Op-eds

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).

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).

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.

Forbes.com

COMMENTARY

Sadanand Dhume

As someone whose politics lean toward the right, John McCain’s presidential campaign has been painful to watch. Up against a calm, cerebral and preternaturally articulate opponent, he has given us the moose-hunting mother of five, the loutish Joe the Plumber and, as if to win an impossible dare, the even less coherent Tito the Builder.

So, while there’s no question in my mind as to who is the better man–what was taught at the Hanoi Hilton can’t be learned at Harvard Law–I have grudgingly acknowledged that the Democrats have fielded the better candidate. His policy positions appear to have been thought through more thoroughly. The searing symbolism of his candidacy, its capacity to both reaffirm and expand the idea of America, is impossible to deny.

Therefore, like most people I know–and, if the polls are to be believed, most people on the planet–I find myself rooting for an Obama victory on Tuesday. But there’s one thing that puts a damper on my enthusiasm: the creepy, cultish odor exuded by the One’s most fervent fans.

Take, for example, Facebook, where as of this writing 2,718 people have enrolled in a group called, I kid you not, “Until Nov. 4, my middle name is Hussein too.” What precisely motivates John Hussein Koppinger of Lexington and Moira Hussein McLaughlin of San Diego and hundreds more like them I shall never know. But apparently, it has something to do with taking a stand against “fear mongering.” (The logic here is circular: If there’s nothing wrong with the middle name Hussein, which of course there isn’t, then why should its use be verboten?)

The middle name movement, though harmless in itself, is symptomatic of something larger. It’s hard to think of another candidate in living memory–certainly not Kerry or Gore or Clinton (Bill or Hillary), let alone either of the Bushes or the almost-forgotten Dole–who has inspired such slavish devotion. It’s not enough to agree with Obama’s position on Iraq, or to admire the lucidness of his prose. For the true believer, supporting him takes on the quality of a religious experience. His name is my name; I am He.

It follows that to criticize Obama at all–to bring up his slender resume, his shady associations, his solipsistic belief in the power of personal diplomacy–is to provoke not merely a political argument but a theological one. You’re as likely to win it as you are to convince an al-Qaida acolyte that a good editor could improve the Koran, or a Sarah Palin groupie that there’s nothing remotely intelligent about intelligent design.

This, in itself, does not negate the logic of Obama’s candidacy, especially when set against eight shabby years of George W. Bush, or the sequence of weird gyrations that have passed for the McCain campaign. Nonetheless, the cult of Obama feels, dare I say it, foreign to the quiet pragmatism that has long been the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon democracy and, one might argue, the secret of its enormous success.

It means that when the results pour in I’ll be cheering for Obama, but as E.M. Forster did for democracy: with two (soft) cheers rather than three full-throated ones.

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

YaleGlobal

Democracy remains highly vulnerable to determined anti-democratic movements

Sadanand Dhume

	Resist infidels: Conservative Indonesian Islamic women demonstrate in favor of Sharia law that would prevent infidels from insulting the Prophet

WASHINGTON: Against the backdrop of carnage at Islamabad’s Marriott hotel, terrorist attacks on the US embassy in San’a and the Indian embassy in Kabul, and the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Algeria, few places in the Muslim world appear as placid as Indonesia. It’s been three years since the country’s last major terrorist bombing; Al Qaeda’s local affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah, is on the run. Democracy has blossomed: Parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for 2009 will be the third consecutive free ballot since the end of General Suharto’s 32-year reign in 1998. Both the president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and the principal opposition leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, reflect the principles of tolerance and inclusiveness bequeathed to the country by its founding fathers at independence. The Indonesian press is Southeast Asia’s freest, its cinema the region’s most vibrant.

Beneath the surface, though, Indonesian society is in ferment. Earlier this year, clerical diktats and repeated mob violence forced the government to effectively ban the Ahmadiyya, a beleaguered Islamic sect considered “heretical” by some Muslims for revering its founder alongside the prophet Mohammed. In June, in an incident rich with irony, members of the vigilante group Islamic Defenders Front, wielding bamboo staves, attacked peaceful demonstrators rallying for religious freedom at the National Monument, an iconic symbol of Indonesian unity. Dozens of district governments have enacted sharia-inspired regulations including mandatory dress codes, compulsory Koran reading tests for students and couples seeking to marry, and vice squads loosely modeled on those in Saudi Arabia and Taliban-era Afghanistan. In September, protesters from the Hindu island of Bali took to the streets to force parliament to postpone passage of a so-called anti-pornography bill whose broadly worded restrictions on clothing and artistic expression could potentially penalize Balinese culture and jeopardize its tourism-dependent economy. Bali contributes the lion’s share of Indonesia’s tourism earnings, estimated at $5.3 billion in 2007.

Behind the anti-pornography bill stands the fundamentalist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), the dark bloom at the heart of Indonesia’s democratic flowering. Modeled on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and fired by the same utopian dream of bringing all aspects of society and the state in line with the allegedly God-given commands of sharia law, the party subscribes to an assertive credo increasingly visible from Morocco to Mindanao: Islam is the solution.

Powered by highly motivated cadres, aided by an image of sea-green incorruptibility and helped along by the disunity and ideological incoherence of mainstream parties, the PKS has taken just 10 years to transform itself from a bit player to a major force in national politics. Currently it’s the seventh largest party in parliament and holds three seats in President Yudhoyono’s cabinet. Trained party cadres multiplied twelvefold from 60,000 in 1999 to 720,000 in 2007. Earlier this year, the PKS capped a run of local and provincial electoral victories by claiming the governorships of populous West Java and North Sumatra. Armed with this momentum, it stands poised to become the third or fourth largest party in next year’s parliamentary elections.

The PKS juggernaut raises questions about the ability of Indonesia’s moderate mainstream to contain a strident minority whose ultimate goals are at odds with the nation’s founding principles and with the respect for individual rights at the heart of liberal democracy. To be sure, many PKS supporters exhibit a certain idealism; they’re usually more concerned with ending graft in government than with stoning adulterers. Nonetheless, party cadres and top leaders – often educated in Middle Eastern or Pakistani institutions – hew to the harsh vision of Egyptian Islamists Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna and their Pakistani contemporary Abul Ala Maududi. To them, the faith makes no distinction between religion and politics. It’s a complete belief system that concerns itself not merely with prayer, fasting, alms for the poor and the haj pilgrimage, but also with elections, governance, commerce and diplomacy. At an individual level, personal decisions are surrendered to the collective: All women must don the headscarf and embrace segregation. Men are forbidden gold, silk, cigarettes and alcohol.

PKS leaders, aware that their imported ideology goes against the grain of Indonesia’s traditionally open and inclusive ethos, downplay their pedigree by emphasizing their anti-corruption credentials. Nonetheless, the party’s claims of moderation are belied by its record. It has been full-throated in support for Jemaah Islamiyah kingpin Abu Bakar Bashir, who spent 26 months in jail for involvement in the 2002 Bali bombings. It consistently backs sharia values over human rights, supporting the persecution of the Ahmadiyya and stoutly opposing attempts to have sharia-inspired bylaws declared unconstitutional. It displays a self-conscious attachment to pan-Islamic causes from Palestine to the southern Philippines. In Indonesia, the PKS project sends a disquieting signal to religious minorities, non-conformist women, and secular and heterodox Muslims. For the region more broadly, where economic development has long been based upon political predictability and a pro-Western outlook, it signals a period of uncertainty and flux.

Nor does the PKS need to claim formal power to diminish Indonesia’s prospects. The examples of Egypt and Pakistan, where the Islamist movement has gained social and political clout over the past 35 years without ever taking office, serve as a caution. In both countries, as in Indonesia, Islamists consistently stoke anti-Western sentiment. Scriptural certainty has gradually stifled science and the spirit of inquiry. Foreign investors shy away from long-term commitments, especially in manufacturing. Non-Muslims live circumscribed and, at times perilous, lives. Terrorism and periodic outbreaks of religious violence are facts of life, and the state’s response is often ineffectual.

The crux of the problem lies in Islamism’s incompatibility with modernity. In the PKS version of women’s rights, for instance, the decision whether or not to wear the headscarf is made by society or the state rather than the individual. Similarly, when it comes to minorities, the party ideology replaces the modern ideal of equality for all with the medieval concept of de facto second-class status as “protected peoples.” And though the party, packed with engineers and doctors, cultivates a technology-savvy image, its ethos is in fact antithetical to scientific advancement. PKS cadres show not the slightest skepticism toward the unverifiable claims of religion. They overwhelmingly reject the theory of evolution in favor of the crackpot creationism espoused by the Turkish pamphleteer Harun Yahya.

In economics, though the party leadership makes the right noises about free markets, the rank and file is overwhelmingly suspicious of the largely non-Muslim ethnic Chinese business community. In foreign policy, the rise of PKS signals a shift of focus from Southeast Asia toward largely symbolic pan-Islamic concerns. The early signs are already visible in high profile visits to Jakarta by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the use of Indonesia’s place on the UN Security Council to water down criticism of Iran’s rogue nuclear program.

The jury is still out on whether Indonesia will evolve into a benign liberal democracy or an Islamist-dominated state that permits elections but suppresses individual rights, whether it will regain its focus on the economic betterment of its people or dissipate its energies on the emotive politics of pan-Islamism, whether it will emulate manufacturing-driven Vietnam or commodities-dependent Nigeria. Unlike most Muslim-majority nations, Indonesia can draw on the strengths of a non-sectarian constitution, a secular elite, an essentially open-minded population and examples of successful multicultural neighbors such as Singapore and Australia. Unfortunately, as recent history shows, these may not be enough to blunt the rise of a shrewd and disciplined movement determined to remake the nation in its image.

The Wall Street Journal Asia

OPINION

By Sadanand Dhume

In recent years few countries have changed their public image as dramatically as India. But though pictures of starving peasants and rutted roads have given way to those of svelte supermodels and bustling call centers, in at least one respect India remains more a basketcase than a potential great power. As Friday’s bomb blasts in India’s software capital, Bangalore, and Saturday’s in the industrial city of Ahmedabad show, India is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the scourge of terrorism.

Reuters

Too little, too late: Forensic personnel inspect the site of a bomb blast in Ahmedabad on Sunday, July 27, 2008.

The Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, which killed one and 49 people respectively and cumulatively wounded more than 200, are only the most recent in a spate of attacks. In the past two years terrorists have targeted the northern city of Jaipur, the high-tech hub Hyderabad, the temple town of Varanasi and India’s financial capital, Mumbai.

Officials have pinned the most recent attacks on Indian Mujahedeen, a homegrown group linked to the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul Jihad-al-Islami and the banned Students Islamic Movement of India. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh — carved out of British India to create a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims — give shelter and succor to terrorists. But the fact that the most recent attacks were carried out by a made-in-India group shows it’s about time that India comes to terms with its own counterterrorism failings.

Among India’s worst mistakes is that instead of uniting behind the minimal goal of providing security for all citizens, India’s constantly bickering politicians have played football with counterterrorism policy. In 2004, one of the first acts in office of the ruling Congress-led coalition government — at the time supported by Communist allies — was to scrap a national terrorism law that allowed for enhanced witness protection and extended detention of suspects in terrorism cases. This had the twin effects of demoralizing law enforcement agencies and signaling to terrorists that the Indian state lacked fight. The paucity of arrests and convictions in the string of bombings that have followed have only strengthened this perception. For its part, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has stalled the creation of a much-needed federal antiterrorism force.

The problem is that India’s counterterrorism effort falls between two stools. As a democracy, it cannot adopt the heavy-handed but effective measures favored by, say, Russia or China. At the same time, India lacks the sophisticated intelligence and law enforcement capacities that allow European countries such as France, Spain and, of late, even Britain to safeguard individual rights and yet uncover terrorist plots before they are executed.

Yet although this may be an explanation, it’s hardly an excuse given that other countries have surmounted their own counterterrorism hurdles. Even Indonesia, a Muslim-majority nation where public sympathy for terrorism in the name of Islam runs deeper than it does in India, has done an infinitely better job of protecting its citizens. Thanks largely to Detachment 88, a special police unit equipped and trained by Australia and the U.S., it has been nearly three years since the last major terrorist strike on Indonesian soil.

Ultimately, though, terrorism is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The larger question is whether India’s Muslims will embrace modernity like so many of their Turkish, Tunisian and Indonesian co-religionists, or reject it like increasing numbers of their militant cousins in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On this front too India’s leaders have failed to get to the heart of the matter. The country tends to exercise a hands-off approach to its 140-million-strong Muslim community. Unlike in Europe or America, Muslims in India are governed by Shariah law in matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. This parallel legal system slows integration into the national mainstream and perpetuates backward practices such as polygamy and the neglect of education for girls. The result has been a disaffected minority, largely lacking the skills to compete in a modern economy and susceptible to calls for violence in the name of faith.

If India is to live up to its potential — and indeed to its hype — it must embrace both the short-term goal of upgrading its counterterrorism capability and the long-term goal of modernizing and mainstreaming its Muslims.

India’s Muslims have enriched national life in countless ways. The vast majority, like people of any faith, are nonviolent. But contrary to popular belief, Indian Muslims have not been immune to the rising global tide of orthodox practice and militant politics. Indian doctors played a role in last year’s failed attacks in London and Glasgow. At home, Muslim groups have assaulted critics such as the exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen. A survey by the distinguished Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed revealed that most educated Indian Muslims view as role models the late Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi, the 19th century Muslim supremacist Sayyed Ahmad Khan, and an influential Bombay-based cleric named Zakir Naik, who eulogizes Osama bin Laden and calls for Shariah for all Indians.

India’s Muslims hardly have a monopoly on either violence or obscurantism. Nonetheless the challenges they face are particularly acute. Will the community be forward-looking, eager to seize new economic opportunities, and at peace with a rapidly changing world? Or will it forsake the future for an idealized past, foster a culture of grievance that condones violence, and view globalization as a mortal threat? Depending on the answer, the Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings are either a passing event or a dark harbinger of things to come.

YaleGlobal

Islamists, even when not in power, wield fear and faith to pressure their societies in conservative directions

	Power and faith: Indonesian Muslims pray at a mosque. Outside Islamists wage war on liberalism

Sadanand Dhume

WASHINGTON: In the years since 9/11 two broad narratives have emerged in the West to explain the nature of the so-called War on Terror. On the right it has become commonplace to equate Islamism – the ideology that seeks to order 21st century societies by the medieval norms enshrined in Islamic sharia law – with a long line of totalitarian threats to liberal democracy. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, for instance, calls it a “foul apparition that has succeeded fascism, Nazism, and communism as the world’s next bane.” The left, not surprisingly, sees the issue as a product of poverty or flawed policies toward the Middle East. Robert Fisk of The Independent blames Islamist terrorism on “political situations and injustice in various parts of the world.”

Both views are flawed. Conservatives rightly emphasize the power of Islamism as an idea and the global ambitions of its adherents, but fail to acknowledge the movement’s lack of military and intellectual heft, or its limited global appeal compared to communism in its heyday. Liberals correctly point out that talk of a Muslim takeover of Europe is delusional, or at the very least premature. But they fail to see that in the Muslim-majority societies of Asia and the Middle East Islamism remains a powerful and growing force. Better organized, better motivated, backed by the threat of violence and protected by cultural norms that prohibit any criticism of Islam, Islamists are able to alter the nature of society even where they don’t hold formal power. Unless beleaguered moderates from Iraq to Indonesia can find a way to stand down the mob and broaden the war of ideas they’ll continue to lose ground to a tenacious movement that believes it has both God and history on its side.

At first glance the familiar comparison of the War on Terror with the Cold War appears reasonable enough. Like communists, Islamists value the group over the individual, justify the use of violence for political ends and nurture an almost visceral antipathy to a world order dominated by wealthy liberal democracies. Moreover, in this new Cold War Moscow and Beijing can easily be swapped with Riyadh and Tehran, Karl Marx with Al Jazeera’s equally hirsute Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Soviet’s World Federation of Democratic Youth with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth. The threat within – once symbolized by Western communist parties and their sympathizers – is now represented by such Islamist-friendly groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain. Moreover, the argument goes, whereas communist and capitalist proxies skirmished in such remote corners as Angola and Afghanistan, Islamists have brought their battle to the heart of the West. Suddenly New York, London and Madrid are as much battlegrounds as Beirut and Baghdad.

Plausible though it appears, this formulation exaggerates Islamist strength and underestimates the effectiveness of the West’s institutions and the resilience of its societies. True, Islamist intimidation has curbed free speech in some places: the Dutch and the Danes must tread lightly when criticizing Islam or contemplate a life of bodyguards and safe houses. But it has also spawned a generation of bold Muslim thinkers in the West – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani to name just three – who are willing to ask the uncomfortable questions that tend not to be asked in their countries of origin. Terrorism has been contained; only foiled plots make the front pages these days. Moreover, Islamism, steeped in a joyless literal reading of Islam, cannot hope to extend its appeal in the West beyond a minority of a minority – those Muslims drawn to its stark utopian vision. Osama bin Laden’s visage will never grace nearly as many T-Shirts as Che Guevara’s.

The weakness of Islamists in the West is matched by the backwardness of the Muslim world. In its prime the Soviet Union could reasonably claim to match the United States in such varied fields as chess, ballet, mathematics, Olympic sports, aviation technology and space exploration. Strip away the accident of oil wealth from Muslim lands and we’re left with societies that cumulatively boast fewer achievements than a single mid-sized Asian power, albeit an exceptional one, such as Korea.

This reality makes it easy to dismiss the Islamist threat, as do most Western liberals, or to shrink its dimensions to the activities of a handful of terrorist groups – al Qaeda or Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah. Yet, paradoxically, it’s precisely the sorry state of Muslim societies that makes Islamism such a formidable force. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims – perhaps between 10 and 15 percent – embrace the Islamist idea 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 Islamists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to a worldview that’s steeped in conspiracy theories and compulsively blames Muslim failures on outsiders. Jews, Americans and Freemasons are favorite bogeymen.

Of course, neither religious obscurantism nor a lack of self-criticism is a Muslim monopoly. India has its Hindu fundamentalists who riot against Muslims and attack painters and scholars, America its Christians waging war against Darwin in the classroom. Nonetheless the danger to liberal democracy that Islamists pose in Muslim countries is of an entirely different order.

Islamists – although almost always a minority – tend to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic courts and police allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square – whether by driving the local edition of Playboy out of Jakarta or by capturing the road to the airport in Beirut. Cultural norms – even in relatively open countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia – put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds. The Spaniard who supports contraception and gay rights can flatly declare that he doesn’t care what the Bible says or what the Pope thinks. An Indonesian or Pakistani who says the same about the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed invites charges of “Islamophobia” and threats of violence.

The influence Islamists exert on the streets and on public discourse has had consequences. Even where they have not claimed formal power – as in Egypt or Pakistan or Indonesia – Islamists have led their societies in an illiberal direction. In Egypt, female university students come under greater pressure to wear the headscarf today than they did a generation ago. In parts of Pakistan, Islamists have declared war on music and soap operas. In Indonesia Christians and heterodox Muslims such as the Ahmadiyya often find their churches and mosques under siege.

In each of these countries those who reject the Islamist message – who believe that gender equity, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are universal values and not merely Western ones – must do so with one hand tied behind their backs.

So while talk of Islam’s inroads in Washington, London and Paris may indeed be overblown, the special conditions in the Muslim world ensure that the threat to liberal democracy in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Islamabad is not about to disappear any time soon.

The Wall Street Journal Asia

OPINION

By Sadanand Dhume

In the global debate about the compatibility between Islam and democracy, Indonesia is often held up as an example of the possible. Ten years after General Suharto’s downfall, the world’s most populous Muslim country has institutionalized free elections and the peaceful transfer of power, nurtured a lively press, and rolled back a panoply of racist laws that once targeted the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. But the ongoing persecution of the Ahmadiyya, a small Muslim sect founded in late 19th century India, underscores Indonesia’s – and the Muslim world’s – trouble guaranteeing a bedrock democratic value: freedom of conscience. Without it, the country’s proud claim to be the world’s third-largest democracy will remain lacking.

The most recent assault on the Ahmadiyya comes from a government body that manages to sound Orwellian and Kafkaesque at the same time – the Coordinating Board for Monitoring Mystical Beliefs in Society. Last Wednesday this august grouping recommended a ban on Ahmadiyya in Indonesia. The reason: Though Ahmadiyya Muslims revere the prophet Muhammad and follow the Quran, they also contend that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), was a prophet as well. This contradicts the mainstream Islamic assertion that all divine revelation ended with Muhammad, the so-called – and it might be noted, self-proclaimed – “seal of the prophets.”

Since arriving in Indonesia in the 1920s, Indonesia’s tiny Ahmadiyya community, a fraction of the country’s 200 million Muslims, had lived peacefully. Ahmadiyyas tend to emphasize education and reject the idea of violent jihad. But in 2005, the Council of Indonesian Ulama, a collection of powerful mullahs, dusted off an obscure 25-year-old religious ruling, or fatwa, and declared the community to be “deviant and misled.” Since then mobs have sacked Ahmadiyya mosques while police stood by, local governments have flouted federal laws and imposed bans on Ahmadiyya worship, and leaders of a thuggish vigilante group, the Islamic Defenders Front, have publicly called for the sect’s followers to be murdered. Through all this, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has dithered, preferring not to stick out his political neck for an unpopular cause.

Mr. Yudhoyono ought to know better. What’s at stake is not merely the safety and well-being of a somewhat offbeat religious group but a much more fundamental question: What kind of country does Indonesia want to be? Will it be, as its founding fathers envisioned, a land where people of all faiths live as equals, or one where non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims are effectively second-class citizens? Will it be a country that respects an individual’s right to worship as he pleases, or indeed not to worship at all, or one where such matters are determined by safari-suited officials and bearded clerics? Will it be ruled by the law or by the mob?

For now the signs don’t augur well, for ironically the deepening of Indonesian democracy has gone hand in hand with a darkening intolerance. As the country’s famously easygoing brand of folk Islam gives way to a triple-distilled orthodoxy imported from the Middle East – among the more noxious side-effects of globalization – the live-and-let-live attitude that underpinned Indonesian pluralism has come under sustained assault. In 21st century Indonesia, non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims can find themselves jailed for such medieval-sounding offenses as “being heretical,” “tarnishing the purity of Arabic,” or “denigrating religion.” Christians often bear the brunt of these new attitudes. Christian groups estimate that 110 churches were forcibly closed between 2004 and 2007 alone, and permission to build new ones is increasingly hard to come by.

Belligerence toward religious minorities at home has gone hand in hand with a heightened sensitivity to insults, real and imagined, to Islam abroad. As though to make up for lost time, Indonesia has propelled itself to the front rows of the global culture wars between Islam and the West. During the cartoon crisis of 2006 the Danish embassy in Jakarta was among the first attacked. The following year mobs converged upon the offices of a toned down (no nudity) local edition of Playboy and forced it to relocate to the Hindu island of Bali. Earlier this month, Indonesia briefly blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube and the social networking site MySpace for allowing users to watch the movie “Fitna,” Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders’s much-derided anti-Islam screed.

As Indonesia mulls the fate of its Ahmadiyyas, its leaders ought to draw lessons from others’ mistakes. In 1974 the charismatic Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sought to appease Pakistan’s strident Islamists by declaring the Ahmadiyyas to be non-Muslims. Bhutto’s placing of petty politics above principle is now generally regarded as a turning point in his country’s long slide toward obscurantism and lawlessness. If this isn’t enough, those perpetually exercised about guarding Islam’s “image” ought to consider the irony that it is in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Washington, rather than among their co-religionists in Karachi, Riyadh or Jakarta, that Ahmadiyya Muslims can live with dignity and practice their faith without fear.