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They had taken the best of Islam, its simple egalitarianism, its ability to infuse drab lives with dignity, without devaluing their earlier achievements. The Javanese retained their own history and architecture, their own names, their own dress and dance and music, their own rituals at birth and marriage and death, even their own conception of the afterlife. It was these, expressed in a million subtle ways in gesture and carriage and voice, that gave their civilization such a high gloss at what remained, after all, a very low level of income.

It was these that the wave of orthodox Islam that had washed over Indonesia in the last thirty-odd years threatened to extinguish.

via Guernica / The Colonized Mind.

I’ve long been struck by how much of the global debate about radical Islam is focused on the mechanics of terrorism, and how little on the harder to measure, but (to me) infinitely more interesting, question of cultural change. How do people and societies make the transition from one way of approaching god to another? What can be openly celebrated and what must be furtive? Who makes the rules?

In this essay for Guernica I examine the ongoing Arabization of Indonesian Islam through a visit to the Dieng plateau in central Java, home to the oldest Hindu temples on the island. It’s a snapshot of a civilization in transition, a place caught between an Indic past and an Arabized future. It has nothing to do with terrorism, or for that matter with textbook radical Islam, the drive to order every aspect of society and the state according to sharia law. Yet, I can’t help but feel that twenty years from now, when we look back on Indonesia, it is this moment of cultural change that will be seen as more important than the much more narrowly focused war against the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.

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Dressed in traditional clothes, Julia Roberts paid a visit to an ashram on the outskirts of New Delhi yesterday while shooting her upcoming film Eat, Pray, Love.

The Hollywood actress met with Swami Dharmadev at Hari Mandir Ashram in Pataudi, India, where she is filming scenes for the adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling book.

via Julia Roberts dresses up in robes to visit an Indian ashram while filming Eat, Pray, Love | Mail Online.

If like me you found Eat, Pray, Love utterly execrable–and couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to read about pasta, prayer and passion when they could be boning up on, say, Islamist politics in south Sulawesi circa 1965–please prepare yourself for more evidence that something is seriously, horribly wrong with this world.

Apparently the movie version stars Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. It is being filmed on location with, one presumes, real Italian gourmands, authentic chanting Indians and truly homeless Indonesians. Two years from now everyone you know would have watched it. Half of them would have wept. The world’s net knowledge of south Sulawesi circa 1965 will be unchanged.

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Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations makes the case for fewer U.S. troops in Afghanistan:

It was a war of necessity after the attacks of 9/11 when you had a hostile government led by Taliban in Afghanistan. Now you have an essentially friendly government in Kabul and al-Qaida has re-established itself in Pakistan. So I am no longer sure what happens in Afghanistan is still essential to the war on terrorism. Afghanistan is thus a war of choice — Mr. Obama’s war of choice. There needs to be a limit to what the United States does in Afghanistan and how long it is prepared to do it.

via US Foreign Policy Expert Richard Haass on Afghanistan: ‘This Is No Longer a War of Necessity’ – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

I’m always happy to see the safe haven argument–that NATO requires a large presence in Afghanistan to prevent terrorists from turning it into a base–swatted away. As Mr. Haass points out, they can just as easily set up shop in another country. (Somalia and Pakistan come to mind.) In fact, you could make the case that Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was problematic less because it hosted a clutch of rudimentary training camps, where terrorists  fired rocket launchers and negotiated obstacle courses, and more because it offered Pakistan’s strategic establishment, the Taliban’s original sponsor, a way to keep its fingerprints off violence for which it was partly responsible. In that limited sense, the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Kabul was a dress rehearsal for 9/11.

Over the past several years, the likes of Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright have shown just how difficult it is to unravel the threads–a combination of personal ties, pan-Islamic fervor and old-fashioned geopolitics–that bound the Taliban, al Qaeda and Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). But for the public at large the notion that Afghans sheltered terrorists while Pakistanis helped catch them, which took hold in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, has been hard to shake.

Only in the past six months or so, with the mainstreaming of the term AfPak, has the twinned nature of Afghan and Pakistani extremism become widely apparent. In the long term, the violence emanating from the region will end only when Pakistan’s only effective institution, the army (which controls the ISI) gives up terrorism as a tactic and pan-Islamism as an animating principle. In the short term, the international community ought to focus on finding the elusive combination of carrots and sticks that will nudge Islamabad down the path of moderation. (More sticks, fewer carrots would be a good place to start.) Nothing suggests that sending more troops to Afghanistan–where they will remain vulnerable to attacks from safe havens in Pakistan–will bring us any closer to that outcome. If anything, it could have the opposite effect.

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Buried in a New York Times story about the alleged Afghan-American terrorist Najibullah Zazi is an intriguing detail about his online viewing habits. Apparently Mr. Zazi is a fan of the well-known Mumbai-based preacher and televangelist Dr. Zakir Naik.

Friends said that Najib later came to love videos on YouTube that featured Zakir Naik, a physician in India and a prominent speaker on Islam. Dr. Naik has been a controversial figure among Muslims and has been criticized for endorsing polygamy and Islamic criminal law, wherein the hands of a thief are chopped off, calling it “the most practical.”

To Mr. Zazi, “he was his inspiration,” his friend Mr. Zaraei said. “He just loved him.”

via Najibullah Zazi, From Smiling Face at the Cart to Terror Suspect – NYTimes.com.

Dr. Naik, a doctor by training, has used a gentle demeanor and a prodigious memory for scripture to earn himself a global following. Muslims around the world watch his sermons on Peace TV. A search for his name on Youtube throws up nearly 24,000 hits; on Google it’s more than half a million.  For me, though, he’s most interesting as someone who cuts to the heart of the ongoing debate about moderate versus radical Islam.

On the face of it, the good doctor appears reasonable enough. He wears a suit and tie and preaches in English. His speech can be impassioned at times, but it’s rarely shrill. He quotes from the Bible and Bhagavad Gita as fluently as from the Koran and the hadith. Confronted by this apparent ecumenicism, even a hard boiled journalist like Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express can sound like a gushy schoolgirl. Mr. Gupta calls Dr. Naik a “rock star of televangelism” who teaches “modern Islam” and “his own interpretation of all the faiths around the world.”

But how modern or ecumenical is Dr. Naik? He supports the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. He defends the Saudi ban on the propagation of other faiths in the kingdom on the grounds that their falseness is self-evident. (He likens it to preventing a math teacher from telling children that 2+2=3, or that 2+2=6.) He recommends a severe form of hijab–in which a woman reveal only her face and hands–as a preventative against molestation and rape. Polygamy will apparently solve the Western “problem” of “the surplus of women.” According to Dr. Naik, Jews “control America” and are the “strongest in enmity to Muslims.”

In short, take away the suit and replace the English with Arabic or Urdu and Dr. Naik would not be out of place in the most benighted part of Saudi Arabia, Sudan or Pakistan. The packaging, and the medium, merely make it easier for him to get his message across to the likes of Mr. Zazi.