ARTICLES

The Wall Street Journal Asia

A PEEK INTO PAKISTAN

A new novel offers a worm’s-eye view of the kinds of lives that rarely make their way to the pages of a newspaper.

By SADANAND DHUME

On the face of it, few countries are in as dire need of a public image makeover as Pakistan. Its best-known exports are the Taliban and contraband nukes. Its airspace commands more attention from Predator drones than from commercial airlines. Its immediate future rests more in the hands of NATO than in those of the WTO. In recent years, the permanently enraged Pakistani mob—protesting Danish cartoons, rumors of Koran desecration, obscure references to Byzantine history by the Pope—has become almost emblematic of the ongoing culture war between radical Islam and the West.

Somewhat paradoxically, Pakistan also happens to be home to some of Asia’s most vibrant new writing in English. Indeed, the country now churns out brilliant novelists the way its cricket team could once be counted on to produce a stream of the world’s best fast bowlers. The most recent addition to an already glittering roster is 25-year-old Ali Sethi, a precocious Harvard graduate who resides in Lahore.

In “The Wish Maker,” his first novel, Mr. Sethi explores modern Pakistan through the lives of Zaki and Samar, near-siblings who come of age together in 1990s Lahore before circumstances launch their lives on sharply divergent paths. Zaki, the book’s narrator, is a sensitive fatherless boy raised in a home bursting with strong-willed women. Samar, though technically Zaki’s aunt once removed, is for all intents and purposes an older sister. Their lives become shorthand for the decisive role family and gender play in shaping the landscape of life’s possibilities for even relatively privileged Pakistanis.

The book’s sharpest insights are reserved for matters of the heart. Mr. Sethi is especially alive to the emotional contours of young love, its modes of courtship, its methods of subterfuge. Samar, hopelessly smitten, seeks to win the affections of her love interest by gifting him imported cologne (Blue Jeans by Versace) and an audiotape filled with love songs (Meat Loaf, Mariah Carey, Bally Sagoo). Ostensible trips to the beauty salon to have her upper lip threaded, and to private classes to sharpen her math skills, serve as cover for trysts forbidden by a deeply conservative society. As detail piles upon detail, the reader cannot help but feel a mounting sense of dread, heightened by Samar’s conscription of the hapless Zaki as a co-conspirator.

Less convincing is the book’s historical reach. Though most of the action takes place in the 1990s, the story spans 60 years of Pakistani history. At times this makes the book groan under the burden of trying to include too much—the poetry of the iconic communist Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s famous promise to give the poor “food, clothing and shelter,” the importance to Pakistan of the three A’s, Army, Allah and America.

As though to make up for this less than rigorous plotting, Mr. Sethi’s prose, always lucid, often soars to illuminate the quotidian. A pre-wedding party dissolves into a “democracy of dance.” A well-groomed hotel manager has the manner of someone “who seemed to reside permanently in morning.” In its heyday in the 1950s, the cosmopolitan port city of Karachi, its cabarets filled with dancers from the Levant and Eastern Europe, appears poised to have the “vision of its successes become its totality.” The city’s subsequent decline is captured by a picture of black, swampy water stinking of fish in the afternoon, and surrounded by “territorial seagulls that were always in a panic.”

Throughout the book, Mr. Sethi is at pains to debunk the idea, not entirely uncommon in America, that Pakistan belongs to the Middle East. Lahore may boast a stadium named for Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi; the math teacher at Zaki’s elite public school may venerate the Arab contribution to his subject; the ban on alcohol in public places may drive the trendy to sheesha bars; the evening news may be read in Arabic in addition to Urdu. But culturally, Zaki and Samar’s Pakistan continues to cleave to idol-worshipping India. At the Lahore store where the duo borrows pirated Bollywood videos, the selection ranges from “Abhimaan” near the entrance to “Zanjeer” on the opposite wall. Spying the Indian actor Amrish Puri in an Indiana Jones movie evokes an instant gasp of recognition.

Mr. Sethi’s narrative may be at times forced, but all in all this remains a novel worth reading, a worm’s eye view of the kinds of lives that rarely make their way to the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington, D.C. based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).

The Wall Street Journal Asia 

Cultural Cartographer

Novelist Kamila Shamsie maps extremism from Kyoto to Karachi.

Burnt Shadows
By Kamila Shamsie
(Picador, 384 pages, $14)

By SADANAND DHUME

The Wall Street Journal

Islam-based parties saw their vote total cut in half.

By SADANAND DHUME

Against a backdrop of Korean missile launches and violent protests in Thailand, those looking for a spot of calm in Asia may alight on an unlikely candidate: Indonesia. Largely peaceful parliamentary elections last week — the third consecutive free elections since the end of Gen. Suharto’s 32-year rule in 1998 — reflect the strides made by a country that not so long ago was in danger of becoming a byword for chaos and random violence.

Most heartening of all has been the Indonesian electorate’s affirmation of its legendary moderation. The top three parties in the incoming parliament — President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democrat Party, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri’s left-leaning Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, and Suharto’s former political machine, Golkar — are all nonsectarian.

They stand for the country’s founding ideology, the live-and-let-live doctrine of Pancasila, and draw their supporters from each of the country’s five major faiths. Mr. Yudhoyono, known as the “gentle general” for his military past and avuncular manner, is the overwhelming favorite to win July’s presidential election.

Islam-based parties saw their cumulative vote-share shrink to about 20% from 38% five years ago. Take the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) — Indonesia’s version of the Muslim Brotherhood — which seeks to institute Shariah law. In the outgoing parliament, PKS and the Democrat Party were virtually tied; in the new parliament the president’s party, which deftly stole PKS’s signature issue, a promise of graft free governance, will seat about three times as many members.

Five years ago, when the Democrat Party won only 7% of the parliamentary vote, Mr. Yudhoyono was forced to rely on PKS support in parliament. This time around he can exclude PKS from the governing coalition and deny it the chance to grow under the umbrella of state power. Nevertheless, while PKS is down, it is still the fourth-largest party in parliament, thanks to the decline of other Islam-oriented parties. It controls several important governorships, including those of the populous provinces of West Java and North Sumatra.

In the short term, striking a deal with PKS may be expedient — it’s natural for any politician to eye the party’s disciplined voter base. But in the long term, as the experience of Pakistan and Sudan shows, trucking with Islamists is a high-risk gamble. A pathbreaking new report by the Libforall Foundation, an anti-extremist nonprofit co-founded by former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, notes that PKS continues its effort to infiltrate mainstream Islamic organizations, and to replace Indonesia’s tolerant, homespun Islam with an arid import from the Middle East.

It will take much more than a single election to dent PKS’s access to Saudi funding and its network of supportive mosques and madrassas, or to diminish the appeal for many newly educated Indonesians of its starkly utopian message: Islam is the solution.

Since it first burst into prominence five years ago, PKS has done little to dispel fears that it is the dark bloom at the heart of Indonesia’s democratic flowering. Party leaders are outspoken supporters of Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist group responsible for suicide bombing in Bali that killed hundreds. Last year, PKS piloted through parliament a harsh antipornography bill that legalizes vigilante violence and forces non-Islamic communities to conform to conservative Islamic norms.

The party’s attitudes toward women’s rights are captured by its obsession with dress codes and outspoken support for polygamy. In a country long famous for a pragmatic foreign policy, PKS makes emotive appeals to pan-Islamic causes such as Palestine. Among the party rank and file, 9/11 conspiracy theories, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are rampant.

If Indonesia is to fulfill its potential as a moderate and modern Muslim-majority democracy, mainstream politicians must not make the mistake of legitimizing this party. In the short term, this means scotching rumors that the PKS may snag the vice-presidential spot on President Yudhoyono’s ticket.

In the long term, it means recognizing the sobering reality that Indonesia’s long struggle with radical Islam is not about to end any time soon. That struggle will be won not by embracing PKS, but by working to banish it to the margins of political life, where it belongs.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels With a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION ASIA

Why are Indonesian clerics bent out of shape over yoga?

By SADANAND DHUME

For those who wonder what problems corruption-ridden and disaster-plagued Indonesia must tackle most urgently, the Indonesian Council of Ulema has the answer: yoga.

On Monday, the Council, a quasi-official grouping of 700 Islamic clerics, decreed that Muslims should shun the ancient Indian practice. The clerics worry that Hindu-influenced chants and invocations might weaken Muslim believers’ faith. The decree, though not legally binding, carries the force of moral authority, and, as is not uncommon in the Muslim world, the unspoken threat of enforcement by vigilantes.

The Council’s decision was not entirely unprecedented. Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council issued a similar ban last November. Nonetheless, it comes as a reminder of the challenges the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country faces as it struggles to nurture a fledgling democracy in the face of the increasingly undemocratic demands of fundamentalist Islam.

To be sure, Indonesia is no Saudi Arabia. The majority of the country’s Muslims — 88% of its 235 million people — practice a gentle folk Islam infused with elements of the archipelago’s long Animist-Hindu-Buddhist past. The country’s constitution is nonsectarian. Overt legal discrimination against non-Muslims, the cornerstone of government policy in neighboring Malaysia, is rare. Most people live in harmony.

But in recent years, Indonesian fundamentalists — including hardline clerics, politicians from the Prosperous Justice Party and vigilante groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front — have grown increasingly assertive. These groups don’t always agree with each other on tactics, but have broadly similar worldviews. They have spearheaded the persecution of the minority Ahmadiyya Muslim community, the passage of a so-called antipornography bill that encourages vigilantism and discriminates against non-Muslim cultures, and a regulation that forces Christian schools to offer religious instruction on Islam.

Put bluntly, Islamic fundamentalism puts a crimp on Indonesia’s otherwise impressive democratic flowering. It’s at odds with individual rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. In a mature democracy, you wouldn’t find a government body called the Coordinating Board for Monitoring Mystical Beliefs in Society outside the pages of a novel. In Indonesia, it helps the government determine which groups are labeled “heretical” or “deviant.”

After two successful national elections since the end of Suharto’s 32-year-reign in 1998 — and with another due this year — Indonesians are justifiably proud of having mastered the processes of democracy. But the gains may be chimerical unless they can defend their ability to publicly scrutinize, criticize — and, if necessary, mock — bad ideas that come from Islam as readily as those drawn from a political manifesto.

Since the 1970s, Indonesian Islam has been stripped of its legendary tolerance toward other faiths by a combination of rapid urbanization, compulsory religious education in government schools, and the efforts of Middle Eastern and homegrown purifiers of the faith. In recent years, this Arabization of Indonesian Islam has gathered pace as globalization has brought the religious and political discourse (often indistinguishable from each other) of Riyadh and Tehran to Jakarta. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims — perhaps between 10% and 15% — embrace the fundamentalist notion that the cause of their backwardness lies not in a failure to embrace modernity but in a failure to fully embrace their faith. Many more, while not full-blown fundamentalists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to these ideas.

Indonesia’s fundamentalists have shown themselves to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic politicians (including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono), courts and police allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square — by driving Playboy magazine out of Jakarta, or by attacking secular nationalists at a high-profile rally for religious freedom. Meanwhile cultural norms put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds. Hardliners can be chided for distorting the faith, but an unspoken code of self-censorship ensures that no one ever questions the faith itself. The kind of robust debate between believers and unbelievers that marks most democracies is notable for its absence in Indonesia.

To put this in perspective, consider that Indians are free to debate the caste-centered and sexist aspects of Hindu scripture. The Spaniard who believes in contraception and gay rights can flatly declare that he doesn’t care what the Bible says or what the Pope thinks. But an Indonesian who publicly expresses similar sentiments about the Quran or the prophet Muhammad immediately invites threats of violence.

This constrained national discourse cedes fundamentalists the moral high ground, a crucial advantage in this battle of ideas. Unless Indonesians can find a way to broaden the debate, to allow purely secular and even antireligious arguments to set up stall in the public square, they should not be surprised to find themselves in a land where clerics set the agenda, both in yoga class and outside it.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels With a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, May 2009).

dhumejihadinsouthasia

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Ayesha Jalal, Harvard University Press, 400 pages, $29.95

The November assault on Mumbai by ten heavily-armed members of the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba came as a reminder, if one was needed, of South Asia’s trouble with radical Islam. Home to about a third of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the region also houses a plethora of violent groups committed to imposing an austere interpretation of their faith on believers and non-believers alike. Many of these—including the L-e-T and its occasional partner-in arms, Jaish-e-Mohammed—sprung up only in the 1990s. But as Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistan-born historian who teaches at Tufts University in Massachusetts, points out in her new book, in South Asia the intellectual pedigree for violence committed in the name of faith stretches back not decades but centuries.

At the heart of Partisans of Allah is an earnest attempt to understand the concept of jihad. In common parlance it means holy war against non-Muslims, but the word itself—as Ms. Jalal takes great pains to stress—simply signifies striving for a worthy or ennobling cause. Indeed, according to Ms. Jalal, jihad is the core principle of Islamic ethics. At least in theory, it encompasses more than suicide attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir or truck bombs targeting luxury hotels. A student’s endeavor to read a book, a patient’s suffering in a hospital, or a farmer’s effort to increase his crop yield may all be construed as types of jihad.

Usually, this sort of sophistry is the province of apologists for radical Islamic violence eager to explain it away as antithetical to the spirit of the faith. At times Ms. Jalal tilts in this direction—the word “infidel” is used without irony, and a tinge of hagiography enters her description of a group of 19th-century jihadists who fought the Sikhs in the Northwest Frontier. However, to her credit, Ms. Jalal is not concerned with whitewashing the less savory interpretations of jihad, but with ensuring that the term is understood with all its nuance, and in a proper historical context.

Toward this effort, a parade of theologians, scholars and legists pass across the book’s pages. In the 16th century, the liberal policies of the Mughal emperor Akbar—who abolished discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims and strove to treat all faiths equally—earned the ire of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624). Sirhindi claimed that Islam and Hinduism were fundamentally incompatible, and that one could flourish only at the expense of the other. A prolific letter writer and a widely respected Sufi scholar, Sirhindi is credited with the revival of orthodox Islamic practice in India after Akbar’s death.

Of a similar cast of mind was Delhi’s Shah Waliullah (1703-62), the most influential Islamic scholar of his time. His blueprint to extend Islamic law outwards from the family to the local polity to (eventually) the world resonates with radical Muslims to this day. Waliullah shared teachers in what is today Saudi Arabia with Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the austere strain of Islam that bears his name. Waliullah believed in a vast Hindu and Shia conspiracy against Sunni orthodoxy, and sought to ban both the Hindu festival of color, Holi, and Muharram, the Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Waliullah popularized a saying of the prophet according to which participating in jihad was superior to fasting or praying for a month. In a similar vein, extrapolating from the history of seventh-century Arabia, Waliullah declared war booty legitimate for Muslims.

The cleric’s influence outlived him by centuries. Between 1826 and 1831, Waliullah’s most famous disciple, Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly in north India, led a bloody, though ultimately unsuccessful, jihad in the Northwest frontier against the Sikhs. Even today, Ahmad’s grave is a sacred site visited regularly by modern day jihadists, who have declared war on, among other things, film, music and education for girls.

It was only under British colonial rule—under attack from both Western scholars and Christian missionaries—that prominent Indian Muslims began to reinterpret jihad in less violent terms. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), the erudite founder of Aligarh’s famous Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental college, argued that Muslims owed their loyalty to the Raj as long as their religious practices were not interfered with. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya sect, felt that jihad as warfare against non-believers had lost its relevance in the modern world, and only contributed toward tarnishing the image of Islam. The Ahmadiyyas instead channeled their efforts toward good works, especially education.

At the outset, Ms. Jalal sets out to breach what she calls the “artificial walls” separating an academic and a general readership. In this, unfortunately, she fails. A potentially gripping read is turned into drudgery by a prose style both dry and somewhat discombobulated. The exception is Ms. Jalal’s examination of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), who—along with the Egyptians Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood—is widely regarded as the 20th century’s preeminent radical Islamic ideologue.

An admirer of Waliullah, Maududi too believed that warfare for Islam was an exalted form of piety—that fighting resolutely on the battlefield was superior to staying home and praying for 60 years. He saw Islam as a “revolutionary ideology,” which seeks to “alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” The faith’s violent history was nothing to be apologetic about. Indeed Islam’s strength lay in the sword’s ability to tear away the veil of misunderstanding that characterizes non-Muslims. For Maududi, art, painting and music belong to jahiliyya, the state of barbarism Muslims ascribe to pre-Islamic Arabs. Apostasy from Islam was akin to treason and therefore punishable by death.

Like Islamic radicals everywhere, Maududi was obsessed with keeping women in their proper place. They were to be respected, but only in the role of nurturing mother, doting sister, devoted wife or dutiful daughter. He believed that menstruation made women physically and mentally infirm, and that they must be excluded from the public sphere altogether. Non-Muslims, inherently unreliable, had no place in the administration of the Islamic state.

In 1953, barely six years after the creation of Pakistan, Maududi joined an agitation to have Ahmadiyyas declared non-Muslim. Their alleged crimes: the veneration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, albeit a lesser one than Mohammed, and the rejection of armed jihad. In 1974, five years before he died, Maududi witnessed the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, eager to co-opt the radical Islamic element in Pakistani society, finally accede to his demands.

As a work of scholarship, Partisans of Allah is not meant to be prescriptive, but its subject matter places it squarely at the heart of the policy debate on how best to handle the rise of radical Islam. For one, it debunks the notion—especially popular on the left—that radical Islamic violence can be explained entirely in the secular language of historical injustice, territorial boundaries and political aspirations. In fact, religious ideas, as attested to by the continuing influence of Waliullah and Maududi, matter profoundly.

Second, and again contrary to conventional wisdom, criticism and firmness will do more than praise and concessions on points of principle to ensure that a modern, good neighborly interpretation of Islam triumphs over the radical Islamic alternative. It’s no coincidence that British rule fostered the relatively moderate Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whereas 60 years of Pakistani independence have thrown up the likes of Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed of the L-e-T and Masood Azhar of the J-e-M.

Sadanand Dhume is the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

YaleGlobal

Global economic integration depends largely on how India and the world deal with Pakistan and its radical Islam.

Sadanand Dhume

	The face of nihilism: Mumbai’s iconic Taj hotel burns after terror attack: captured attacker (inset), alleged Pakistani member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Ajmal Amir Kasab

NEW DELHI: Even for India, which typically loses many more lives to terrorism in a year than most countries do in a decade, the November 26-28 attacks on Mumbai marked a watershed. For the first time, foreigners – Americans, Japanese, Israelis and Germans, among others – were among the nearly 200 dead and 295 wounded. The scale of the attacks, carried out in 10 places by 10 heavily armed jihadists, made the 2001 terrorist assault on India’s parliament appear almost trivial by comparison. In its audacity and ruthlessness, as well as in the wall-to-wall international coverage it attracted, the assault on Mumbai brought to mind 9/11 in New York and Washington, the bloody Chechen takeover of a school in Beslan in 2004 and the 2005 London suicide bombings.

In many ways, the victims of the carnage in Mumbai represent the integration of markets, peoples and ideas captured by that catchall word – globalization. Both the hotels attacked, the Taj and the Oberoi, are mainstays of high-end business travel. If a global icon – say Bono or Bill Gates or Bill Clinton – has spent a night in India’s financial capital, odds are that he stayed in one or the other. The nearby Nariman House, home to the local branch of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox Jewish movement, served as an informal way station for young Israelis, familiar figures on the tourist trails of Asia. Leopold Cafe, where jihadists lobbed a hand grenade and sprayed diners with automatic weapon fire, has long been a backpacker favorite. All in all, the odds of the victims having multiple entry stamps in their passports, friends from more than one country on Facebook and a credit card welcome across borders in their wallets were incomparably higher than in any previous terrorist attack in India.

If the city of Mumbai symbolizes the hopeful face of globalization in South Asia – standing for pluralism, enterprise and openness to ideas and investment – then the Pakistan-trained jihadists responsible for the carnage represent its darker twin. Carved out of British India in 1947 as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, Pakistan has long been a magnet for pan-Islamic radicals from around the world, among them Abdullah Azzam (1941-89), the ideological father of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad, Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their comrade in arms Mullah Omar of the Taliban. A plethora of local groups, among them Lashkar-e-Taiba, suspected to be behind the Mumbai attacks, one of whose alleged operatives, Ajmal Amir Kasab, was captured by Indian authorities, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, though organizationally distinct from Al Qaeda, share the same toxic ideology. The L-e-T was among the jihadist groups that banded together in 1998 under the umbrella of bin Laden’s Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

Along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is the world’s pre-eminent exporter of radical Sunni fervor. The country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), part of the army, in a sense pioneered the yoking together of modern-weapons training with pan-Islamic religious brainwashing, albeit initially with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. Many Pakistanis are moderate; nonetheless sympathy for radical Islam runs deep. A 2007 poll showed bin Laden with an approval rating of 46 percent, higher than that of many of Pakistani politicians. The radical Islamic outlook – obsessed with the glories of Islamic civilization, hostile toward non-Muslims and non-conformist women, and convinced that Jews and Americans are perpetually plotting against their faith – is shared by many who may formally disapprove of Al Qaeda’s tactics.

Until the most recent incidents in Mumbai, the consensus view in both New Delhi and Washington was that India – with its robust democracy, large middle class and world-beating companies – could sprint toward development despite its dysfunctional neighbor. But the capacity of a handful of terrorists to paralyze life in Mumbai and inflict several billion dollars worth of damage raise profound questions about the basic premise underlying India’s reach for great power status. It should give pause to even the hardiest optimist. Put simply, the world can no longer be certain that a failing Pakistan won’t take India down with it or, at the very least, hobble its efforts to catch up with East Asia.

For India, then, the challenge is not merely to do a better job of combating terrorism within its borders, or to attempt to assuage public anger through a token diplomatic tit-for-tat. New Delhi must also find a way to work with the international community to change the very nature of the Pakistani state. A good neighborly Pakistan will be one that does more than make appropriate noises after every fresh terrorist outrage. It will be a country that holds itself responsible for acts of violence originating on its soil, renounces grandiose extra-territorial ambitions in Indian Kashmir and Afghanistan, and focuses its energies on improving the abysmal levels of health care and education that rank it 136th of 177 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index.

A minimal first step will be to show good faith in what Islamabad now calls a shared fight against terrorism by handing over to Indian authorities Pakistan residents with civilian blood on their hands. Heading the list: the L-e-T leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and the Indian mafia don Dawood Ibrahim, a Karachi resident who orchestrated the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed more than 250 people. Ibrahim is also suspected of using his underworld network to aid the most recent attacks. Terrorist camps on Pakistan territory, including those in the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir, must be closed in a way that is verifiable by the international community. Madrassas that have long stoked radicalism in the region – including Jamia Binoria in Karachi and Darul Uloom Haqqania outside Peshawar – must be given a credible ultimatum to either reform or be shuttered.

None of this is possible without dollops of international aid. But aid alone, however well-intentioned, cannot alleviate the problem unless properly directed. More pressing than the need for health clinics and new schools, or even support for Pakistan’s shaky democratic institutions, is military and educational reform. Over the medium to long term, Pakistan must cease to be what the Singaporean scholar Tan Tai Yong has called a “garrison state.” Though the country spends a relatively modest 3.2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, according to Ayesha Siddiqua, an expert on the Pakistan military, its budget, official and unofficial, accounts for as much as 30 percent of government spending. Its army is beyond the control of its putative civilian masters, and reforming or re-orienting the ISI will be impossible as long as Pakistan’s generals continue to wield the kind of clout and wealth that would make a 1970s Latin American strongman blush.

Education reform will have to go much deeper than providing sorely needed infrastructure and boosting enrollment, especially among girls – only about one in three Pakistani women can read and write. The world needs to understand how Pakistanis view history, and find a way to strike a balance between a justified pride in Islam and a celebration of militarism and conquest. Madrassa students ought to be exposed to art, music and literature to see a world beyond the black and white of Koranic injunctions.

Needless to say, none of these measures are easy to implement. But as the carnage in Mumbai shows, and as jihadists the world over appear to instinctively grasp, our rapidly shrinking planet is not large enough for global capitalism and global radical Islam to exist side by side indefinitely.

Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, DC, and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic,” a travelogue about radical Islam. Click here to read an excerpt. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

 

 

 

The Wall Street Journal

Years of appeasing terrorists has made the problem worse.

By SADANAND DHUME

As the story of the carnage in Mumbai unfolds, it is tempting to dismiss it as merely another sorry episode in India’s flailing effort to combat terrorism. Over the past four years, Islamist groups have struck in New Delhi, Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, among other places. The death toll from terrorism — not counting at least 119 killed in Mumbai on Wednesday and Thursday — stands at over 4,000, which gives India the dubious distinction of suffering more casualties since 2004 than any country except Iraq.

The attacks highlight India’s particular vulnerability to terrorist violence. But they are also a warning to any country that values what Mumbai symbolizes for Indians: pluralism, enterprise and an open society. Put simply, India’s failure to protect its premier city offers a textbook example for fellow democracies on how not to deal with militant Islam.

The litany of errors is long. Unlike their counterparts in the West, or in East Asia, India’s perpetually squabbling leaders have failed to put national security above partisan politics. The country’s antiterrorism effort is reactive and episodic rather than proactive and sustained. Its public discourse on Islam oscillates between crude, anti-Muslim bigotry and mindless sympathy for largely unjustified Muslim grievance-mongering. Its failure to either charm or cow its Islamist-friendly neighbors — Pakistan and Bangladesh — reveals a limited grasp of statecraft.

Finally, India’s inability to modernize its 150-million strong Muslim population, the second largest after Indonesia’s, has spawned a community that is ill-equipped to seize new economic opportunities and susceptible to militant Islam’s faith-based appeal.

To be sure, not all of India’s problems are of its own making. In Pakistan, it has a neighbor founded on the basis of religion, whose government — along with those of Iran and Saudi Arabia — has long been one of the world’s principal exporters of militant Islamic fervor.

Bangladesh also hosts a panoply of jihadist groups. As in Pakistan, public sympathy with the militant Islamic worldview forestalls any meaningful effort against those who regularly use the country as a sanctuary to plan mayhem in India. America’s unsuccessful Pakistan policy — too many carrots and too few sticks — has also contributed to a fundamentally unstable neighborhood.

Nonetheless, the reflexive Indian response to most every act of terrorism is to apportion blame rather than to seek a solution that will prevent, or at least minimize, its recurrence. Even Indonesia — a still-poor Muslim-majority nation where sympathy for militants runs deeper than it does in India — has done an infinitely better job of recognizing that the protection of citizens’ lives is any government’s first responsibility. A superbly trained, federal antiterrorism force called Detachment 88 has ensured that country has not suffered a terrorist attack in more than three years.

By contrast, India’s leaders — who invariably swan around with armed guards paid for by the taxpayer — can’t even agree on a legal framework to keep the country safe. On taking office in 2004, one of the first acts of the ruling Congress Party was to scrap a federal antiterrorism law that strengthened witness protection and enhanced police powers.

The Congress Party has stalled similar state-level legislation in Gujarat, which is ruled by the opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. And it was a Congress government that kowtowed to fundamentalist pressure and made India the first country to ban Mumbai-born Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” in 1988.

The BJP hasn’t exactly distinguished itself either. In 1999, the hijacking of an Indian aircraft to then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan led a BJP government to release three hardened militants, including Omar Sheikh Saeed, the former London School of Economics student who would go on to murder Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

More recently, the BJP, driven by tribal religious solidarity and a penchant for conspiracy theories, has failed to demand the same tough treatment for alleged Hindu terrorists as it does for Muslims. Minor parties, especially those dependent on the Muslim vote, compete to earn fundamentalists’ favor.

In sum, the Indian approach to terrorism has been consistently haphazard and weak-kneed. When faced with fundamentalist demands, India’s democratically elected leaders have regularly preferred caving to confrontation on a point of principle. The country’s institutions and culture have abetted a widespread sense of Muslim separateness from the national mainstream. The country’s diplomats and soldiers have failed to stabilize the neighborhood. The ongoing drama in Mumbai underscores the price both Indians and non-Indians caught unawares must now pay.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

The Wall Street Journal Asia

Coming of Age in Malaysia

Educated and wealthy, but of low social status.

Evening Is the Whole Day
By Preeta Samarasan
(Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $24)

By SADANAND DHUME

As bizarre tourism slogans go, few achieve the precise balance of concision and confusion of “Malaysia, Truly Asia.” Leaving aside the notion that other lands — say Japan or Vietnam or Indonesia — are somehow deficient in their Asianness, the central premise of Malaysia’s hard sell to the world is the notion that it hosts, in effortless harmony, three of the continent’s great cultures: Malay, Chinese and Indian.

The reality, as readers of Preeta Samarasan’s exquisitely crafted debut novel will discover, could not be more different. “Evening is the Whole Day” tells the story of a prosperous Tamil family, the Rajasekharans, who live in Ipoh, about 200 kilometers north of Kuala Lumpur. The choice of an Indian family is telling. The father is a “topshot lawyer.” The family occupies the big house on their lane, and inhabits a world of Oxford-inflected accents, gleaming Volvos and single malt Scotch. But they also belong to the community that, not to put too fine a point on it, is at the bottom of Malaysia’s racially divided totem pole.

On top, of course, are the Malay Muslims, who, though they make up only about 60% of the population, have jerry-built an elaborate system of preferences that ensures their dominance of national life. This system — which, depending on your point of view, is either a clever piece of social engineering or a kind of ethnoreligious apartheid — makes race as important a determinant of a person’s life chances as talent, ambition or hard work.

Armed with family wealth and an English education, the topshot lawyer Mr. Rajasekharan dreams of a political career in a country newly freed from British rule. But the Malay-Chinese race riots of 1969 scotch those ambitions by decisively turning Malaysia away from merit and pluralism. By 1980, when the bulk of the story unfolds, the Rajasekharan children are growing up in a land where a person’s odds of getting into university, securing a promotion in a government job, or acquiring an apartment with a reasonable down payment depend, in no small measure, on the right to check a box that says bumiputera, or “son of the soil.” The Chinese, entrepreneurial and hardworking as the stereotype goes, find a way to prosper despite the odds. The Indians, many of whom are descendants of rubber plantation workers imported by the British, tend to languish.

Much of the drama unfolds through the divergent trajectories of two teenage girls living under the same roof. Uma, the family’s brilliant eldest daughter, has snagged a scholarship to Columbia University in New York, and with it the promise of escape from her dysfunctional family. A less hopeful future awaits the servant girl Chellam, whose meager dreams are matched by the meanness of her circumstances.

Ms. Samarasan’s prose is always self-assured and frequently dazzling. She likens petty cruelty to “forcing a cat to walk through a puddle.” The pain of infidelity comes not from the mere knowledge of it, but from the indelible image of a husband buying a big white bawal fish for his mistress to steam with ginger and spring onions. The impact of an awful truth can shoot through a child “like an eel in black water.” Ms. Samarasan is also slyly humorous: It’s hard not to laugh out loud at her portrayals of an Elvis-impersonating Hindu shaman and a gossipy fantasist of a neighbor known as Kooky Rooky.

The novel, at the end, illuminates a fascinating country whose representation in literature remains scant. It expands our understanding of the sprawling Indian diaspora. Most of all, though, it leaves you with something achieved by only the best fiction — a sense that your world has somehow, almost imperceptibly, been permanently enlarged.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

Forbes.com

COMMENTARY

How will Islamists react to the president-elect?

Sadanand Dhume

Four days after America elected president a man who spent a chunk of his childhood in Indonesia, an Indonesian firing squad took aim at three of those behind the world’s deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11: the 2002 bombings that killed 202 people on the resort island of Bali.

The execution of Imam Samudra and brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas caps one of the world’s least recognized and most successful anti-terrorism efforts. Over the past six years, an elite Indonesian police squad called Detachment 88, trained and funded in part by America and Australia, has rounded up about 400 violent Islamists. Thanks to its efforts, the world’s most populous Muslim country has not experienced a terrorist bombing since a second attack on Bali in 2005.

But though the demise of the Bali bombers offers some closure, Indonesia is also a vivid reminder of how a country can win the battle against terrorism while losing ground in the wider war against Islamism, the totalitarian ideology that seeks to order every aspect of society and the state according to the medieval norms enshrined in sharia law.

Barely a week before, spurred by the efforts of the fundamentalist Justice and Prosperity Party, Indonesia’s version of the Muslim Brotherhood, parliament rammed through a draconian anti-pornography bill whose broadly worded restrictions on clothing and artistic expression potentially criminalize Indonesia’s non-Islamic cultures. Clerical diktats and mob violence have forced the government to effectively ban the Ahmadiyya, a tiny sect considered heretical by some Muslims for revering their founder alongside the prophet Mohammed. In dozens of districts across the archipelago, sharia-inspired regulations have spawned Taliban-lite vice squads, mandatory dress codes for women and random Koran reading tests for students and couples seeking a marriage license.

For Americans of a certain persuasion, (rightly) contemptuous of the Bush administration’s ham-fisted approach to the Muslim world, Barack Hussein Obama is expected to turn the page on a chapter they would rather forget. The election of a black man whose father and step-father were Muslim, who opposed the war in Iraq from the start and who promises to shut down the al-Qaida holding-pen in Guantanamo Bay will, we are endlessly assured, calm Muslim anger and strengthen moderate voices.

But while it’s indeed true that your friendly neighborhood Islamist in Jakarta or Bandung–or indeed in Karachi or Cairo–will find it much harder to demonize BHO than he did GWB, to imagine that Islamists view the world through an American prism betrays a solipsism nearly as delusional as the one that claimed American troops in Iraq would be greeted with candy and flowers.

Those who attack hapless Ahmadiyyas and publicly mourn the Bali bombers as martyrs–like those who raze girls’ schools in Afghanistan and target Buddhist monks in southern Thailand–aren’t merely at odds with America’s support for Israeli settlements in the West Bank or the excesses of Abu Ghraib, but with the very idea of modernity. They seek a society where women are clearly subservient to men, where collective responsibilities trump individual rights, where freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry are curbed, and where non-Muslims are (at best) protected peoples rather than equal citizens. They are backed by powerful clerics, a river of petrodollars from the Gulf and a culture that places religious discourse above the reach of secular criticism.

For Indonesia, then, as for the rest of the world, neither the long overdue execution of the Bali bombers nor the impending elevation of Barack Obama alter this reality. The new president is indeed better equipped than his predecessor to wage a war of ideas. Whether he can win it, though, remains to be seen.

Sadanand Dhume is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist.

dhume-elson

Far Eastern Economic Review

by R. E. Elson, Cambridge University Press, 394 pages, $105

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

Ten years after the end of Gen. Suharto’s 32-year reign, Indonesians can look back on their achievements with some satisfaction. Democracy has taken firm root: Heading into presidential and parliamentary elections in 2009, nobody seriously questions the country’s capacity to transfer power by the ballot. Separatist movements in Aceh and Papua have been quelled. Thanks to tenacious police work, the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah is on the run. An ambitious decentralization program has settled into place without, as feared, throwing the country into administrative chaos. The press, once a government poodle, is now a pitbull. Even the economy—though sluggish compared to the go-go 1990s—has recovered from the worst of the Asian financial crisis. By way of comparison, in terms of democracy Indonesia is better off than China; in terms of development it remains ahead of India.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that until the 20th century the very word Indonesia—let alone the idea of an archipelagic state in its present form—had little meaning. As the Australian scholar R. E. Elson recalls in his meticulously researched new history, for the Dutch it was the Netherlands East Indies, the tropical Netherlands or, at times, the fanciful sounding Insulinde (the islands of the Indies). Non Dutch travelers often preferred the vague Eastern Seas or Eastern Islands, or the nakedly derivative Indian Archipelago.

Ruled by a relatively minor European power, one that was stingier with education and administrative responsibility for the natives than either the British or the French, Indonesians were slow to develop a national consciousness and an independence movement. Budi Utomo, or Glorious Endeavor, the association of medical students whose formation marks the country’s first tepid nationalist stirrings, was born in 1908. It took another 20 years for activists at a youth conference in Batavia to famously pledge their allegiance to “one homeland, one people and one language.”

At the time, the slogan represented aspiration more than reality. Portions of the homeland in question—including devoutly Muslim Aceh and Hindu Bali—had only recently been stitched together by force of Dutch arms. That the fiercely Christian Moluccans who played an outsize role in the colonial army, the refined Hinduized royals of central Java and the animist tribals of Borneo constituted a single people would have been news to most Ambonese, Solonese and Dayaks. And while the version of Malay that would be called Bahasa Indonesia already linked the trading ports of the archipelago, its usage beyond its Sumatran heartland was patchy. Suffice to say, the grandmothers, and most likely the mothers, of the Sundanese, Minangkabau and Minahasans who attended the Batavia youth conference would have been unintelligible to each other.

Indeed, when Indonesia declared independence from the Dutch in 1945—prodded by the occupying Japanese who had invaded three years earlier—its leaders agreed on little more than the desire to rule themselves. Centralists and federalists jostled over the balance of power between Jakarta and regional governments. Communists and non-Communists differed on land distribution and the nature of the economy. Javanese and non-Javanese held incompatible ideas of the cultural basis for national unity. Ethnic chauvinists and liberal cosmopolitans subscribed to opposite views on the status of the Chinese minority. Military men and civilians disputed the precise role and function of the army.

However, what Mr. Elson calls “the greatest and most enduring division” concerned the role of Islam in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The dominant group at independence, nationalists led by Sukarno, believed in a modern, multiethnic and multireligious state in which people of all faiths would be treated equally. For Islamists such as Mohammad Natsir (1908-93), the point of banishing the Dutch was not merely to fulfill a vague longing for freedom, but to create the opportunity to be more fully Muslim—in an environment shaped by Shariah and a polity that explicitly guaranteed Muslim dominance.

Over six decades Indonesia has seen six presidents. It has swung from Sukarno’s permanent revolution to Suharto’s dour development state to the free-for-all of the post-Suharto era known as reformasi. Along the way, it has experienced one of Asia’s most infamous pogroms, the slaughter of 500,000 suspected communists in 1965-66; perhaps its sharpest economic setback, the 1998 collapse that led to Suharto’s downfall; and the most devastating natural disaster in living memory, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 225,000 people, most of them Indonesian. Through all this, the issue of Islamism, though appearing to fade between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, has refused to disappear.

Mr. Elson does not dwell on this detail. Indonesia, as he points out, has outgrown both the rhetorical excesses of the Sukarno era and the development-at-any-cost ambition of Suharto’s New Order regime. In their place he sees “modesty of purpose, pragmatism in attitude and gradualism in achievement.” For the first time, a country whose independent history has only known competing forms of collectivism—both Sukarno and Suharto forbade dissent and emphasized unity—has opened the door to a culture of individual rights. Should Indonesia’s democracy continue to mature, as Mr. Elson appears to believe is likely, it will gradually overcome all discrimination based on race or religion, celebrate pluralism in thought and culture, and reflexively respect freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

Needless to say, a sunny view of Indonesia’s future is not entirely unwarranted. Compared to the rest of the Muslim world—with the possible exception of secular Turkey and Tunisia—it remains a beacon of hope and moderation. The country’s cosmopolitan elites share an unselfconscious broadmindedness; the masses have historically favored nonsectarian parties over Islamists. Compared to their counterparts in South Asia, let alone those in the Middle East, Indonesian women enjoy a higher status in society and greater access to education and careers. In outspoken defenders of religious and artistic freedom such as former President Abdurrahman Wahid, the country boasts Muslim leaders who are moderate by any yardstick and not merely by the special one usually applied to Islam.

And yet it’s equally easy to take a less sanguine view. The most reassuring aspects of contemporary Indonesia are essentially holdovers from the past; the most disturbing belong firmly to the present. If seen through the prism of pluralism—a thaw in attitudes toward the Chinese minority notwithstanding—the growth of orthodox practice and Islamist politics have already shrunk the big tent the country once represented. A generation ago, an ambitious, public spirited Christian could aim for virtually any job in the country. Today the sectarianism fostered by organizations such as the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), and an accompanying sense of majority entitlement, have led to de facto barriers to advancement for non-Muslims in the civil service, state-owned companies and, albeit to a lesser extent, the higher reaches of the military.

State-sponsored migration has fatally altered the demographics of traditionally Christian or animist regions such as the Moluccas and Papua. In many of the most devoutly Islamic parts of the country, local authorities have begun to experiment with Shariah, complete with vice squads, mandatory dress codes and compulsory Koran reading. Vigilante groups attack “unauthorized” churches, heterodox Ahmadiyya Muslim mosques and secular liberal gatherings with impunity. In parliament and in politics at large, the fundamentalist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood, beavers away at diminishing women’s rights, cultural diversity and the ability to respond firmly to Islamist intimidation and violence.

In short, the jury is still out on the idea of Indonesia. It may well evolve, as Mr. Elson and others of an optimistic bent suggest, as a benign liberal democracy with a strong commitment to human rights. But by the same token, the alternative, a state dominated by Islamist collectivism, in which nonconformist women, non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims are effectively second-class citizens, can hardly be ruled out.