Indonesia

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).

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.

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 Book Show

ABC Radio National

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2389148.htm

Transcript

Publications

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.

dhumejohnsidel

Far Eastern Economic Review

by John T. Sidel, Cornell University Press, 304 pages, $21

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

Two years after the brouhaha over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, the world is bracing for another round of Islam-related turmoil. The feared flashpoint: a film by the flamboyant Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders that links violence by contemporary Muslims with violent passages in the Koran. Mr. Wilders’ predicament—he lives under armed guard and can’t find a television station that will air his film—symbolizes the rapid inroads made by radical Islam, or Islamism, in Europe. To put it bluntly, thanks to an influx of immigrants from the Muslim world, the famously iconoclastic Dutch have less freedom to criticize religion today than they did a generation ago.

Half a world away, the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, faces not dissimilar troubles. Long synonymous with a gentle folk Islam that was remarkably relaxed toward non-Muslims, Indonesia has struggled since the mid-1990s with outbreaks of religious violence. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John Sidel, a professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics, sets out to analyze and explain the reasons.

Mr. Sidel traces the roots of religious conflict in Indonesia to Dutch rule. He contends that the Dutch system of pillarization, in which Catholics and Protestants developed their own religious schools, associations and political parties, was mimicked in Indonesia to a striking degree. A person’s religious identity—Catholic, Protestant, nominal Muslim or orthodox Muslim—determined his schooling and, ultimately, his access to power through the legislature, the civil service or the military.

Against this backdrop, the advent of General Suharto’s New Order regime in 1966 led to a deepening of Islamic piety and a gradual shift toward orthodoxy. Complicit in the slaughter of 500,000 suspected communists from 1965 to 1966, the New Order quickly took steps to inoculate the country against a communist comeback. It forced Indonesians to declare their religious faith, expanded religious instruction in state schools and banned interfaith marriages. Figures on religious education capture the scale of change. In 1942 Indonesia’s 1,870-odd pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) taught 140,000 students. By 1997, the year before Suharto stepped down, the number of pesantren had swelled to nearly 9,400 and their students
to 1,770,000.

The combination of religious instruction in state schools and the mushrooming of Islamic schools helps explain what Mr. Sidel, quoting the scholar Gregory Starrett, calls the evolution of the Indonesian understanding of Islam from “an unexamined and unexaminable way of life” to “a coherent system of practices and beliefs.” To the casual observer, these changes first became apparent in the mid-1980s, in the profusion of headscarves on college campuses, in the prayer calluses on the foreheads of the devout, in the shiny-domed mosques that sprung up in villages, towns and cities across the archipelago. Over time these pious and newly assertive Muslims began to jostle for power with traditional secular Muslim and Christian elites.

There is much to commend in this book. It touches upon the link between Islamic piety, especially of a strictly scriptural sort imported from the Arab world, and outbreaks of religious violence. It emphasizes the importance of conspiracy theories in mobilizing mobs, and the pivotal role played by so-called professional Muslims: Islamic teachers in state schools, functionaries in the ministry of religion and the propagandists of the Islamist media. Mr. Sidel’s painstaking research shows how trivialities—say the sound of a motorcycle outside a mosque during prayers—can spark a full scale riot. His willingness to tackle something as inherently imprecise as identity is refreshing. His observation that Indonesia’s jihadists belong to loose networks of like-minded activists rather than to the strictly hierarchical command structures portrayed by some of the more enthusiastic terrorism experts is astute.

Ultimately, however, this book’s central thesis is unconvincing. Mr. Sidel accurately details the profound (and ongoing) changes in Indonesian society over the past three decades. Nonetheless he traces Muslim-Christian violence neither to growing Muslim assertiveness nor to the birth of an Islamist movement dedicated to ordering both society and the state according to the medieval precepts of sharia law. Instead he plumps, somewhat bizarrely, for the notion that it is not hardened religious identity (to borrow his prolix term), but anxiety about a perceived threat to this identity that fuels the riots, pogroms and jihads of the book’s title. Overall, this theory, along with an elaborate typology to distinguish between riots, pogroms and jihads, feels forced.

In a similar vein, Mr. Sidel dismisses the idea of an organized Islamist movement in Indonesia and suggests that the worst of the country’s troubles are over. “Jihad in recent years in Indonesia should be understood not as evidence of an ascendant, insurgent Islam but as a symptom of the weakness of those who have tried to mobilize in its name.” This apparent profundity can appear plausible if you meditate upon it long enough, unless you happen to consider the obvious fact that the truly weak—Falun Gong practitioners or Burmese democracy activists or Pakistani Christians—aren’t typically in the business of shipping armed men to battle their opponents, or of organizing coordinated bombing campaigns.

Fortunately there is an explanation of both the upsurge in religious violence in Indonesia starting in the mid-1990s and the relative lull of the past three years that does not require a breathtaking display of mental gymnastics. Presidents seen as Islamist-friendly (Suharto after 1990, or his successor, B.J. Habibie) or weak (Abdurrahman Wahid) tend to embolden rioters and jihadists alike. Stronger presidents with non-sectarian credentials—Megawati Sukarnoputri and the incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—have the opposite effect.

The international stance toward Islamist extremism in general and jihadist violence in particular has also played a role. Before 9-11 and the Bali bombings of 2002, Indonesia and its Islamists were largely ignored. Since then, heightened attention from the international press along with arms and training for Detachment 88, the highly skilled anti-terrorism unit within the Indonesian police, have broken up plots before they could be executed and diminished the prospects of large scale religious violence. Unfortunately, though, violent Islamism remains only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It is the non-violent yet unrelenting pursuit of the same extreme ends—through elections, administrative fiat, and a sophisticated education and propaganda effort—that will ensure that Indonesia’s troubles with Islamism, like the world’s, aren’t about to disappear any time soon.

dhumeakbarahmed

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Akbar Ahmed, Brookings Institution Press, 323 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

At a time when a British teacher in Sudan barely escaped a prison term for allowing seven-year-olds to name a teddy bear Muhammad; a Saudi Arabian rape victim needed a royal pardon to evade the prospect of 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with an unrelated man; and Islamists from Gaza to Waziristan step up their war against video stores and barber shops, a book that seeks to explain what exactly is roiling the Muslim world is more than welcome. On the face of it, few people are better qualified to write it than Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and, since 9/11, a familiar face on television.

In Journey Into Islam, Mr. Ahmed, accompanied by a clutch of students, travels across much of the Muslim world. In Damascus he dines with mystic sheikhs. In Lahore he rubs shoulders with politicians beneath portraits of Mughal emperors. In Kuala Lumpur he chats with female professionals. In Jakarta he consorts with besieged moderates and militant students. Everywhere he and his students hand out questionnaires to gauge the attitudes and aspirations of the proverbial street. But, unusually for a book of this kind, it is in India that the narrative dwells the longest, and India that provides the analytical prism through which Mr. Ahmed views present-day Islam.

For Mr. Ahmed, three towns in north India—Ajmer in Rajasthan, and Deoband and Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh—capture the range of Muslim responses to globalization and the West. Ajmer, which houses a shrine to the 12th century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti, represents a retreat toward a mystical union with the divine. Deoband, birthplace of an ultra orthodox brand of Islam that is the subcontinent’s version of Wahhabism, symbolizes an attempt to defend the faith by adhering strictly to Islam’s core texts. Aligarh, home since 1875 to the famous Mohammedan Anglo-Indian College (now Aligarh Muslim University), stands for the attempt to engage Western ideas while preserving Islamic belief and practice.

Each of these models can claim its share of famous adherents. For the Sufis, there’s the Persian poet Rumi and the female Arab saint Rabia. The modernizers dominate the first half of the 20th century, among them the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and former Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi. In the literalist Deoband tradition, Mr. Ahmed includes not just the Wahhabis but also such founders of modern Islamism—the drive to impose Shariah law on peoples and governments—as Abul Ala Maududi of the subcontinent’s Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmed finds the Sufis on the defensive, the modernizers in disarray and the Islamists, though he prefers not to use the term, on the ascendant. A popular Deoband writer in India announces that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the true champions of Islam. In Indonesia, one in four people surveyed calls bin Laden a role model. In Malaysia the majority profess admiration for such Islamist icons as Qutb and Maududi.

This book makes several important points. It stresses that the Islamic world is not monolithic, and that most Muslims are not on some kind of crazed jihad against the West. It explains that many Muslim women—including many of an Islamist bent—hold responsible jobs and are animated by ideas. It elegantly collapses the crux of Muslim anger into the so-called Taj Syndrome—the Islamic world’s glittering past juxtaposed against its wretched present. It identifi es the inherent tension between the American emphasis on individualism and traditional Muslim attitudes that place greater emphasis on family and community. Mr. Ahmed also deserves to be commended for wearing his erudition lightly; you don’t need to be an expert on Islam or Islamism to grasp his arguments.

And yet, on the whole this is a disappointing book. Nobody expects Mr. Ahmed to be unsympathetic to his faith, but his habit of simply dismissing any Muslim actions he disagrees with as “un-Islamic” is puzzling.

Thus attacks on (Christian and Buddhist) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are “quite alien to the Islamic values of justice and compassion.” The death sentence (by stoning) handed down by a Shariah court to a Nigerian woman who had a child out of wedlock has “more to do with tribal honor codes and response to globalization than with Islam itself.” The doctrine of armed jihad is defined away as merely “defense of one’s family and community in the face of attack.”

Unwilling or unable to take a hard look at Islam, Mr. Ahmed, predictably enough, turns to America and the West. The usual parade of villains soon surfaces: vengeful American foreign-policy hawks, insensitive Danish cartoonists, chief executive officers of multinational corporations, Christian creators of violent video games and a media “always on the lookout for some controversial issues surrounding Islam.” Globalization, we are informed with lofty certainty, lacks a moral core. Muslims hope to redeem their “honor and dignity” by turning to Mr. bin Laden. Of course, Mr. Ahmed quickly reassures us that this is not quite as alarming as it appears. He has somehow deduced that “many Muslims who sympathize with bin Laden in a broad and general sense would by no means support his more murderous or violent activity.”

When it comes to those who approach Islam and Islamism differently from him, Mr. Ahmed chooses to veil his attacks. Thus it is “scholars of Islam” who consider the distinguished Princeton historian Bernard Lewis to be “the quintessential ‘Orientalist.’” And it falls on unnamed critics to make the somewhat inflammatory allegation that the attacks of 9/11 “would almost be welcome” to Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld because they “would give a new momentum to their neocon worldview.” In a similar vein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, three of the most outspoken critics of Islam’s treatment of women, are dismissed as appearing “deliberately provocative” to ordinary Muslims.

This failure to grapple with uncomfortable ideas precludes a deeper analysis of what has gone so profoundly wrong. After all, Muslims, as any Vietnamese or Korean can tell you, can hardly claim a monopoly on recent suffering. Nor are they the only people whose past appears superior to their present. Many Indians and Chinese share similar sentiments. And all societies are struggling in their own way with the rapid change, for good and for ill, wrought by the closer integration of peoples and markets.

The trouble, then, is not globalization as such, but that an organized and tenacious minority of Muslims (the Islamists), believes that the cure for economic and political backwardness lies in embracing barbarism. To these true believers, the palpable failure of their project in Iran, Sudan and Taliban-era Afghanistan offers little discouragement.

To suggest, as Mr. Ahmed does, that Islamists must be engaged, rather than unflinchingly opposed, reveals a curious blindness to this fact. For proof he need not look further than his native Pakistan where, as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto shows, an unchecked Islamist movement now threatens the state itself.

Mr. Ahmed believes that reform—though he prefers the term renaissance—must come from within an Islamic framework, and that it must be introduced by those considered credible by fellow Muslims. This appears plausible enough on the face of it. In practice, however, those calling for meaningful change—for the Islamic world to embrace minority rights, women’s rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry—seem to immediately lose credibility, and those who have credibility appear more interested in obfuscation and apologetics than in change. Unfortunately, unless Muslims can find a way to solve this conundrum, the odds of any kind of renaissance will remain exceedingly slim.