Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) Read Online Free PDF Page A

forgiveness. “When Suharto through Habibie wanted to find a name for the paper for ICME, Habibie asked me to find a name. I gave him three choices:
Res Publica, Republik, Republika.
Suharto chose
Republika.
After that I began to gain my freedom. I can talk anywhere I like. When I came back in 1986 I wasn’t allowed to give any public lectures. So things have changed completelyin Indonesia. Of course there has been opposition. Non-Islamic, Catholics.”
    “Why did Suharto change his mind?”
    “I don’t know. A puzzle to me. Maybe God changed his mind. In 1991 he went on hajj to Mecca—the pilgrimage. His name now is Hajji Mohammed Suharto. Before that he had no first name. He was just Suharto.” And Imaduddin became a busy man. “Since 1991 I have been assigned by Habibie. He called me one day and said, ‘I would like you to do just one thing. Train these people. Make them become devout Muslims.’ ”
    “So you’ve given up engineering?”
    “Completely. Since 1991 I have been every year to European countries, United States, Australia, just to meet these students, especially those getting scholarships from Habibie. I train them to become good Muslims, good Indonesians. Next week, as I told you, I go to visit Canada and the United States. I will be there for two months. I will visit twelve campuses.”
    It was possible to see the political—or “geopolitical”—purpose of his work. The students were already dependent on Habibie and the government. Imaduddin’s mental training, taken to the students at their universities, would bind them even closer.
    He said of the students abroad, “When they become devout Muslims and good leaders of Indonesia they will not think about revolution but about accelerated evolution.” It sounded like a slogan, something worked over, words, to be projected as part of the program: development, but with minds somehow tethered. “We have to overcome our backwardness and become one of the new industrial countries by 2020.”
    So, starting from the point that in Indonesia there was something more important than technology, we had zigzagged back—through the human resources idea, which was the religious idea—to the need for technological advance. A special kind of advance, with the mind religiously controlled.
    This zigzag had followed the line of Imaduddin’s own career, from his troubles at Bandung to his importance in the Habibie program. And in his mind there would have been no disjointedness. The most important thing in the world was the faith, and his first duty was to serve it. In 1979 he had had to express his opposition to the government. It was different now. The government served the faith; he could serve the government. The faith was large; he could fit it to the government’s needs. He had not moved to the government; rather, the government had moved towards him.
    “I felt in 1979 that the religion was under threat. The intelligence group at that time was under the influence of the Catholics, who were afraid of Islamic development here. They have what is called in psychology projection.They think that because they are a minority they will be treated like they treated the Muslims in other countries. Now I have my friends in the cabinet. It’s God’s will.”
    The Javanese way of reverence was now easy for him. He said of Habibie, his patron, “He’s a genius. He got summa cum laude in both master’s and doctorate in Germany, in Aachen. His second and third degrees were in aeronautical engineering. He’s an honest person. He’s never missed a prayer. Five times a day, and he also fasts twice a week, Monday and Thursday. Habibie’s son is smarter than his father. He went to Munich.” And Imaduddin had also arrived at an awed understanding of President Suharto’s position as father of the nation. When Habibie had shown the president Imaduddin’s first letter about the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, the president, running his eye down the forty-nine