Former Pres. of Indonesia's analysis of International Terrorism

This is quite interesting. I am very relieved to hear
moderate muslims at least acknowledging there is a
problem and discussing ways to solve it.

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How to counter Islamic extremism

By Abdurrahman Wahid

April 10 2002

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/09/1018333351
993.html

There are two great challenges for reform of education
that have to be addressed if Muslim society is to
respond meaningfully to the threat of terrorism.

Most Muslims are strongly opposed to acts of violence,
in any form, undertaken in the name of religion.
Consequently, it hurts us to constantly see the name of
Islam, "the religion of peace", linked with
international terrorism.

Nevertheless, as Muslims we must face the reality that
if we fail to address the challenges before us we will
find ourselves constantly confronted with accusations
of harboring terrorists - regardless of how fair those
generalised accusations might be. If, however, we are
prepared seriously to address these two challenges,
people such as Osama Bin Laden will find increasingly
little solace or support in Muslim society.

Sadly, at the moment within the Muslim world we do have
groups that justify violence on the grounds that they
are defending Islam against the tyranny of the
uncivilised West. We need to undercut the kind of
thinking that justifies such simplistic assertions, in
order that those who advocate terrorism will find no
refuge in our communities.

The first challenge is the urgent need to develop a new
approach to understanding Islamic law.

At the moment the formal canonical approaches to
Islamic law leave us with a number of unresolved thorny
issues. For example, according to a formalistic
understanding of Islamic law, when a Muslim converts
out of Islam to embrace another faith they are said to
be guilty of apostasy, which, according to a narrow
understanding of Islamic law, renders them liable to
punishment by death. Clearly such an understanding of
Islamic law is, to say the least, problematic. If
rigidly enforced, it would seem to demand the deaths of
tens of millions of people who have converted from
Islam to Christianity.

Clearly something is wrong here. Especially when we
consider that Muslim nations around the world have
ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
wherein an essential element is the right to freedom of
belief and freedom of conscience. Needless to say, we
need immediately to address these apparent
contradictions between our understanding of Islamic law
and the universal values that we not only endorse but
also proclaim to be at the heart of our faith.

If we fail to address this in our institutes of higher
learning and in our theological discourses, we condemn
ourselves to be trapped in an infantile stage of
development, and as Muslims failing to achieve the
maturity required of us by the core principles of our
faith.

Indolence in this matter will produce for us a growing
gap between formalistically minded Islamic leaders, on
the one hand, and the people whom they lead, on the
other. Such a basic tension is very unhealthy and it is
high time we honestly addressed the challenge before
us.

The second challenge that needs to be confronted lies
in the field of general education.

We face a dangerously schizophrenic approach to
educating our young people. At present, tens of
thousands of Muslim students, mostly from the
impoverished developing nations that comprise the bulk
of the Islamic world, are sent abroad to study in
technologically more advanced societies in order that
they may bring back home and apply to their own
societies an understanding of modern science and
technology.

And so it is that every year thousands of young Muslims
from developing nations such as Indonesia come of age
while studying as strangers in foreign lands. Their
education provides for them an understanding of modern
technology and science but it is, of course, left to
them to reconcile this newly gained knowledge with the
faith that, as foreign students in the West, they
increasingly come to feel to be at the core of their
identity.

Because they have not been trained in the rich
disciplines of Islamic scholarship, they tend to bring
to their reflection on their faith the same sort of
simple modelling and formulistic thinking that they
have learnt as students of engineering or other applied
sciences. Students studying liberal arts are rather
better served when it comes times to reflect on the
place of Islam in the modern world. But precious few
young Muslims from developing nations have the
privilege of undertaking liberal art courses in Western
universities.

This might seem but a small matter, but the
ramifications are far reaching. Left to themselves,
these future leaders of Muslim societies apply the same
intellectual principles they have learned in the
classrooms to understanding the place of Islam in the
modern society.

Many end up going down a familiar path, taking a more
or less literalistic approach to the textual sources of
Islam: The Koran and the traditions of the Prophet,
otherwise known as the Hadith.

Grabbing a few verses out of context, they seek to find
answers to the challenges facing Muslim society today.
The result is that they use these texts in a
literalistic and reductionistic fashion without being
able to undertake, or even appreciate, the subtly
nuanced task of interpretation required of them if they
are to understand how documents from the 7th and 8th
centuries, from the alien world of tribal Arab society
among the desert sands, are to be correctly applied to
the very different world that we live in today.

Analysing problems in a reductionistic fashion and
rigorously applying a simple formulas may be an
appropriate approach to building a bridge, or even
erecting a skyscraper, but it is grossly inappropriate
and inadequate to the task of building modern Muslim
society.

Sadly, without at all intending it to be so, we take
the best of our young people and school them in such a
way that, in the face of alienation, loneliness and the
search for identity, they are unable to approach their
faith with the intellectual sophistication that the
demands of the modern world require of them.

Until we begin to value a broad education for our young
and face up to the nature of the intellectual
challenges that face them, we are unwittingly
condemning ourselves to forever struggle with the very
forces of violent radicalism that we regard as being
anathema to our faith.

--

Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid is
speaking in Melbourne on Thursday and Sydney on Friday
as a guest of ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program.
This article draws from his address to a recent
anti-terrorism conference in Seoul.