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

signatures, had stopped at Imaduddin’s name and said in a matter-of-fact way, “He’s been in prison.” Habibie reported this to Imaduddin, and Imaduddin was wonderstruck.
    He said to me, “One name. When you think of the hundreds of thousands who have been to jail here …” He left the sentence unfinished.
    And now he had a stupendous vision of the future of the faith here.
    “I believe what the late Fazel-ur-Rehman told me. He passed away in 1980. He was one of the members of the National Islamic Academy in Pakistan. He was Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago. I invited him to Iowa to give a lecture.” Interesting, this glimpse of the protected goings and comings of Islamic missionaries in the alien land. “I met him at the airport. He hugged me and said, ‘I have read many of your articles and books and I am happy to meet you today. You are Indonesian. I strongly believe that the Malay-speaking Muslims will lead the revival of Islam in the twenty-first century.’ I picked up his bag and escorted him to the car and asked him why he believed that. He said, ‘I am serious. You will lead the revival. There are three reasons. First, the Malay-speaking Muslims have become the majority of the Muslim world, and you are the only Muslim people to remain united. We Pakistanis failed to do that. The Arabic world is divided into fifteen states. You have only Sunnis, no Shias. Second, you have a Muslim organization, Muhamadiyah, with the slogan, Koran and Sunna.’ Because Fazel-ur-Rehman strongly believed that only the Koran can answer modern questions. ‘Third, the position of women in Indonesia is just as at the time of the Prophet, according to the true teaching of Islam.’ ”
    I asked Imaduddin, “What are the modern questions that the Koran can solve?”
    “Human relations. Sense of equality. Freedom from want, freedom from fear. These are the two things people need, and this is the basic mission of the Prophet Mohammed.”
    He had told me in 1979 that he could not be a socialist when he was young because he was “already” a Muslim. It could have been said then that devoutness did not provide the institutions. But this could not be said now that the faith alone did not bring about freedom from want and fear, because the faith Imaduddin propounded was anchored to Habibie’s technological program, whose glory was expressed in the flight of the N-250.
    “Science is something inherent in Islamic teaching. If we are backward it’s because we were colonized by the Spanish, the British, the Dutch. Why were men created by God? To make the world prosperous. In order to make the world prosperous we have to master science. The first revelation revealed to the Prophet was ‘Read.’ ”
    It seemed part of what had gone before. But when I got to know a little more of the politics of Indonesia I was to see that this was where Imaduddin was taking the war to the enemy, and making an immense power play on behalf of the government.
    In Indonesia we were almost at the limit of the Islamic world. For a thousand years or so until 1400 this had been a cultural and religious part of Greater India: animist, Buddhist, Hindu. Islam had come here not long before Europe. It had not been the towering force it had been in other converted places. For the last two hundred years, in a colonial world, Islam had even been on the defensive, the religion of a subject people. It had not completely possessed the souls of people. It was still a missionary religion. It had been kept alive informally in colonial times, in simple village boarding schools, descended perhaps as an idea from Buddhist monasteries.
    To possess or control these schools was to possess power. And I began to feel that Imaduddin and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals—with their stress on science and technology, and their dismissing of old ritual ways—aimed at nothing less. The ambition was stupendous: to complete the Islamic takeover of