CIAO DATE: 6/5/2007

Bernard Schwartz Fellow Sadanand Dhume on Political Islam and Indonesia

Nermeen Shaikh

May 2007

Asia Society

Sadanand Dhume, a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at Asia Society, is a journalist and writer with a long-standing interest in Asia. He has recently completed a book on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia. As a former Indonesia correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Asian Wall Street Journal in Jakarta, Sadanand covered Indonesia's economic, political, security and social scene. Before that he was the New Delhi bureau chief of FEER.

He spoke to Nermeen Shaikh following the official launch of the Bernard Schwartz Fellows program at Asia Society in New York. Click here to view video clips from the launch event. [http://www.fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=825]

Read interview on US-India relations with Bernard Schwartz Fellow Pramit Pal Chaudhuri. [http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/pramit.cfm]

Tell us a little about how you came to be interested in Islam and in Indonesia in particular.

Well, part of it was by accident because in 2000 I was the India bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review, and at the time the magazine was much more interested in Southeast Asia than India. As a reward for good services - at least, this is the version that was told to me - I was told [by the editors] that they wanted to move me to Southeast Asia. They asked me to pick a country. I chose Indonesia, partly because as an Indian I'm sort of biased towards large countries, so the idea of reporting from any of the other countries in the region just didn't meet the "who cares" test in my head. But Indonesia, of course, did, being such a large country.

Secondly, I'd spent a year there as a child when I was twelve. So I had a sense of the country. I had memories and so on. So it was a no-brainer to me. I landed up there at the end of 2000. This was during the Wahid presidency, and I ended up staying for four years.

As for the second part, the political Islam question: it was hard not to get interested in it if you were covering Indonesia because it was clearly one of the biggest things happening and, in my opinion, the single most important thing that was going to determine which way Indonesia turned out. That is still true today.

Now, in your most recent article in The Wall Street Journal -

[Laughs] I was afraid you'd bring that up!

In your most recent article in the Wall Street Journal, discussing the publication of what is ultimately a soft pornographic magazine, Playboy, even if in edited form, you say that American popular culture's "crass commercialism and blithe disregard for Islamist sensibilities" offer the greatest hopes of bringing Muslim societies to terms with modernity. What makes you believe that such a modernity should appeal to anyone?

My point is not simply that modernity would be limited to, say, Playboy or Baywatch or Desperate Housewives -- which is my troika of comparisons - but that at some very basic level being able to tolerate what one finds distasteful is a mark of modernity in any society. So there are two parts to my argument: first, are you able to tolerate in your neighbor something that you find distasteful yourself? And the second issue, which I think is particularly important with the state of political Islam, concerns women and female sexuality and nudity and so on. And I believe that it is a form of progress if women make up their own minds on such issues.

This is a very important issue, clearly. One should obviously be able to tolerate what one finds distasteful. But the question is: On what basis can we adjudicate upon whose tolerance is more important?

I'm not saying that Islamists should not be able to protest Playboy. All I'm saying is that they shouldn't have a veto over what other people view or don't. They shouldn't be able to go into a courtroom and intimidate a judge the way they have. They shouldn't resort to violence to get their way. That's what I'm arguing about. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have their own newspapers. More power to them! I will oppose what they say in those papers and I will say that these are bad ideas.

Let me give you an example. There's a magazine in Indonesia called Sabili. It's a very popular, very hardline magazine. And to give you just one example: right after the Bali bombings, they named Abu Bakar Bashir - the head of Jemaah Islamiyah [al Qaeda's Southeast Asian franchise] -- "Man of the Year". When there was a civil war going on between Muslims and Christians in Ambon, their contribution to this was to quote verses from the Quran - out of context, in context, whatever - inciting people to murder and violence. Very unhelpful by any common sense measure. I'm not saying ban them.

Point taken, but the sense I get from reading your writings is that Islamists somehow need constraints placed upon them that other religious - so long as not Muslim - or secular parties would not need. What is the singularity of Islam, in your experience, that requires external constraints imposed upon it in a public setting, constraints which would not apply to any one of a number of political movements across the world?

First of all, the important distinction here is that I am not really talking about religion qua religion. I talk about a set of political ideas: How do you organize society? How do these ideas permeate every aspect of society, whether it's banking or how women dress and so on? I think it's a form of totalitarianism. In a programmatic sense, there is no equivalent in the world today. You have fanatical groups of all persuasions. If I were in Kansas today I would be more worried about crazy people trying to kick Darwin out of the schoolroom. Without a question. If I were in Benares I would be more concerned, perhaps, about people trying to shut down Valentine's Day. So I'm not saying that intolerance, per se, or even a hyper-charged variety of intolerance, is something that is confined to Islam.

That said, the seriousness of the problem, the quickness to violence, the tendency to ignore the state or where possible, subvert it, is at this moment in time of critical importance in many Muslim majority countries. That is just a fact that we have to recognize. So I'm not saying that this is something inherent in Islam. I'm not saying that, say, this is unchangeable, this is just the way it is. Maybe in fifty years we're in a different position. Maybe in fifty years this is not a serious issue. Fifty years ago it wasn't an issue in many parts of the Muslim world. So these things are cyclical. My point is not that it's something rooted necessarily in religion but at this moment in time, clearly, political Islam poses a much greater danger to our world and to what we all recognize - or what, at least, I would hope we recognize - as universal liberal values, than any other ideology on the planet.

In the same article, "Playboy in Indonesia", you also say that "It's no coincidence that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a country where Starbucks isn't allowed to use its mermaid logo lest it cause offense." Do you think that sexual repression is more to blame than the fact that Saudi Arabia is among the most repressive regimes on earth that has witnessed the most dramatic and precipitous decline in per capita income since the first Gulf war?

I wasn't writing an op-ed about all the things that are wrong with Saudi Arabia. Perhaps if I were to write such an op-ed it would touch upon many of the things you've raised. That wasn't the point of my op-ed. The point is that Saudi Arabia is repressive. I mean, it's hard to even count the number of ways in which it is repressive. It is a deeply repressive place politically, I agree.

You think that if Playboy had been circulating in Saudi Arabia these guys wouldn't have gone and killed themselves in the World Trade Center?

I think if Saudi Arabia had been an open enough society - that's a complete hypothetical - it would be so profoundly different as a culture and as a place. It would not be exporting Wahhabism to start with, just to begin with. So that's a hypothetical beyond hypotheticals.

In your recent articles, you have written extensively on the question of political Islam, and you have just noted that Islamic movements have not always been violent. What do you think has happened in the last fifty years? How, if at all, is the weakening of left, secular alternatives by external forces connected to this, in Indonesia and elsewhere?

I have written a book about this. When you see my book you'll see it. I do not forgive the massacres of the mid-60s in Indonesia. They were a blot on the nation's history. I don't recommend any kind of amnesia about it. I have not written specifically about these massacres in the pieces you mention but if you read a big essay I wrote about Indonesia in the Far Eastern Economic Review two years ago, I mention them as being a key contributing factor. So this is not something that I gloss over.

Here is where I stand on this and why I believe this. Do I believe that secular armed forces are important in countries like Indonesia? Absolutely. The reason I believe it is that part of the strategy that is used by these [Islamist] groups, which are totalitarian groups, is to take the law in their own hands. And they're willing to use intimidation. They're willing to use violence. And you're seeing something similar going on in Pakistan now with the madrassah students. So the question then is if you believe in a set of secular, liberal values, is it possible to have those in these societies without some kind of countervailing force to act as umpire.

I am just unclear about why the infringement of secular, liberal values is worse than more prevalent forms of political or economic disenfranchisement. Given the kind of exclusion, oppression, and deprivation that so many people in these societies suffer from, so much of it a result of systemic inequality and injustice, what is it about one's secular, liberal credentials that only stand to attention when a woman is forced to wear a veil or when Islamists yell slogans in a gathering of a few hundred people?

Indonesia is a case where until recently it was widely believed that this country had a serious shot at economic progress. Now you could look at the history of Asia over the last fifty years and you can take a country like, say, Korea and scoff at it. Or you can look at the history of the last fifty years and you can say that, well, actually, there have been winners and losers and the winners have tended to be countries that have modernized their economies. I would put Korea in that category and I would put Singapore in that category. Japan, of course, was modern before that. I would put Taiwan in that category. What lessons do these countries -- that are, I believe, the winners of the last fifty years - have to give the countries that I believe have been the losers of the last fifty years? Does Indonesia draw from the ideas of countries that have done things right? Do we acknowledge that? I think we in South Asia have real trouble acknowledging - at least, in India they do - how we can learn from others who have done things right. So if you look at Islamism purely as a set of ideas, they have the ability to cripple a country. Bad ideas have consequences. I believe these are bad ideas.

Islamist ideas are more to blame for Indonesia's precipitate economic decline than the Asian financial crisis?

I do not believe that the Islamists caused that. But if you look at it today, you look at its competitors, look at its neighborhood, look at its region, do you believe a country that is paralyzed by violence is going to progress? What are the choices that face the country? Is it in a position to be competitive economically? Is it going to be competitive vis-à-vis, say, Vietnam? Is it going to be competitive even compared to Thailand? Or the other countries in its broad peer group?

In an interview with Voice of America recently, you said that the US position in shaping moderate Islam, determining where Indonesia will go, and so on, will make a "very big difference". Why do you say that?

Well, isn't that obvious?

But why?

The US is the most important country in the world. The US role in shaping these questions is of tremendous importance to all of us. It's obvious. I mean, where is the ambiguity there? Or let me put that back to you. Why would that not be the case? You're saying it's not important what the US does?

I have no idea. I'm saying that if you make the claim-

You clearly have an idea!

Let me put it another way. If what the US does will make a "very big difference", what does this say to you about the extent to which Indonesia, whether Islamist parties, secular parties or the military, can exercise sovereign decisions with respect to the internal affairs of their country?

This doesn't mean that they can't exercise sovereign decisions. The US makes a very big difference anywhere and everywhere. That doesn't mean that countries cease to be sovereign or cease to make sovereign decisions. Do you think that the US has no influence or US policy makes no difference to China? Of course it does. That doesn't make the Chinese less sovereign.

One of the most profound things right now is this battle, this battle for the soul of Islam - I consider it the political soul because, as I said before, I'm not a religious person and I don't comment on religious matters. If the US, broadly speaking, in the Islamic world, encourages forces of tolerance and moderation, that will be a force for good. If it decides that it either has no stake in this battle or it plumps for forces that I consider to be retrograde and backward - you know where I stand on this - it will have very negative consequences for these countries and the region. So the importance of the US is self-evident.

In all your articles, you speak in rather alarmist language about Islam and Muslim societies in general, without trying to give a serious political account for why Islamist movements (both violent and non-violent) all over the world have been growing in recent decades. The most striking silence, in this regard, both in the context at least of Indonesia and Pakistan, has to do with the consequences of the Cold War. This is apparent also in your review of Musharraf's In the Line of Fire where, in the first paragraph, you say that the Taliban were armed and funded by the ISI, which is why, of course, it is difficult for them to disentangle now. But the ISI would simply not have been able to do that without being a part of the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. The fact that you don't mention this is rather odd. Why are you so conspicuously silent on these facts?

I know where you're coming from and I think it's a fair question. Let me tell you broadly where I stand on this. There are two ways, if you like, to sort of boil this down to extremes, here are the two prisms you can bring to this issue. You can say that, well - and I'm making this a little bit of a caricature, which is for the sake of argument or simplicity - it's all America's fault, or it's not America's fault at all.

But in fact I will acknowledge and I do write about this in my book, that for example what happened in Indonesia - and you could argue that obviously what happened in Afghanistan also [in the 1980s and 90s]- was a result of US policy. Definitely, but I don't buy the idea that it was primarily because of the US.

What is happening with Islam in the world, whether it's Wahhabism or similar strains, I don't believe that this is something that is America's fault. So you can say that particular policy decisions, for example in Indonesia support for Islamists or troubles with the left-leaning Sukarno government, had consequences. Absolutely, you saw the textbooks change in schools and so on. There are very few people who would disagree with that. But I don't believe that America is the major engine of this change. Is it a factor? Of course. Is it the factor? I don't believe so.

There are many factors. I would say in Indonesia the single biggest factor was massive dislocation. If I had to point to one thing I would say massive dislocation combined with enforcement of uniform religious education.

To what extent does your position on the "Muslim question" draw from the policies and insights of parties such as the BJP in India or the neoconservative wing of the Republican party in the US?

You'd find very few people in either the Republican party or in the BJP who advocate in favor of either Playboy or many of the other things I do.

On the Muslim question, not in general.

It's a loaded question. I personally don't see any particular parallel but perhaps you can point something out to me and I will be able to answer that better.

Why for example do you argue that Islamists of any variety - violent or non-violent -- should not even be engaged with?

I believe they should be opposed. So it's not about engaging. But if you can engage them to change their mind, sure. But I think the ideas that they hold are terrible ideas.

But not all Islamists hold the same ideas.

What is my definition of an Islamist? A person who believes that Sharia should order all aspects of human life. That's my definition. That's my working definition. I think that's a terrible idea and it should be opposed. It's very straightforward.