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Obama's pitch for moderate form of Islam comes unstuck in Indonesia | There is now very little tolerant Islam to be seen anywhere, outside of staunchly secular Tunisia. According to a book titled 'Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East', authored by John R.
Bradley, Indonesian capital Jakarta is an outstanding example of a city converting
from the party capital of Southeast Asia, to being ultra-Islamic in the Saudi
Arabian mould. According to the New York Post, US First Lady Michelle Obama’s
handshake with an ultra conservative Muslim Indonesian government minister during
the recent Obama visit to Jakarta earlier this week, has probably illustrated
this hypocrisy in the country. That handshake, rather than the president’s appeal
to moderate Islam, came to dominate the headlines about his visit to the country
of his childhood, the New York Post reports. For a start, the controversy undermined
the very argument Obama had traveled to Indonesia to make: that the world’s most
populous Muslim country should be hailed as a role model for moderate and progressive
Islam. In Indonesia , an extremist Wahhabi form of Islam is on the ascendancy.
Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia , it is steadily eradicating the tolerant and pluralistic
Islam that did indeed define Indonesia back when Obama lived there, many decades
ago. Nothing better illustrates the new Wahhabi stranglehold on Indonesian politics
than the reaction of Tifatul Sembiring, the minister in question, to news reports
about the now infamous handshake. Initially, he claimed that the physical contact
had taken place without his consent, as if he had been seized by the well-toned
First Lady and wrestled into submission. The video of the handshake, though, shows
the minister warmly greeting the president’s wife, not with one but both hands,
in enthusiastic violation of his oft-stated belief that unrelated men and women
must avoid physical contact in public at all costs. There is a broader point to
be made here, namely that pandering to the most absurd tenets of extremist Islam
merely increases the vast gulf in any Muslim country between public and private
morality. In other words, it encourages hypocrisy, because in the modern world
following such tenets with any degree of seriousness is well nigh impossible.
The Indonesian minister’s flip-flopping is a perfect example. But we need only
glance at his role model, Saudi Arabia . In strictly segregated Saudi Arabia ,
a screaming panic seizes the clerics at the slightest sign of what they like to
call “indifference to the veil.” Women risk breaking the law merely by stepping
outside of their homes unaccompanied by a male relative. Extramarital sex is,
in theory, punishable by public beheading or stoning. Yet 70 percent of marriages
in the country are now reportedly of the “temporary” variety that can last as
briefly as a few hours, and are often a barely concealed cover for prostitution.
Then there is outright prostitution. Again, it is officially banned and harshly
punished, but widespread in all strata of Saudi society, with the religious police
even conducting regular raids on brothels in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina
. All this would perhaps be tolerable if the result was that people could go about
their private business undisturbed, so long as they did not make a song and dance
about their transgressions. That is how things played out historically, but not
any more. The result is that for the ordinary Muslim in the streets of Jakarta
, things are becoming as difficult as the streets of Riyadh . There is a constant
need for random examples to be made of hapless violators, who may be punished
today for what only yesterday seemed widely tolerated, and what may again be tolerated tomorrow.
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