ROBERT SMALL'S ISLAM
The 66Antics of Dilettantism and Played-Out Impressionism f Redux
Robert Small’s new exercise in “Islam policy”1 conveniently ignores my detailed rebuttal2 of his initial presentation3 whose linchpin was that the Indonesian Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) party represented the apotheosis of Islamic “moderation.” As I pointed out, Small’s earlier claim was made because of an inadequate historical understanding of the NU on his part.
NU’s 1926 foundational principles which sanction shariabased Islamic supremacism were reiterated and acted upon during the subsequent decades, through the present, resulting in such “moderate” outcomes as mass murderous jihadism against Indonesian non-Muslims (ethnic Chinese; Christians), and its ongoing avowed support for female genital mutilation, which is “contributing” to rates of this misogynistic barbarity at well over 90 percent among Indonesian Muslim women.4Not addressing those sad realities—which shatter his premise altogether—Small now “replies” by focusing on the personal probity of former president Wahid. But Small’s latest “Wahid-centric” line of “argument” simply reinforces what I previously demonstrated about the NU—and Small’s own inadequate presentation of basic facts which undermine his assumptions.5 When, in 1984, Wahid assumed the leadership of the NU (which his grandfather had founded) he (according to political scientist John Sidel) apparently was remorseful about (and thus acknowledging!) “the role of NU activists in the anti-Communist pogroms of 1965-66.”6 Fast-forward a decade and a half later to Wahid's assumption of Indonesia's presidency, largely via the support of a consortium of Muslim parties known as the Central Axis—an “axis” which had rallied the Muslim masses for the 1990s' jihad campaigns against the Christian minorities in Poso and Maluku.7
When Wahid, in the eyes of the Muslim Central Axis “betrayed” its support, these Muslim parties spearheaded a successful campaign (in 2000-2001) to initially censure then president Wahid, and ultimately, compel his removal from office.8 Thus Small's latest revisionism9 fails to account for what these facts clearly indicate: Wahid was an outlier within both his own “traditionalist” NU Islamic party (which he felt compelled to attempt to “reform”10), and more broadly, Indonesian Islam itself, and he was ultimately rejected for failing to support the longstanding goal of Indonesia's full, jihad-based Islamization.11 Even Sidel's largely apologetic analysis nonetheless includes this apt summary of a half century of indigenous, jihad- inspired turmoil:
Against the backdrop of the Darul Islam rebellion(s) of the 1950s and early 1960s and the bombings of the 1980s, the jihad observed in Indonesia in the early years of the twenty-first century thus appears less as the product of— essentially exogenous—Wahhabi or Salafi influence, Afghanistan experience, or Al-Qaeda outreach than as the most recent variation on a well-established, recurring theme in Indonesian history.
The activists recruited for jihad in Maluku and Poso in 2000-2001 and for bombings around the country in 2000-2004, after all, seem to have been drawn from the very same networks as those involved in the Darul Islam movement of the 1950s and the bombing campaign of the mid-1980s.12Small utterly ignores the conundrum a serious scholar of modern Indonesia, and its post-Dutch colonial Islamic revival, Harry J. Benda (who helped establish a graduate program in Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University) observed astutely over a half century ago, in 1958:
{The} political significance of Indonesian Islam, including Javanese Islam, stems in no small measure from the fact that in Islam the borderline between religion and politics is, at best very thin. Islam is a way of life as much as a religion.. {Islam} does not recognize the existence of independent, secular realms of life.. Separation of religion and politics, in other words, was, at best a temporary phenomenon of Islam in decline. In an era of Islamic awakening, it could not survive for long, either in independent Muslim lands or in Islamic areas ruled by non-Muslims.. Like other Muslims, Indonesian Islamic leaders—reformists, hardly less than orthodox— were thus by Western standards not only lacking in political experience, but were, by the nature of their orientation and training, ill-equipped to formulate political goals as such. The santri {Javanese practitioners of a more orthodox Islam} civilization, in other words, is not a political ideal so much as the idealization of a religious community—the ummah—which would subsume within its all-embracing confines all walks of life, subordinating the state to the dictates of the Islamic ethic.. {I}f given political expression in Darul Islam— the so-called “Islamic State”—the political program of Islam is limited to postulating a state which, irrespective of its constitutional form, economic organization, and social composition, is to be ruled by Muslims in accordance with Islamic Law.13
But Small puts forth, recklessly, this uninformed and pejorative non sequitur about me:
His {Bostom’s} simple model surrenders Islam to the Islamists, which is ultimately self-defeating because it offers no counter-strategy except resistance.14
An extensive publication record—two lengthy, copiously documented, published books (The Legacy of Jihad, and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism), and a third, nearly completed and due out in 2012 (Sharia versus Freedom—The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism), plus numerous essays and commentaries)—thoroughly debunks,15 Small’s mischaracterization16 of my evidence-based ideas.
Refusing to kowtow to postmodern, ahistorical apologetics about mainstream Islam—both its very broadly supported doctrines, and nearly fourteen- century history, graphically reflecting how those doctrines have been actualized—undergirds my realistic, evidence-based approach to dealings with the Muslim world.
Unlike Small’s approach, my worldview is shaped by the irrefragable reality of what Islam, not “Islamism,” inculcates, and Muslims, not “Islamists,”17 abide, in overwhelming numbers. How would Small’s “policy formulation” deal, in contrast, with the 78 percent of Pakistani’s,18 86 percent of Jordanians,19 and 84 percent of Egyptians20 who adamantly reject basic freedom of conscience and support killing so-called apostates from Islam? (Data on less draconian “punishments” for apostasy—a “crime” that does not even exist outside of Islamdom—such as imprisonment, beating, the annulment of marriage, loss of parental rights, and disinheritance, were not collected but would likely have been even more “popular” within those countries across the Islamic world.) Does Small honestly believe those representative, vast Muslim majorities are hapless victims of “modern Islamism,” somehow “abetted” by the “dark hand of Bostom's model”—not— reality/sanity check—pious Muslims adhering to unbowdlerized, mainstream Islam, as preached and practiced for a continuum of nearly 1,400 years?Rather than engaging in defamatory projection regarding my views, I would encourage Small to—wait for it—actually read what I have written, extensively, about combating all forms of jihadism and Islamization —military and cultural—while upholding Western freedom.
Finally, although I have certainly amplified my own views on these matters in the interim (including related discussions about harvesting our vast domestic resources21 of shale oil, natural gas, and coal, as well as related analyses of the embarrassing {i.e., to real scientists} sham “science”22 of anthropogenic warming23), here are my comments from a 2003 book review of Raphael Israeli's Islamikaze, endorsing his (my shared) policy recommendations vis-à-vis the Islamic umma.
The author concludes with a most unique and unflinching prescription for how Western democracies should respond to the Islamikaze threat.
He proposes the creation of an Alliance of Western and Democratic States (AWADS), consisting of a nucleus of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (and these core nations can sponsor other countries proven to conform to its rules and standards), with the following six avowed “rules of engagement”:• Strict control of immigration from Muslim countries without reliance on the “efforts” of the countries of origin, who have shown neither the will nor the means to stop this massive flow, much of it already illegal. This policy should include interception and routine unceremonious repatriation of the illegal immigrants themselves, and expulsion from AWADS nations of those who assist them.
• Reciprocal arrangements for controlled immigration, tourism and educational exchanges between Muslim countries and AWADS nations to guarantee equivalent, unimpeded bilateral flow— Muslim nationals to AWADS, AWADS nationals to Muslim countries—devoid of characteristic Muslim discriminatory regulations towards other races, faiths, or nationalities.
• Rendering various forms of economic, technical/infrastructural, health, agricultural, and educational assistance by AWADS to Muslim countries contingent upon basic conditions met by the applicants, including: accountability; progress in human rights; meaningful efforts at population control; renunciation of force/violence in dealing with other nations/communities; and monitoring and controlling incitement to hatred and violence in mosques and media outlets.
• Terminating all military assistance and weapons sales by AWADS to non-member states, supplemented by a policy that any weapons- manufacturing third party which sells or transfers weapons to those regimes will itself forfeit the right to deal with AWADS members.
• Mosque construction, as well as the building of other Muslim institutions in AWADS nations, particularly projects funded by Saudi Arabia, will be contingent upon reciprocal arrangements to construct religious institutions for other faiths in Muslim nations, including each country situated on the Arabian peninsula, and the binding commitment by all parties—AWADS and non-members of AWADS—that no incitement or hatred will be propagated in any of these religious institutions.
• The importation into AWADS nations from Muslim countries of cultural commodities and assets— books, movies, art shows and exhibits, performing arts groups, clerics and missionaries, print media or audio/video tapes—must also be reciprocal, contingent upon the unrestricted flow of similar AWADS assets into Muslim countries—and all such assets will be required by law to be devoid of messages that disseminate hate.24
Writing almost ninety years ago, in 1922, the historian Louis Bertrand chastised Western governments, who, in their interactions with Islamic societies, tried “to appear more Musulman (Muslim) than they (the Muslims) themselves,” warning,
The times are too serious for us to engage any longer in the antics of dilettantism and played-out impressionism.25
Small and those would-be policymakers who share his mind-set need to rapidly cease and desist their own similarly delusive “antics of dilettantism and played-out impressionism.”
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