes into the open, Bali also has many young men ready to fight. The young generation can imagine an independent Bali, another puputan.

This weekend, Javanese fanatics bombed the main tourist strip in Kuta. By November, there will be many innocent Javanese street-vendors floating in the sea. The reaction will cause another, and that another. Ketut and other young Balinese still think about King Waturrenggong and the Just-Arrived-Magic-Powerful-High-Priest. They celebrate the latter's memory twice a year. Muslims still think about Mohammed's war to take Mecca and destroy the 300-odd religions represented there. It is only the West that has a stunted sense of history, with anything predating the Second World War classified as "ancient," and it is only the West that insists religion and politics are separate issues.

U.S. President George W. Bush has said "you are either for us or against us," and blindly called his war against terrorism a "crusade." Osama bin Laden agreed, countering that "you are either a believer or an infidel." In the post-World Trade Center world, in country after country, movements and complaints that had seemed long buried are emerging back into the visible dimensions. Slowly, behind the scenes, fault lines which go back thousands of years are beginning to show.

Even in Paradise.
Alexander Boldizar, former columnist with the Harvard Law Record, is director of the Gaya Fusion of Senses gallery in Bali, Indonesia.