---
The Daughter of Islam
Yenny Wahid confirmed what I fear the most. In an interview
written by The Wall Street Journal's editor Nancy de Wolf
Smith, "Daughter of Islam", on the Journal's February 25 edition,
she confirmed the fear that has haunted me for some years. The fear
that has started to grow in my heart since 1980s, when I began to
realize the subtle ripples of changes in Indonesia.
Although most people from the Western world assume, after
9/11, that the radical Islamic agenda is to destroy the U.S. and its
allies - Yenny says, as I always think - it is not the ultimate
goal. The attacks to the Western targets, she believes, are designed
to function as brutal propaganda coups that will attract recruits to
the cause of violent revolution. The main goal is to topple the
governments of Muslim countries, including - most famously - the
Wahabi royal regime of Saudi Arabia. But the real strategic plum -
Yenny says, as cited by the Journal - would be her native Indonesia
and its 220 million citizens, the largest Muslim population on
earth.
"We are the ultimate target," she told the Journal. "The
real battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims is happening in
Indonesia, not anywhere else. And that's why the world should focus
on Indonesia and help."
I met Yenny's father, Abdurrahman Wahid or Gus Dur - as
people call him - several years ago when I still worked in Kompas
Daily as a journalist. One night, Har (he was my editor then, and is
now my beloved hubby) and I visited Gus Dur at his humble home in
Jakarta, and we were served by an all-night-long wonderful chat
about life and peaceful Islam. Abdurrahman Wahid is a respected
Islamic scholar who headed Indonesia's largest Muslim cultural
organization, Nahdlatul Utama (NU), before becoming the first
president of newly democratic Indonesia from 1999 to 2001. He is one
of the strongest advocates of "a universal Islam that desires
justice and prosperity for all". In the same newspaper on December
30, 2005, he wrote about "a terrible danger that threatens humanity"
in the form of "an extreme and perverse ideology" that grossly
distorts the true meaning of the religion.
Given Indonesia's history of moderate and syncretic Islam
with various cultural influences from Hindu and Budhist past, I can
tell I have felt the changes along the way. When I was a little
girl, it was always harmony and peace that reflected among neighbors
of different religions in this country. Everybody celebrated others'
sacred holidays, greeted each other with respect. When I was a
little older, being a teenager, I remembered there was a beginning
of a "hush-hush" hearsay, "Don't greet others on their holidays.
It's a sin. They are infidels. You'll be burned in hell."
When I entered the college life, I was even "knocked out to
death" by the penetration of a strange-but-subtle movement that
happened in most public universities in Indonesia. There was a
required course everybody should have taken at that time, a required
course on a required religion. Now as I am looking back, I wouldn't
have called it a course. It was literally a brainwash-in-disguise of
a very structured, institutionalized belief system that intimidated
me through social sanctions, doctrines, dogmas, and fear. After
getting out of this class, I could have either come up "death"
or "alive". Oops. I mean, one could come up as either a "frightened
prisoner" to his or her own belief, or a "brave survivor" of the
universal truths whose "wounds" and "bruises" would take a very long
time to heal.
Now, in my adult years, there is this fear that has been so
intimidating for most of moderate politicians and leaders in
Indonesia. The fear of being labeled un-Islamic. The fear is so real
that it brings "complicity of silence" - as cited by Abdurrahman
Wahid - the mass silence about terrorism and other acts of
intolerance which characterize the radicals' behavior.
Gone is my sweet memory of a harmony of all people from
across religions, and races, and skin colors, who could live side-by-
side in this beautiful, sunshine country, with more than 17,000
islands and hundreds of ethnic diversities.
Indonesia has not recovered from the economic meltdown that
happened in the currency crisis of 1997-1998, that coincided with
the fall of the Suharto dictatorship. As a result, poverty and lack
of education are there, have made millions of Indonesians live in
desperation, frustation, and "hell". And these people are easy
targets for radicals who aim to install an Islamic regime. Unlike
the communists who exploited the poor people in order to install
their ideology a generation ago, the radicals are operating in an
economic milieu. They offer a kind of "clean" government that
is "free" of corruption and that guarantees those "tickets to
heaven". And while the democracy "is not working" now, they argue,
why not start to entertaining the idea of an Islamic country?
On this, Yenny, who got a Master's degree in public
administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2002,
says as cited by the Journal, "This is exactly the issue that just
happened in Palestine. Because Hamas managed to portray themselves
as the clean party. We do have parties like that as well (in
Indonesia), like Hamas."
And, no. The domino effect is not the worst case scenario.
True, when something "bad" happens to this country which has the
largest Muslim population in the world, it is big enough to
destabilize the whole region, the impact will be felt even far
beyond Asia.
However the worst case, doomsday scenario is not that. The
doomsday comes when it becomes the hotbed for terrorism. Hundreds of
million of people are there, sick of being cheated by the democracy,
sick of being beaten by the poverty and corruption. These people are
ready to buy the "tickets to heaven".
This is the real battle.
***
(Source: "Daughter of Islam" by Nancy de Wolf Smith, The Wall Street
Journal, February 25, 2006.)
--- End forwarded message ---
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