BOOK REVIEW On Indonesia's Islamic road My Friend the Fanatic by Sadanand Dhume
Reviewed by Ioannis Gatsiounis
It can be counted on. First, Islamists in Indonesia leave their mark, through,
say, a bombing of a foreign hotel, or by successfully pressing a province to
introduce public canings. Then the international media report the incident,
before a handful of Indonesia observers bristle that the media have distorted
Islam's threat.
They point to opinion polls and election results and a long history of
moderation. But, then, the cycle repeats itself and the discomforting fact of
the matter becomes impossible to ignore: that Indonesia has undergone an
up-tick in religious
consciousness over the past few decades - and pronouncedly so since September
11, 2001.
The travelogue My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist thus
could not be more timely. Author and former journalist Sadanand Dhume
crisscrosses Indonesia's archipelago, searching out the prime movers and
shakers of a movement that believes Islam holds all of life's answers and aims
to impose its intolerant version of Utopia on the country's fledgling
democracy.
Dhume's access card is Herry Nurdi, a 27-year-old managing editor of an
influential Islamist magazine who counts Jews and America as his enemies. He
prays "to make every member of [my] family either the pen or the sword of
Islam", believes "every Muslim must know how to fight”, and is later scolded by
a local journalist for helping Dhume enter "places that might not have been as
easily accessed otherwise".
The eclectic main cast includes a televangelist, the soon-to-be head of
Indonesia's most influential Muslim organization, and the notorious militant
Abu Bakar Bashir, the reputed spiritual head of the Jemaah Islamiyah terror
group that has been implicated in various attacks. The book is, ultimately, a
sad and disquieting portrait of blind faith, rage, paranoia, personal
imprisonment, envy and confusion festering amid the long shadows of
globalization.
Dhume is a self-consciously graceful writer who says he falls between two types
of observers of Islam: those who quote the Koran and episodes from the Prophet
Mohammad's life to prove that Islam is intrinsically violent; and the
apologists who subscribe to the tourist-brochure version of Islam as a
"religion of peace".
Insofar as he does straddle that divide, Dhume does not disassociate moderate
Muslims from orthodox ones. While moderates may not yearn for the imposition of
Islamic law, as all Islamists do, they share the dualistic conviction that the
Koran is the irrefutable word of God, making for a sometimes blurry divide that
has abetted extremists around the world in their pursuit of power.
As Dhume notes, "One couldn't escape the irony that on the whole the deepening
of democracy [in Indonesia ] had gone hand in hand with a darkening
intolerance."
The author does not hold all Muslims accountable for the mess in which
Indonesia finds itself: "Most Muslims of my acquaintance ... were as
open-minded and as averse to violence as anyone else. For the most part I felt,
with the light condescension of the atheist, that practicing Muslims, like
people of any religion, turned to faith for what solace it offered in an
imperfect world."
But he is not so naive or politically correct to give Islam a free pass.
Moderation in religion can be a slippery slope; moderates are the well from
which extremists draw. And, as Dhume implies, Islam, demanding total submission
to God and a literal interpretation of the Koran, is arguably more susceptible
to extremism than the world's other major faiths. He knows that insofar as the
cliche that Islam has been "hijacked" by extremists is true, their swift
advance in Indonesia could not occur without indifference, if not ambivalence,
among moderates.
Dhume grants that while by comparison to other Muslim countries Indonesia may
be a beacon of tolerance - in Jakarta "a certain boldness still belonged in the
public square" - he warns that moderation in Islam has been granted a special
yardstick and the world would do better by itself to drop its fear of offending
Muslims and fix the discrepancy. Dhume asks pertinently, "[Is] a moderate
Muslim simply anyone against settling religious and political grievances by
flying an airplane into a skyscraper or blowing himself up in a bar full of
tourists?"
The same question needs to be asked in neighboring Malaysia, where a Muslim
woman was recently sentenced to caning for drinking a beer. Rather than appeal,
she has requested that the caning be done in public, to instill in others the
importance of being a "good" Muslim. By universal standards, it is the victim's
response as well as the punishment that warrants scrutiny.
Like the literary giant V S Naipaul before him (an obvious influence on the
author), the point for Dhume is that left unchecked Islamists will strip
Indonesia of what's left of its essence and potential, and they need not seize
formal power to do so. The difference is that Naipaul's contempt for blind
faith was tempered by a great deal of empathy for his subjects. Dhume's fierce
determination to understand Islamism tends to crowd out the non-Islamic
identity markers of his fanatical companions, discoloring the portrait
slightly.
Dhume's preoccupation with the rise of Islamism may also have led him to
underestimate the resilience of neutralizing forces at play in Indonesia. Time
will tell. For Dhume, the point is not to leave it to chance. As he puts it,
"Indonesia was Southeast Asia's pivotal country and no single issue mattered
more to its future than the movement Herry had helped me unlock."
One of the more endearing aspects of the book is Dhume's struggle to become a
writer in the truest sense of the word - nearly a lost pursuit in the Internet
age, where blogs and Twitter feeds manufacture stars at the expense of literary
substance.
Dhume's living room sofa is cluttered not with newspapers but short stories
from heavyweight literary journals like Ploughshares. He quit his job at the
Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far East Economic Review to pursue his book.
He references D H Lawrence, quotes Naipaul and gets lost in Ernest Hemingway
beside the Indian Ocean.
Inspired by greatness, Dhume yearns to spool together golden sentences, at once
muscular and touching, and occasionally the aspiration leads him to overwrite.
But on the whole those influences have given rise to a vivid and astute
travelogue, offering an inside look at the high toll politicized Islam is
exacting on the world's third-largest democracy.
My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist by Sadanand
Dhume. Skyhorse Publishing, April 2009. ISBN: 978-1-60239-643-2. US$24.95; 288
pages.
Ioannis Gatsiounis is the author of Beyond the Veneer: Malaysia's
Struggle for Dignity and Direction, and, later this month, Velvet &
Cinder Blocks (ZI Publications), a collection of politically-tinged short
stories set about Asia and the West. His blog is breaklines.wordpress.com.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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The eclectic main cast includes a televangelist, the soon-to-be head of
Indonesia's most influential Muslim organization, and the notorious militant
Abu Bakar Bashir, the reputed spiritual head of the Jemaah Islamiyah terror
group that has been implicated in various attacks. The book is, ultimately, a
sad and disquieting portrait of blind faith, rage, paranoia, personal
imprisonment, envy and confusion festering amid the long shadows of
globalization.
