Indonesia As the New India

This stable democracy with a hot market economy resembles another Asian giant in the 1990s.

George Wehrfritz

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 20, 2008

Jakarta today could be any of Asia’s 21st-century boomtowns. The malls buzz, traffic snarls and modern office towers dominate the skyline. It all feels profoundly normal—but that’s big progress in a place that, barely ten years ago, seemed destined for ruin. Following the fall of longtime strongman Suharto, and with Indonesia reeling from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, many analysts feared that Asia’s third-biggest country (population: 235 million) would go the way of Yugoslavia. Instead, it has become a cohesive, robust and exuberantly democratic moderate Muslim nation. Things are so buoyant that Indonesia invites comparison to another Asian giant: India.

Both remain corrupt, chaotic and excruciatingly complex. Yet each is also an attractive emerging economy, and in India’s case, a star of the developing world. Could Indonesia be next? Its economy grew by 6.3 percent last year, the main stock exchange ranks among the world’s best performers since 2003 and last year foreign direct investment nearly tripled, to a respectable $4 billion. All of which resembles India in the 1990s, when reforms kick-started a potentially massive economy—though outsiders barely noticed until the IT sector took off and growth passed 8 percent. In Indonesia, the key sectors are energy, mining and soft commodities like rubber, palm oil and cocoa. And in an exclusive interview, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says he sees no inherent reason why a big democracy like his can’t grow as fast China, which has posted 10 percent growth rates in recent years.

That would put Indonesia on a lot of magazine covers. In fact, the country already looks better than India in two ways: its per capita income ($3,348) is a third higher, and thanks to Jakarta’s fiscal austerity, it now boasts one of the lowest debt ratios in the world. “After ten years of restructuring, Southeast Asia’s largest economy is in great shape,” says Nicholas Cashmore, CLSA’s country head and chief researcher in Jakarta.

Indonesia’s political turnaround has been just as dramatic as its economic one. The president, known universally as SBY, is a former general who was elected in mid-2004 and has since become the country’s most effective democratic leader. In four years, he has helped Indonesia roll up its terrorist problem and rebuild from the 2004 tsunami. Less appreciated (but more enduring), he has backed a profound political decentralization program, empowering hundreds of local administrations. Jakarta now rules by consensus, not decree. This has its downsides: it makes it impossible to railroad through big national development projects of the sort China is famous for. As SBY himself admits, “in many circumstances, we face local communities that don’t agree with government projects, so we have to convince them. I do not think the system is wrong. In a democracy like ours, change, reform and resistance are normal.”

The country’s largest parties now basically agree on economic policy and the need to reduce corruption, improve the rule of law and make government more efficient. Key democratic institutions—including a free press, impartial courts and a legislature chosen by voters—are remarkably robust, and the once all-powerful military has largely removed itself from politics. Meanwhile, regional autonomy has triggered economic booms at the periphery, in contrast to the typical Southeast Asian model. “From the U.S., the U.K. or even Hong Kong,” writes Cashmore, “it is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of Indonesia’s potential [or] appreciate just how much more there is to the country beyond Jakarta.” By his calculation, greater Jakarta now accounts for just 15 percent of Indonesia’s GDP, a relatively small share compared to other Asian capitals.

Indonesia’s accomplishments are all the more impressive when you remember how far and fast the country has come. The fall of Suharto’s New Order (a highly centralized system that vested absolute power in the dictator and his cronies) 10 years ago was accompanied by a financial meltdown so severe that the IMF had to step in. Indonesia also faced fierce separatist insurgencies, Christian-Muslim violence and Islamic extremism underscored by the 2002 Bali bombing. The country seemed to be teetering on the brink of wholesale disintegration. Yet today, as Australian National University economist Andrew MacIntyre and the Asia Foundation’s Douglas Ramage argued in a recent report, observers should start thinking of Indonesia “as a normal country grappling with challenges common to other large, middle-income, developing democracies—not unlike India, Mexico or Brazil.”

In some ways Indonesia’s democracy is even more sophisticated than those other states’. Take decentralization. Jakarta, like New Delhi, oversees national defense, internal security, finance, foreign policy and the justice system. But unlike the Indian government, Indonesia’s—thanks to two “big bang” reform packages passed in 2001 and 2006, and supported by SBY—must now coordinate most other activities through the country’s 33 provinces and nearly 500 local administrations, where popularly elected leaders make policy, manage two thirds of all civil servants and oversee everything from schools to economic development. As World Bank economists Wolfgang Fengler and Bert Hofman observe in a soon-to-be-published study, Indonesia has turned itself from “one of the most centralized countries in the world into one of the more decentralized ones.”

To see what that means on the ground, follow the money. Under a new fiscal system implemented in 2001, regions are allocated a huge slice of the country’s budget to spend more or less as they please. Poor and remote areas receive the most per capita, and those with abundant natural resources get shared extraction revenues. According to the World Bank, regional governments in Indonesia now account for 36 percent of all public expenditures, compared with an average of just 14 percent in all developing countries. And locals can promote whatever agendas they choose. “This is the real revolution,” says Erman Rahman, who heads the World Bank’s local governance initiatives in the country. Regions with proactive leaders have become laboratories of experimentation from which innovative anti-corruption, public-health and economic-growth initiatives have emerged. For his part, SBY has enabled this process by maintaining macroeconomic discipline and political stability. And his support for local autonomy has undermined separatism, extremism and communal violence.

One regional pioneer, Gamawan Fauzi, took power in West Sumatra’s Solok region in 2001 and quickly created a one-stop shop for government services, replacing an opaque and complex web of offices and brokers. Fauzi’s concept was to bring all government services under a single roof, post set fees, promote autopayment and guarantee prompt service as a means of rooting out corruption. And it has worked: the model has since been emulated across Indonesia, and Transparency International reports that corruption, while still high, has been reduced substantially.

Other local leaders have earned fame by initiating innovative new programs. Gede Putrayasa, who heads the poorest of nine regencies on the tourist island Bali, won office in 2001 on a pledge to provide universal medical insurance and free education. The latter proved relatively easy (he simply waived the 5,000 rupiah monthly fees), but improving health care without breaking the local budget was tougher. Under the old system, funds went to hospitals and local administrators, who did things like stockpile pharmaceuticals procured from companies that paid kickbacks. Putrayasa’s innovation: provide every local household free health insurance that compensates clinics for services actually provided. “There’s not a big savings,” says Putrayasa, “but everyone is covered and the efficiency is much better because there is no longer any corruption.”

Such reforms have stimulated economic growth. Putrayasa’s health-care and education initiatives (as well as a jobs program that sends underemployed rice farmers to Japan) have reduced the local poverty rate fourfold to just 5.5 percent today. Better local governance has also made Indonesia a major beneficiary of the global soft commodity boom. Together, the value of its four largest crops—rubber, coconut, palm oil and cocoa—rose from $2.3 billion in 2000 to an estimated $19 billion in 2008, CLSA calculates. That’s thanks to local leaders like Fadel Muhammad, governor of the hardscrabble province of Gorontalo on the island Sulawesi, who turned his constituents into the country’s best corn farmers by deploying teams of agricultural consultants; providing subsidized seeds, fertilizers and rental machinery to farmers; and giving cash rewards to village leaders who boost yields. Since 2002, Gorontalo’s poverty rate has shrunk from 49 to 29 percent.

Of course, decentralization has its problems. Analysts and watchdog groups say that while the number of effective leaders in the 500 local administrations has spiked from a handful to 50 or more under SBY, they are sometimes particularly effective at blocking necessary national reforms and projects. The result, says Ramage, is that progress will be “evolutionary, not revolutionary.” For example, the Trans Java highway, which would link Jakarta with Indonesia’s second-largest city, Surabaya, was launched in 2004 with a target completion date of 2009, but is still only 10 percent done because of local opposition.

Nonetheless, Indonesia has already become a beacon of stability in Southeast Asia and the Islamic world. Its antiterrorism campaign—Indonesia has shut radical madrassas, established an effective counterterrorism force and cracked down hard on suspected cells, while also avoiding human-rights abuses—is seen as a model for the region. And as the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia’s democratization has implications from Morocco to Mindanao in that it exemplifies an alternative to zealotry, intolerance and extremism. “Indonesia is not immune to radicalism we see worldwide, but this is exactly why we must maintain our identity as a moderate, tolerant nation,” says Yudhoyono. “It enables us to prevent a clash of civilizations.”

SBY is likely to win re-election next year, but even if he loses, analysts don’t expect any sharp change in policy, because all the major political camps in Jakarta agree on the current reform blueprint. Even India does not enjoy that kind of stable consensus on how to catch China.

With Greg Hunt in Hong Kong

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/163572

Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam

by David Bukay
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2007, pp. 3-11
http://www.meforum.org/article/1754

That there is no compulsion in Islam and that Islam is a religion of peace are common refrains among Muslim activists,[1] academics,[2] officials,[3] and journalists.[4] In an age of terrorism and violent jihad, nowhere, they argue, does the Qur’an allow Muslims to fight non-Muslims solely because they refuse to become Muslim.[5] Proponents of Islamic tolerance point to a number of Qur’anic verses which admonish violence and advocate peace, tolerance, and compromise.[6]

But not all verses in the Qur’an have the same weight in assessment. Unlike the Old or New Testaments, the Qur’an is not organized by chronology but rather by size of chapters.[7] Even within chapters, chronology can be confused. In sura (chapter) 2, for example, God revealed verses 193, 216, and 217 to Muhammad shortly after he arrived in Medina. God only revealed verses 190, 191, and 192 six years later.[8] This complicates interpretation, all the more when some verses appear to contradict.

Abrogation in the Qur’an

The Qur’an is unique among sacred scriptures in accepting a doctrine of abrogation in which later pronouncements of the Prophet declare null and void his earlier pronouncements.[9] Four verses in the Qu’ran acknowledge or justify abrogation:

• When we cancel a message, or throw it into oblivion, we replace it with one better or one similar. Do you not know that God has power over all things?[10]
• When we replace a message with another, and God knows best what he reveals, they say: You have made it up. Yet, most of them do not know.[11]
• God abrogates or confirms whatsoever he will, for he has with him the Book of the Books.[12]
• If we pleased, we could take away what we have revealed to you. Then you will not find anyone to plead for it with us.[13]

Rather than explain away inconsistencies in passages regulating the Muslim community, many jurists acknowledge the differences but accept that latter verses trump earlier verses.[14] Most scholars divide the Qur’an into verses revealed by Muhammad in Mecca when his community of followers was weak and more inclined to compromise, and those revealed in Medina, where Muhammad’s strength grew.

Classical scholars argued that anyone who studied the Qur’an without having mastered the doctrine of abrogation would be “deficient.”[15] Those who do not accept abrogation fall outside the mainstream and, perhaps, even the religion itself. The Ahmadiyah sect, for example, today concentrated in Pakistan, consistently rejects abrogation because it undercuts the notion that the Qur’an is free from errors.[16] Many Muslims consider Ahmadis, who also see their founder as a prophet, to be apostates.

Because the Qur’an is not organized chronologically, there has been a whole subset of theological study to determine which verses abrogate and which are abrogated. Muslim scholars base their understanding of theology not only upon the Qur’an but also upon hadiths, accounts of the Prophet Muhammad’s life. One hadith in particular addresses abrogation. It cites Abu al-A‘la bin al-Shikhkhir, considered by theologians to be a reliable source of knowledge about the Prophet’s life, as saying, that “the Messenger of God abrogated some of his commands by others, just as the Qur’an abrogates some part of it with the other.”[17] Muhammad accepted that God would invalidate previous revelation, often making ordinances stricter.[18]

Abrogation occurs not only within the Qur’an, but also by the Qur’an toward earlier revelations, such as those passed on by Jesus or Moses. Sura 2:106 refers to commandments sent to prophets before Muhammad.[19] ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Ali, commentator and translator of the Qur’an, interpreted the verse to mean that God’s message is the same across time, but its form may differ according to the exigencies of time.[20] ‘Abd al-Majid Daryabadi, a Pakistani Qur’an commentator, suggested, however, that the laws might differ across time but that there should be no shame in the same lawgiver replacing temporary laws with permanent ones.[21]

Also cause for discussion among scholars is the question of whether God withdrew revelations from the memory of Muhammad and his followers, causing such revelations to disappear like some of those mentioned in the Qur’an about which little is known today.[22]

This leads to the classical theological dispute about whether such interpretations dilute the idea that the Qur’an is eternal.[23] Those who discount or downplay abrogation interpret the verses revealed by Muhammad in Mecca to address spirituality and see those revealed later in Medina not as abrogation but rather expanding context to understand the whole.[24]

Abrogation in Classical Scholarship

Muslim scholars in the classical period agreed about the principle of abrogation in the Qur’an. In the eleventh century, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali bin Ahmad bin Sa‘id Ibn Hazim (d. 1064), an Andalusian theologian, philosopher, historian, and jurist, examined the Qur’an chapter by chapter to show which verses supplanted other verses.[25]

Classical scholars also examined the pattern in which Muhammad engaged in abrogation during revelation because Qur’anic laws were brief and insufficient for the needs of the huge Muslim community.[26] Muhammad changed his rules according to the circumstances. Within the hadith, there are a number of examples. Muhammad, for example, revealed verse 2:187 regulating sex during Ramadan after ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab questioned him.[27] Likewise, Muhammad abrogated another verse encouraging all believers to fight militarily for God (4:95) after he was challenged by a blind man who could not.[28]

Abu Ja‘far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari (d. 923), a Sunni famous as a historian, argued that “abrogation can only be done with regard to commands and prohibitions.”[29] Debate continued over the following centuries, however, giving rise to the science of Asbab an-Nuzul (The reasons of revelations). The father of the field, Abu al-Hassan Ali bin Ahmad al-Wahidi an-Naisaburi (d. 1075), argued that understanding the reasons for revelations was crucial to resolve apparent inconsistencies.[30] Context underpins the field. Some revelations were, for a time, forgotten,[31] altered,[32] or eliminated by Satan’s influence.[33] Scholars argue about whether God first revealed chapters 74 or 96.[34]

Abu al-Kasim Hibat-Allah bin Salama (d. 1019) argued that the starting point of any investigation of the Qur’an is the science of abrogating and abrogated verses.[35] He identified four categories of abrogation: 43 chapters unaffected by abrogation;[36] six chapters that augmented the concept of abrogation but were themselves not abrogated;[37] 40 chapters with abrogated wording but authority intact;[38] and 25 chapters with both their wording and authority abrogated.[39] (See Table 1: Abrogation in Practice, below)

Table 1: Abrogation in Practice

Verse Abrogating	Verse Abrogated	Issue
2:185	2:184	Fasting
2:234	2:240	Divorced women
2:285	2:284	Revelations
3:85-6; 9:73	2:62; 2:256; 5:69	Tolerance – Ahl al-Kitab
4:11-12	2:180; 2:240	Bequest-Inheritance
5:90	2:219; 4:43	Wine drinking
8:66	8:65	Fighting abilities
9:29	2:109; 60:8-9	People of the Book
9:36	2:217; 45:14	Prohibition of fighting
22:52	53:19-23	Satan and his daughters
24:2	4:15-7	Adultery and fornication
33:50	33:52	Muhammad’s wives
58:13	58:12	Money for conferring
64:16	3:102	Fear of God
73:20	73:2-3	Night prayer

Muhammad’s ability to add or delete verses according to questions or contemporary issues also demonstrates the flexibility of the Qur’an.[40] Classical theologians accepted that Medinan chapters supersede Meccan, not only for chronological reasons, but also because the Medinan verses represent Islam during a period of strength.

Still, there are internal debates about various manners of abrogation. Among Sunni theologians, there are disputes about whether sunna (the rules for life as shown by Muhammad, as opposed to the hadith which are prescripts traced to Muhammad through his conversations with other people) can abrogate the Qur’an. The Maliki and Hanafi schools suggest that the sunna and the Qur’an can abrogate each other while Shafi’is do not.[41] Ahmad bin Muhammad an-Nahhas, an Egyptian Shafi’i exegete, (d. circa 1515) catalogues the opinions:

• The Kufans agree that the Qur’an may abrogate both the Qur’an and the sunna;
• The Shafi‘i say that the Qur’an can only abrogate other passages of the Qur’an but disagree that the sunna can abrogate the Qur’an;
• Others, according to Nahhas, argue that the sunna can abrogate both the Qur’an and the sunna;
• While still others say that the sunna abrogates the sunna but not the Qur’an;
• And a last set prefer not to set such rules but rather judge on a case-by-case basis.[42]

The Egyptian theologian Abu al-Fadl ‘Abd ar-Rahman Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti (d. 1505) related comments by Muhammad’s cousin Ibn ‘Abbas who explained, “Sometimes the revelation used to descend on the Prophet during the night, and then he forgot it during daytime. Thus God sent down this verse [2:106].” Suyuti continued to cite one verse whose end abrogated its beginning.[43] In another case, a hadith abrogates the Qur’an. While the Qur’an talks only about scourging and exiling the adulterer;[44] Muhammad stoned some adulterers to death, establishing it as the penalty.[45] Here, though, Suyuti focuses not only on the abrogation itself but also on determining the wisdom behind it.[46]

Contemporary theologians and populists have reopened the debate about the legitimacy of abrogation. Ali Dashti (1894-1982), a traditionally-trained Iranian scholar who served sporadically in parliament during the first half of the twentieth century, accepted the explanation that revelation of the Qur’an was linked to Muhammad’s need to answer queries and his need to respond to random incidents.[47] He also suggested that abrogation implied human rather than divine provenance for the Qur’an.

Ahmad von Denffer (1949-present), a convert to Islam who writes about religion, argues that understanding of abrogation is important to understand the correct application of God’s laws and is among the most important preconditions for interpretation of the Qur’an.[48]

Other Muslim commentators, however, are more dismissive about abrogation, citing verses—all Meccan—to argue that God’s laws are immutable.[49] Many contemporary Islamic propagandists fear how abrogated verses might affect proselytizing. On one Islamist Internet site, one participant sought to refute the abrogation principle by attacking “corrupted interpretation” of two verses (2:106 and 16:101).[50] Muhammad Asad (1900-92), born Leopold Weiss—who converted from Judaism to Islam, after which he worked with the Pakistani theologian Muhammad Iqbal and later became Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations—argued that classical theologians misinterpreted passages relating to abrogation and cited another verse (10:64) to reinforce the idea of immutability. “In short,” he argued, “the ‘doctrine of abrogation’ has no basis in historical fact, and must be rejected.”[51]

Abrogation and Jihad

How does the theological debate over abrogation impact contemporary policy formulation? While not all terrorism is rooted in Islam, the religion is an enabler for many. It is wrong to assume that more extreme interpretations of religion are illegitimate. Statements that there is no compulsion in religion and that jihad is primarily about internal struggle and not about holy war may receive applause in university lecture halls and diplomatic board rooms, but they misunderstand the importance of abrogation in Islamic theology. It is important to acknowledge that what university scholars believe, and what most Muslims—or more extreme Muslims—believe are two different things. For many Islamists and radical Muslims, abrogation is real and what the West calls terror is, indeed, just.

During the lifetime of Muhammad, the Islamic community passed through three stages. In the beginning from 610 until 622, God commanded restraint. As the Muslims relocated to Medina (623-26), God permitted Muslims only to fight in a defensive war. However, in the last six years of Muhammad’s life (626-32), God permitted Muslims to fight an aggressive war first against polytheists,[52] and later against monotheists like the Jews of Khaybar.[53] Once Muhammad was given permission to kill in the name of God, he instigated battle.

Chapter 9 of the Qur’an, in English called “Ultimatum,” is the most important concerning the issues of abrogation and jihad against unbelievers. It is the only chapter that does not begin “in the name of God, most benevolent, ever-merciful.”[54] Commentators agree that Muhammad received this revelation in 631, the year before his death, when he had returned to Mecca and was at his strongest.[55] Muhammad bin Ismail al-Bukhari (810-70), compiler of one of the most authoritative collections of the hadith, said that “Ultimatum” was the last chapter revealed to Muhammad[56] although others suggest it might have been penultimate. Regardless, coming at or near the very end of Muhammad’s life, “Ultimatum” trumps earlier revelations.

Because this chapter contains violent passages, it abrogates previous peaceful content. Muhsin Khan, the translator of Sahih al-Bukhari, says God revealed “Ultimatum” in order to discard restraint and to command Muslims to fight against all the pagans as well as against the People of the Book if they do not embrace Islam or until they pay religious taxes. So, at first aggressive fighting was forbidden; it later became permissible (2:190) and subsequently obligatory (9:5).[57] This “verse of the sword” abrogated, canceled, and replaced 124 verses that called for tolerance, compassion, and peace.[58]

Suyuti said that everything in the Qur’an about forgiveness and peace is abrogated by verse 9:5, which orders Muslims to fight the unbelievers and to establish God’s kingdom on earth.

Prior to receiving “Ultimatum,” Muhammad had reached agreements with various Arab tribes. But when God gave Muhammad a revelation (2:190-2), Muhammad felt justified in breaking his cease-fire. For Isma’il bin Kathir (1301-73), a student of Ibn Taymiyya and an influential Qur’an interpreter in his own right, it is clear: As jihad involves death and the killing of men, God draws attention to the fact that disbelief, polytheism, and avoidance of God’s path as shown by the Qur’an are worse than killing them.[59] This creates license for future generations of Muslims to kill non-Muslims solely on the basis of their refusal to accept Islam.

According to Ibn Kathir in his commentary on Chapter 9:5, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first caliph, used this and other verses to validate fighting anyone who either did not pay religious taxes to the Muslims or convert to Islam. Ibn ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab, one of the hadith transmitters, quoted Muhammad as saying, “I have been commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no deity worthy of worship except God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” He testified that Ad-Dahhak bin Muzahim, an authentic transmitter of hadiths, said that the verse of the sword “abrogated every agreement of peace between the Prophet and any idolater, every treaty, and every term.” ‘Awfi cited Ibn ‘Abbas, who argued that “Ultimatum” obviated earlier peace treaties.[60] The Shafi‘i school took this as a justification for killing anyone who abandoned prayer and for fighting anyone who refused to pay increased religious minority taxes.[61]

Such interpretations resonate. Muhammad Sa‘id Ramadan al-Buti, a contemporary Al-Azhar University scholar, wrote that “the verse (9:5) does not leave any room in the mind to conjecture about what is called defensive war. This verse asserts that holy war, which is demanded in Islamic law, is not a defensive war because it could legitimately be an offensive war. That is the apex and most honorable of all holy wars. Its goal is the exaltation of the word of God, the construction of Islamic society, and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth regardless of the means. It is legal to carry on an offensive holy war.”[62]

Defensive warfare in Islam is nothing but a phase of the Islamic mission that the Prophet practiced. After that, it was followed by another phase, that is, calling all people to embrace Islam. Even for People of the Book, there can be no role except conversion to Islam or subjugation to Muslim rule. Hence, Muhammad’s statement, “They would not invade you, but you invade them.”[63]

Modern Revisionism of Jihad

David Powers, a well-known researcher of classical Islam, agreed that 9:5 abrogates no less than 124 verses that command or imply anything less than a total offensive against the non-believers. However, he says the verse is itself considered to be abrogated by the conditional clause with which it concludes: “But if they repent and perform the prayer and pay the alms, then let them go their way.”[64] But such a condition is not magnanimous: When infidels repent and perform the Muslim prayer and pay alms, it means they have become Muslims. Once they are Muslims, there is no need to slay them. The clause thus becomes more coercive than conditional. It suggests than a non-Muslim must convert to Islam or be slain.

Still, no verse is more frequently cited by contemporary Muslims preachers and analysts to depict Islam as peaceful and compassionate as 2:256, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.” For Sheikh Abdur Rahman, the chief justice of Pakistan, this verse is one of the most important, containing a charter of freedom of conscience unparalleled in the religious annals of mankind.[65]

Muhammad offered this verse in his first year of residence in Medina when he needed the Jews’ support. Nahhas, with the authority of Ibn ‘Abbas, said: “Scholars differed concerning 2:256. Some said it has been abrogated by 9:73 for the Prophet compelled the Arabs to embrace Islam and fight those that had no alternative but to surrender to Islam. Other scholars said that 2:256 had not been abrogated concerning the People of the Book. It is only the infidels who are compelled to embrace Islam.”[66] Suyuti does not see 2:256 abrogated by 9:73 but rather interprets 9:73 as a case of postponing the fight until Muslims become strong. He argues that when Muslims were weak, God commanded them to be patient.[67]

This is also the case of sura 9:29, which deals with Jews and Christians. Fighting them is mentioned after the clarification regarding fighting the idolaters (9:5). This verse (9:29) was revealed when Muhammad was commanded to fight the Byzantines and prepared the expedition to Tabuk. Ibn Kathir declared: The order is to fight the People of the Book until they pay the jizyah (protection tax) with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. Had they been true believers in their religions, that faith would have directed them to believe in Muhammad because all prophets commanded them to obey and follow him. Yet when he was sent, they disbelieved in him even though he is the “mightiest of all messengers because it suits their desires and lusts, and because they disbelieved in the master, the mightiest, the last and most perfect of all prophets.”

Ibn Kathir continues: “This honorable verse was revealed with the order to fight the People of the Book. After the pagans were defeated, the people entered God’s religion in large numbers, and the Arabian Peninsula was secured under the Muslims’ control.”[68]

Conclusions

The issue of abrogation in Islam is critical to understanding both jihad and da’wa, the propagation of Islam. Some Muslims may preach tolerance and argue that jihad refers only to an internal, peaceful struggle to better oneself. Western commentators can convince themselves that such teachings are correct. However, for learned Muslim scholars and populist leaders, such notions are or should be risible. They recognize that, in practice, there is compulsion in Islam. They take seriously the notion that the Qur’an teaches not just tolerance among religions, but tolerance among religions on the terms of Islam. To understand the challenge of the current Islamist revival, it is crucial for non-Muslims and moderate Muslims alike to recognize that interpretation of Islamic doctrine can have two faces, and that the Medinan face may very well continue to overshadow the Meccan face for a major portion, if not the majority, of contemporary Muslims.

David Bukay is a lecturer in the school of political science at the University of Haifa.

[1] Mustafa Akyol, “Terror’s Roots Not in Islam,” FrontPage Magazine, Oct. 20, 2004; “Islam: The Religion of Peace” and “Status of Human Beings in Islam,” Islam: Beginner’s Introduction, Bihar Anjuman Foundation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 29, 2006.
[2] John L. Esposito, What Everybody Needs to Know about Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 61-4, 70-3, 117-27, 132-6; Natana Delong-Bas, “New Opinion of Ibn Abdel Wahhab,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Jan. 26 – Feb. 1, 2006; Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 221-6.
[3] George W. Bush, address to joint session of Congress, Sept. 20, 2001; idem, remarks, White House, Oct. 23, 2001; Tony Blair, British prime minister, statement to Parliament on the London bombings, July 11, 2005.
[4] Karen Armstrong, “The True, Peaceful Face of Islam,” Time, Sept. 23, 2001.
[5] Jamal Badawi, “Islam, World Peace and September 11,” video clips, accessed May 16, 2007; idem, “Jihad, A Call to Humanity,” islamicforumeurope.com, accessed May 16, 2007.
[6] Qur. 2:256; 2:285; 3:64; 4:134; 5:5; 5:8; 5:48; 11:118; 29:46; 49:13; 60:8-9. All references are from Ahmed Ali, Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[7] For further discussion, see Richard Bell, Introduction to the Qur’an (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953), pp. 57-61; A.T. Welch, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 5 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960), s.v. “kur’an,” pp. 409-11.
[8] For more concerning the construction of the Qur’an, see Bell, Introduction to the Qur’an, chaps. 6-8.
[9] Bell, Introduction to the Qur’an, pp. 86-107; Arthur Jeffery, Islam: Muhammad and His Religion (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 66.
[10] Qur. 2:106.
[11] Qur. 16:101.
[12] Qur. 13:39.
[13] Qur. 17:86.
[14] John Burton, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 7, s.v. “Naskh,” p. 1010.
[15] Abu al-Kasim Hibat-Allah Ibn Salama, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh (Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1966), pp. 4-5, 123. On pp. 142-3, he lists the abrogated verses. See also pp. 7, 11, 26-7, 37, 46.
[16] Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Religion of Islam (Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha’at Islam, 2005), p. 32; Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Nahhas, An-Nasikh Wal-Mansukh (Cairo: Maktabat ‘Alam al-Fikr, 1986), pp. 2-3.
[17] Muhammad Abu al-Husain Muslim bin al-Hajjaj al-Nisapuri, Sahih Muslim (Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1971), book 003, no. 0675.
[18] ‘Abdallah Ibn ‘Umar al-Baydawi, Anwar at-Tanzil wa-Asrar at-Ta’wil (Riyadh: Dar at-Tiba‘ah, 1997), pp. 116-7.
[19] Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, The Meaning of the Qur’an, vol. I (Lahore: Islamic Publications, Ltd., 1967), p. 102, fn. 109; Ali, Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation, p. 24.
[20] Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Glorious Qur’an: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1978), pp. 46-7.
[21] Abdul Majid al-Daryabadi, Tafsir al-Qur’an (Lahore: Idara Islamiyyat, 1985), p. 36; see also Mustansir Mir, Dictionary of Qur’anic Terms and Concepts (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), pp. 5-6.
[22] Badr al-din Muhammad bin ‘Abdullah al-Zarkasi, Al-Burhan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, vol. 1 (Cairo: Matba’at al-Halabi, 1957), p. 235; Abu al-Fadl ‘Abd al-Rahman Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti, Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, 1973), part 1, p. 47.
[23] Richard C. Martin, Mark R. Woodward, with Dwi S. Atmaja, Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu‘tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1997), pp. 25-6, 47-8, 126-8, 210-7; Louis Gardet, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 4, s.v. “Kalam,” pp. 468-71; Daniel Gimaret, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 7, s.v. “Mu‘tazila,” pp. 788-9.
[24] Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, At-Tafsir al-Kabir, vol. 1 (Cairo: Maktabat ‘Alam al-Fikr, 1956), p. 446.
[25] Abu Muhammad ‘Ali bin Ahmad bin Sa’id Ibn Hazim, An-Nasikh w’al-Mansukh (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyah, 1986).
[26] Ali Dashti, 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 1994), p. 54.
[27] Muhammad Ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 6 (Lahore: Kazi, 1979), book 60, p. 31; Mahmud bin ‘Umar al-Zamakhshari, Al-Kashshaf ‘an Haqa’iq at-Tanzil wa-’Uyun al-Aqawil fi Wujuh at-Ta’wil (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, 1967), part I, pp. 337; Abu al-Fadl ‘Abd al-Rahman Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti, Lubab an-Nuqul fi Asbab an-Nuzul (Cairo: Maktabat ‘Alam al-Fikr, 1964), p. 31; Baydawi, Anwar at-Tanzil wa-Asrar at-Ta’wil, pp. 39.
[28] Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 6, part 6, p. 227; Zamakhshari, Al-Kashshaf, part I, p. 555; Suyuti, Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, p. 98.
[29] Abu Ja’far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari, Tafsir: The Commentary on the Qur’an, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 471-2.
[30] Abu al-Hassan Ali Ibn Ahmad al-Wahidi al-Naisaburi, Kitab Asbab nuzul al-Qur’an (Cairo : Dar al-Kitab al-Jadid, 1969), p. 4.
[31] Qur. 87:6-7.
[32] Qur. 2:106.
[33] Qur. 22:52.
[34] Bell, Introduction to the Qur’an, pp. 108-9; Welch, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 5, s.v. “Kur’an,” pp. 414-9.
[35] Salama, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, pp. 4-5, 8; Nahhas, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, pp. 4-12.
[36] Qur. 1, 12, 36, 49, 55, 57, 61-2, 66-9, 71-2, 77-9, 82-5, 89-94, 97-102, 104-10, 112-4.
[37] Qur. 48, 59, 63, 64, 65, 87.
[38] Qur. 6-7, 10-1, 13, 15-8, 20, 23, 27-31, 34-5, 37-9, 43-7, 51, 53-4, 60, 68, 70, 74-7, 80, 86, 88, 109.
[39] Qur. 2-3, 5, 8-9, 14, 18-9, 21-2, 24-6, 33-4, 40, 42, 51-2, 56, 58, 73, 103, 108.
[40] Suyuti, Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, part I, p. 82.
[41] On the Shafi’i school, see Majid Khadduri, Islamic Jurisprudence. Shafi’i's Risala (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), pp. 123-7, 195-205.
[42] Nahhas, An-Nasikh W’al-Mansukh, pp. 5-6.
[43] Qur. 9:5 (the sword verse).
[44] Qur. 24:2.
[45] Suyuti, Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, part 3, pp. 59-60, 69-70, 74; Qur. 4:15-16.
[46] Ibid., pp. 60, 69, 72. For further examples of Muhammad changing his mind, see Nisapuri, Sahih Muslim, 15:4044–62.
[47] Dashti, 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, p. 54.
[48] Ahmad Von Denffer, “Asbab al Nuzul” and “Al-Nasikh wal-Mansukh,” Ulum al-Qur’an: An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1989), chap. 5.
[49] Yusuf Ali, The Glorious Qur’an, pp. 46, 47; Qur. 6:34, 115; 10:64; 18:27.
[50] A. Muhammed, “The Lie of Abrogation: The Biggest Lie against the Qur’an,” accessed May 7, 2007.
[51] Muhammad Asad, Message of the Qur’an (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1993), pp. 22-3, fn. 87; see also Ernest Hahn, “Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Controversy over Abrogation” The Muslim World, Apr. 1974, p. 126.
[52] James Robson, trans., Mishkat al-Masabih, vol. 2 (Lahore: M. Ashraf, 1963-5), book XV, chap. 5, pp. 752-5, book XVIII, chap. 1, pp. 806-16; idem, Mishkat al-Masabih, vol. 3, book XVIII, chap. 5, pp. 836-9.
[53] L. Veccia Vaglieri, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 4, s.v. “Khaybar,” pp. 1137-43.
[54] See explanations, Suyuti, Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, part 1, pp. 60, 65, 164.
[55] Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 617-9; Yusuf Ali, The Glorious Qur’an, p. 435; Tabari, The History of Al-Tabari, vol. 8, pp. 160-87.
[56] Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 6, book 60, no. 129.
[57] Muhsin Khan, “Introduction,” in ibid., pp. xxiv-xxv.
[58] Ibn Hazm, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, pp. 19, 27; Muhi al-Din Ibn al-’Arabi, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-Krim (Beirut: Dar al-Andalus, 1978), p. 69; Burton, The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 7, s.v. “Naskh,” p. 1010; Salama, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, p. 130, mentioned only 114.
[59] Ibn Kathir, Tafsir of Ibn Kathir, vol. 4, pp. 375-7.
[60] Ibid., pp. 375, 377.
[61] Khadduri, Islamic Jurisprudence: Shafi’i Risala, pp. 333-52, notes, pp. 33-9.
[62] Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti, Jurisprudence in Muhammad’s Biography (Damascus: Dar al-Fikr, 2001), pp. 323-4.
[63] Ibid., p. 242.
[64] David S. Powers, “The Exegetical Genre nasikh al-Qur’an was mansukhuhu wa-mansukhuhu,” in Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an, Andrew Rippin, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 130-1.
[65] Sheikh Abdur Rahman, Punishment of Apostasy in Islam (Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1972), pp. 16, 18-9.
[66] Nahhas, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, p. 80; Ibn Hazm, An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, pp. 12-9, 27, 42.
[67] Suyuti, Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, pp. 25-6.
[68] Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir, pp. 404–9, 546-7; Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, book 53, no. 388; Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, p. 620.

A Plan of Attack For Peace

With Gaza in flames, the prospects for a Middle East deal seem minuscule. But there is a way out, and both sides know what they must do.

Daniel Klaidman

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jan 12, 2009

In the remorseless logic of the Middle East, war is diplomacy by other means. This was true when Anwar Sadat launched a surprise attack on Israel in October 1973, a move that gave him the credibility and stature in the Arab world to make peace six years later with the Jewish state. It is also true today as Israel continues its assault on Hamas in Gaza, attacks that were prompted by Hamas missile strikes on Israel. The recent violence has reportedly cost more than 400 lives and left over 2,000 wounded; on Saturday, Israeli ground forces began moving in. Much of the outside world, not without justification, views the Gaza campaign as yet another atavistic explosion of Arab-Israeli violence that will, once again, set back the efforts for peace. But these strikes were not simply a reaction; they were a calculation.

Indeed, an Israeli source intimate with Olmert’s thinking, speaking anonymously in order to speak freely, says the prime minister went into Gaza with a two-tiered set of objectives. The first was simply to stop the missiles Hamas was sending into Israel and to force a renewal of the ceasefire that existed until Dec. 19. Olmert’s second goal, the source says, is far more ambitious—and risky: the prime minister wants to crush Hamas altogether, first by aerial attacks and then with a grinding artillery and infantry assault. The hope, however faint, is eventually to allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government to reassert control in Gaza, clearing the way in the future for a return to serious peace negotiations. With Hamas out of the way, Olmert believes there is a chance that Israel and the Palestinians can put flesh on the outlines of a comprehensive peace plan he negotiated with Abbas over the past year.

Wishful thinking? Probably. After so many failed attempts, the phrase “peace process” has little meaning. Olmert’s own motives in Gaza may have as much to do with domestic politics as foreign policy. Badly weakened and facing possible corruption charges, he has been grasping to rescue his tarnished legacy. But the fact that Olmert wants to negotiate, and that Abbas wants to negotiate, underscores the stubborn, maddening fact about the Israeli-Palestinian relationship: there is only one path to peace, and both sides know what it is—and yet neither side has been willing to take it. The violence, the bombings, the threats and counterthreats are all the more exhausting and senseless because they are, essentially, an elaborate delaying tactic. The broad contours of a peace were laid out eight years ago when President Bill Clinton brought the two sides together at Camp David and tried to broker a historic deal. The current Olmert “shelf plan” is remarkably similar to the Clinton parameters: a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians make painful compromises on the core issues of territory, security, Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. The 2000 talks collapsed partly because time ran out on Clinton’s term and partly because neither side had the political clout to sell the deal back home. Bush, fixated on Iraq and terror, has paid little mind to the conflict until recently.

There are many difficult details to be worked out: the exact borders of a two-state compromise; the fate of Palestinian refugees; the future of Jerusalem. President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, will now inherit these challenges. They cannot simply pick up where Bill Clinton left off. The strategic context in the region has changed profoundly—for the worse. George W. Bush’s war on terror has diminished American credibility in the Arab world. Moreover, the leaders of those Arab states that are closest to the United States have lost legitimacy, challenged by popular opposition at home. Meanwhile a Shiite government in Baghdad, the first in half a millennium, along with the rise of Iran, has increased Shiite-Sunni tensions throughout the Middle East. (On the bright side, Iran’s enhanced influence in the region means that the West has a powerful incentive to break up the alliance between Tehran and Damascus. Real progress with Syria could have a positive effect on Israeli-Palestinian talks.)

At the moment, the greatest impediment to peace is Hamas, the terrorist group that won power in Gaza through elections in 2006. The rise of a rejectionist “Hamastan” in Gaza has left Palestinians divided between Abbas’s more moderate Fatah government and radical Hamas leaders who encourage violence and believe Israel itself should not exist. Hamas rose by exploiting the misery and grievances of the Palestinians. The challenge for Palestinians and Israelis who desire peace is to make Hamas irrelevant in the eyes of its supporters by offering them something more tangible than revenge.

The suspicion of many Israelis—sometimes justified—that Palestinian leaders are interested not in peace but in Israel’s destruction has been another powerful obstacle. Israelis warn against becoming freiers. The word is Yiddish for “suckers,” but it carries deeper psychological freight in a country that grew out of the ashes of the Holocaust and has absorbed “never again” as its mantra. The Palestinians harbor similar resentments at having repeatedly drawn the short stick of history. As many of them see it, the land of Israel is land that the world stole from them in 1948, leaving them without a home. At Camp David, Yasir Arafat refused to finalize a peace agreement with Israel, claiming that to do so would be to court assassination by his own people.

There are no options other than a comprehensive agreement that creates two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, warily coexisting side by side. Lately, some Palestinian intellectuals have been making the case for a single, binational state—an idea that could have even more currency in the aftermath of Israel’s military action in Gaza. But from the Israeli perspective, such a one-state solution would be disastrous, for it would terminate the founding principle of the country as a Jewish homeland.

President-elect Obama may have hoped he would have time to develop an approach to peacemaking in the Holy Land. But as usual, the schedule is dictated by facts on the ground. It is unclear how engaged Obama can be in the Middle East in the early months of his administration; his first priority will be fixing the American economy. What Obama can’t delay once he takes office is forcefully recommitting the United States to a two-state solution and the basic framework for peace that already exists.

During the presidential campaign, Obama’s detractors tried to cast doubt on his loyalty to Israel. It was a political ploy, since Obama has spoken out forcefully in Israel’s defense. Yet many Israeli and American Jews hope Obama will be willing to deliver the sort of tough love to the Israelis that Bush, reflexively defensive of Israel, refused to do for eight years. The president must be willing to pressure the next Israeli prime minister to make difficult concessions for peace. The Israelis may be more open to such pressure now than they were in the past. Time is no longer on their side. Arab birthrates are rising. By most estimates, if Israel insists on maintaining control over the West Bank, the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea will be majority Arab in years to come. Thus, the only way for Israel to stay a Jewish state is to make way for a Palestinian state. Early signs are that Obama intends to play this role of loyal but critical friend—and in that sense will be, as the joke goes, “good for the Jews.”

The new president and his team will be able to rely on ideas derived from the work of negotiators who have struggled, with the patience of Job, to find a middle ground. There is room for refinement and improvement. The haggling will be epic. But in the end (if there ever is an end), any lasting agreement for peace will probably look something like this.

Article I: Territory

Ever since Israel blitzed the Arabs in 1967′s Six Day War—taking the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan—”land for peace” has been the guiding principle of any comprehensive deal. It remains the only option. Israel has already withdrawn from Gaza; it must now pull out of the vast majority of the West Bank. Palestinians will establish their homeland in these two swatches of land. In return, the Palestinians and other Arabs will formally renounce their claims on the Jewish state and recognize its right to exist. But there will have to be some adjustments to the pre-1967 borders. Israel and the Palestinians should swap equal amounts of land, allowing a majority of the roughly 270,000 Israeli settlers now residing in the largest of the West Bank settlement blocks to stay where they are while remaining under Israeli sovereignty. Israel in turn would give up a land corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank and allowing for the free flow of people and commerce between the two. There is one additional challenge that did not exist when Clinton laid out his original proposal in 2000: the Israelis have erected a security barrier that puts a full 8 percent of the West Bank on their side of the fence. It has already changed the way Israelis think about the borders of their nation. “The security barrier is creating new conceptual and spatial contours in the Israeli imagination,” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and now a senior fellow at both the Century and New America foundations. But for any deal to succeed, the barrier would have to be torn down or, at the very least, moved.

Article II: Security
Back in 2000, this was the most straightforward of the issues to be worked out. Both sides generally agreed that the new Palestinian state would have to be largely de-militarized. Palestinian forces would be allowed to maintain light arms to enforce domestic law and order but would not have an offensive capability that could in any way threaten Israel. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over their airspace, but it would be limited to civilian aviation. Yet the violence of the last eight years—not only between Palestinians and Israelis but also between Fatah and Hamas forces—complicates the security equation. The Israelis are now more skeptical that Fatah is strong enough to assume responsibility for security. A more feasible approach would be to put a NATO-based international force in the West Bank that would later transfer control to the Palestinians. Obama might well go for this; his designated national-security adviser, retired Gen. James Jones, developed the idea while serving as Condoleezza Rice’s envoy for Palestinian-Israeli security issues. As far as Israeli forces are concerned, they would be able to withdraw from the strategically important Jordan Valley over a longer period of time, perhaps three years. Israel would be allowed to maintain a number of warning stations on Palestinian territory. Finally, Israel would allow the Palestinians to have sovereignty over their borders and international crossing points. But these borders and crossing points should be monitored by an international presence.

Article III: Jerusalem

The sacred “City of Peace” is at the very heart of the 100-year conflict: how to divvy up rights to a holy place with too much history and not enough geography. In 2000, Clinton’s deft diplomatic skills helped demystify Jerusalem. He asked Israeli and Palestinian mediators to come up with a list of 60 basic municipal responsibilities they could share, from garbage collection to mail delivery. There was remarkable consensus. By moving the conversation from the sacred to the mundane, the exercise isolated the practical issues of running a city from the abstract and emotionally fraught issue of sovereignty. Clinton’s seductively simple notion was this: in occupied East Jerusalem, he said, “What is Arab should be Palestinian and what is Jewish should be Israeli.” This is just as relevant today. So is the principle from Camp David that Jerusalem must be divided—but shared, and it must serve as a capital to both states.

One of Clinton’s solutions will likely have to be dialed back. His concept of split-level sovereignty for the holiest parts of Jerusalem are too incendiary. Jews know the area as the Temple Mount, the site where the ancient temple once stood. It is revered by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the place where Muhammad ascended to heaven on a white steed. Clinton proposed Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram and Israeli sovereignty over the entire Western Wall, part of which runs beneath the Muslim quarter of the Old City. Today, it is very unlikely that either side would accept such a division. But there are other creative solutions. One is a proposal in a new book by Martin Indyk, Clinton’s ambassador to Israel at the time of the 2000 summit. Indyk recommends that the Old City be placed under a so-called “special regime,” with Israeli and Palestinian governments sharing sovereignty over the territory. But the religious sites inside the Old City walls would remain under the control of the respective Muslim, Jewish and Christian religious authorities without any actual designation of sovereignty. Alternatively, Indyk suggests, the entire Holy Basin—the Old City and religious sites—could be placed under international supervision, with religious authorities controlling their holy places.

Article IV: Refugees 
This may be the most difficult problem to solve. What will become of the Palestinians who fled or were forced from their territory in 1948, and their descendants? There are as many as 4 million refugees living in camps on the West Bank and Gaza and in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. They are poor, stateless and angry. For half a century they have waited, believing that one day they will return to their homes. Throughout the years of negotiations, Palestinians have demanded a “right of return.” But to Israelis, the notion implies an admission that they are responsible for the refugee crisis and the historical injustices leveled against the Palestinians. Israelis, offended at the suggestion that their country was born in sin, have drawn a clear line.

Israeli leaders have been willing to accept a partial solution: some refugees living in the camps would make homes in the newly established state of Palestine. A small, symbolic number would be permitted to move to Israel. For this to work, refugees living in camps in Syria and other foreign states would have to be allowed to stay if they chose, and be granted citizenship in their adopted countries—the Arab host countries could not demand that all of the refugees return to Palestine, where they would overwhelm the budding state. And the refugees must be granted a window of time—perhaps three to five years—to petition international courts for compensation for what they have lost, perhaps as part of a massive regional redevelopment plan.

But how to salve the wounds of Palestinian grievance? One intriguing solution is offered by writer Walter Russell Mead in an essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Mead argues that though Israel must take some responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy, the entire nakba, or catastrophe, “cannot simply be laid at Israel’s door.” Israel must acknowledge its part in the events of 1948, but the international community must take “ultimate responsibility” for the 60-year-old crisis. In this way, the world would acknowledge that the Palestinians have indeed suffered a historic injustice, but obviate the need for Israel to bear full responsibility. “This is a way to confer dignity on the Palestinian people,” says Levy—a crucial step toward securing an elusive peace.

With Dan Ephron, Christopher Dickey and Michael Hirsh

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/177840

In Iraq, the Day After

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 2, 2009; A01

 

BAGHDAD Maybe it was the only shot heard for days in a neighborhood once ordered by the cadence of gunfire. Perhaps it was the smiles at checkpoints and the shouts of Iraqi policemen navigating the always snarled traffic. “God’s mercy on your parents,” they beseeched. “God’s blessings on you.” Maybe it was the music box still playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” at a kiosk overflowing with Christmas tree decorations and heart-shaped red pillows.

For anyone returning to Baghdad after spending time here during its darkest days two years ago, when it was paralyzed by sectarian hatred and overrun by gunmen sowing despair, the conclusion seemed inescapable.

“The war has ended,” said Heidar al-Abboudi, a street merchant.

The war in Iraq is indeed over, at least the conflict as it was understood during its first five years: insurgency, communal cleansing, gangland turf battles and an anarchic, often futile quest to survive. In other words, civil war — though civil war was always too tidy a term for it. The entropy, for now at least, has run its course. So have many of the forces the United States so dangerously unleashed with its 2003 invasion, turning Iraq into an atomized, fractured land seized by a paroxysm of brutality. In that Iraq, the Americans were the final arbiter and, as a result, deprived anything they left behind of legitimacy.

Not to say that there is peace in Iraq. As many people are killed today as on any day in 2003 and 2004. Nor is there victory. For any Iraqi, the word, translated into Arabic, draws a dumbfounded look. Victory for whom? Certainly not the tens of thousands of civilians — perhaps many more — killed in the frenzied clashes of those once inchoate forces.

Rather, it is the day after.

Baghdad feels much as southern Lebanon did after an asymmetrical war there in 2006, between Israel and Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim movement that fought Israel to a draw. Survivors rose from the rubble of their homes, offices and stores with the satisfied smile of survival — in war, its own victory. Then they beheld the destruction the fighting had wrought around them. Their faces turned grim as they realized the task at hand.

It is perhaps the day before, too.

“We don’t know what’s next,” Shidrak George, a bystander, said April 9, 2003, as he watched men vainly assault Saddam Hussein‘s statue in Firdaus Square with chains, a sledgehammer and a cascade of rocks before making way for a bulky Marine M88 armored recovery vehicle to pull it down. The vehicle stopped for no one. It didn’t have to.

He said everything remained ghamidh — mysterious and unclear.

“We want to know how this turns out.”

A City of Walls

In Baghdad’s 1,250-year history, its denizens have bestowed on it many names. To Abu Jaafar Mansour, its founder, it was the City of Peace, a capital whose walls were so perfectly circular that a contemporary suggested they were poured into a mold and cast.

Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad was a testament to his megalomania, a strange sprawl with a disfigured sense of grandeur. After his fall, the city was stripped bare, revealing a modern creation of brick and mud, vulnerable like its people. It became a city of lanterns amid the blackouts, a city of ghosts shadowed by fear, a city that was mahjoura, forsaken. The architecture of occupation soon followed, falling like a curtain — dull, unadorned concrete barriers colored in the somber gray of an overcast sky.

Baghdad today is a city of those walls.

The neighborhood of Dora looks like a maximum-security prison, complete with a rusted watchtower. Sadiyah has but one entrance, where waiting traffic sometimes snakes a mile. Sadr City is enclosed, then divided into three hamlets. Amariyah is surrounded. So are Hurriyah and Shuala, Bayaa and Amal. No one can see inside. No one can look out.

In two years, only the faces of the walls have changed.

They now declare the swagger of Iraqi army units: “The Lion Brigade remains a lion,” graffiti reads. They warn: “Respect and be respected.” They celebrate: “Long live the new Iraq.” They serve as a canvas for murals that forgo Iraq’s more contemporary Arab past for its older Sumerian and Babylonian glory. They carry the advertisements of the travel agencies, moneychangers and realty offices they now protect. They bear the floral patterns that, not long ago, were more familiar on martyrs’ posters.

Most of all, the walls conceal.

“A ruined state” was the term Iraq’s parliament speaker had for what the Americans have left behind those walls. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said it in anger after he resigned in December. But the phrase resonates, in both Iraq as a whole, a weary landscape dominated in hues of brown, the color of poverty, and in Baghdad, a city where everything these days seems twisted or torn, bent or broken, snared in barbed wire that has lost its sheen. Every median has its piles of dirt and rubble, often both. Every curb has its soggy trash.

This war’s end feels more truce than treaty, more respite than reconciliation. There is no revival or renaissance, no celebration. It manifests itself most in the simple lifting of a siege.

In a roundabout once known as Ali Baba Square, water occasionally flows from a bronze fountain portraying Kahramana, the slave girl who outwitted the 40 thieves of “A Thousand and One Nights.” Boys play pool on tables lining the lazy Tigris River. Trucks along Abu Nawas Street bring flopping fish destined for plates of masgoof, an Iraqi specialty.

In Firdaus Square, where Hussein’s statue once gave way to American tanks whose barrels read “Beastly Boy” and “Bloodlust” and U.S. soldiers blaredJohnny Cash‘s “Ring of Fire” over Humvee speakers, two students, Hussein al-Abbas and Amjad Abdel Hamza, took pictures of each other near the swings and park benches.

“For the memories,” Abbas said.

Behind them, a poster reads: “Law builds the nation.”

Fragile is the term American officials rely on to describe this Iraq, and indeed, it is that. At this moment, the country feels as though it could recover, economically if not physically, blessed by oil reserves that are potentially the largest in the world. Crumbling, it feels as though it could just as well remain a powerless, pliant country buckling under its own weight, dependent on a United States that seems determined to dictate its future.

The spectrum between those poles relies on the question of power. The struggle for that power — a series of elections this year is one avenue, and money, guns and repression are another, more familiar means — pervades almost every aspect of life in Iraq today.

Fragile, repeat the Americans. Dangerous, say many Iraqis, bracing for more violence.

“Before the storm, there’s always quiet,” said Amal Salman, living with her family in Karrada, above a street lined with vendors hawking hats emblazoned with “Budweiser,” “Wisconsin” and “Baylor Crew.” A kiosk offered posters of Turkish soap operas that have become a sensation in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Arab world. Pictures of Hossam al-Rassam, a popular Iraqi singer, were in short supply.

When she was 13, Salman chronicled the fall of Hussein in her diary. “No one realizes they are gone, all of them, forever,” she wrote in 2003. She stayed optimistic during Baghdad’s darkest chapter. “The sun will set today, but it always rises again. Everything rises again,” she said then. “I don’t know how to express it, but I understand it.”

Now 18, she worried.

“It’s always most dangerous when it’s calm,” she said.

The Culture of the Shoe
Standing in Firdaus Square on April 9, 2003, the Marine recovery vehicle doing its part, it was difficult to imagine that the United States truly understood the country it had inherited that day. Iraq was a place brutalized by war and tyranny, imbued with ambivalence about the future, shaped by yearning for the past. It never abided by American preconceptions. It never hewed to the United States’ construct of what a country should be.

In months, the unanticipated forces that would shape Iraq were soon unleashed — a Shiite Muslim revival, disenfranchisement of Sunnis, the import of a radical strain of Islam, the hardening of sectarian and ethnic identities, and the onset of a lawless culture of men with guns. An Iraqi friend once called their legacy the culture of the shoe, known here as the kundura.

“When anyone is against you, when anyone has differences with me, I will put a kundura in his mouth, I will shove a kundura down his throat, I will hit him with a kundura, and so on,” he said at the time. “We live in a kundura culture.”

Today, many of those forces seem to have fitfully run their course.

“There is a disintegration in the entire sectarian establishment in Iraq,” said Wamidh Nadhme, a political science professor sitting in the Adhamiyah quarter, over a leisurely lunch of a wintertime soup that mixed turnips with balls of ground meat. “Everyone now is trying to wash their hands of the blood that had stained them.”

His once perilous neighborhood was now quiet. There was neither the staccato crack of gunfire nor the dull thud of helicopters. His gate was unlocked. So was his front door.

His son, Jamal, nodded in agreement, but then offered a caveat.

“The embers are still glowing,” he cautioned his father.

Mercury might best describe Iraq’s politics these days, skipping, rolling and congealing, pushed and pulled by forces that always feel surreptitious and furtive.

The overarching Shiite alliance, once blessed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has crumbled. The figure of one of its leaders, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, stricken by cancer and ravaged by its treatment, seems a metaphor for its fortunes. The bloc that claimed to speak on behalf of reticent Sunnis has splintered, unable to agree on a candidate to replace the speaker of parliament, himself partial to the kundura. It faces competition from the Sons of Iraq movement, which is made up of many who have surrendered the insurgency for a seat at the table. The Shiite prime minister is rallying Sunnis against Kurds. Some of his allies are those same former insurgents.

Shiite Arab, Sunni Arab and Kurd were always facile descriptions of Iraq. Now they make hardly any sense before the constellation of combustible alliances jockeying to answer the questions at the heart of Iraqi politics today: How strong will the central government in Baghdad be, and what coalition of interests will secure power?

“The flames have disappeared. It’s true,” said Abboudi, the street vendor in crowded Karrada, as he sat at his well-stocked store of men’s clothes. “But the war continues among the politicians. Until this moment, there is a great struggle going on among them.”

In that, 2009 feels much like that April day in 2003. Then, as now, one war’s end was the preamble for another, far greater struggle. Much was ambiguous and indistinct. Consequences were unintended.

Like today, it was all ghamidh.

Being Chinese is a personal decision and choice

A recent statement by Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, a much respected, loved and admired leading ulema and a former president of Indonesia, who said he is a descendant of princess Champa, whose son Tan Eng Hwan was known by his given Indonesian aristocrat name Raden Fatah, is a breath of fresh air for all people of Chinese descent in Indonesia, and those who believe in a multicultural society.

For once, a strong and charismatic religious leader of the majority has unabashedly and courageously broken the silence by being openly pluralistic and multiculturalistic. Gus Dur has set an example that being ethnic Chinese is not something to be embarrassed about nor to be feared; instead, it is to be acknowledged wholeheartedly.

Like Gus Dur, Barack Obama, a strong American politician who is on his way to becoming the first president of African descent, has also embraced his ethnicity with a lot of grace and composure. So has Eric Liu, a strong columnist, journalist, political analyst and a member of one of the most admired think tanks in Washington DC, who wrote the best-selling memoir The Accidental Asian. A rare personality of militant toughness and philosophical softness, Indonesian Army Brig. Gen. Tedy Jusuf is another exemplary case of a strong person with a multiculturalistic perspective.

While Gus Dur has probably lived his whole life not as a “typical” person of Chinese ethnicity in Indonesia, Obama, who has mixed blood of American Caucasian and native African, has consciously chosen to live in a black neighborhood in a Chicago suburb and to adopt the lifestyle of most African-Americans.

Liu, an American born whose parents were immigrants from Taiwan, has also consciously chosen to declare himself a Chinese, as stated in his memoir in bold letters.

Cited from his book, “Chinese civilization as transmitted to the Overseas Chinese depends, ultimately, on consent rather than descent. Chineseness isn’t a mythical, more authentic way of being; it is just a decision to act Chinese.”

Brig. Gen. Jusuf, whom I had the privilege of hosting during his recent visit to the United States, has shown how being a member of Chinese ethnicity is a lifelong pride that he will always treasure and is a fundamental cause of his cultural activism, which is reflected in his efforts to embody Tionghoa Indonesia as an ethnicity, as symbolized in one of the pavilions at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah.

His achievements as a strong military leader and a member of a Indonesia-based think tank portray him as a rare blend of the so-called wun (intellectual) and wu (physical strength or martial arts) in Chinese philosophy, which is based on yin and yang. Above all, his admiration for Indonesia as his homeland has been echoed in his works and philosophical standings between the two cultures.

Embracing one’s culture, particularly one that is often stereotyped as “less desirable” and, unfortunately, during the New Order under Soeharto was considered a “criminal act”, as anything Chinese from written characters, publications, to bearing Chinese names was legally forbidden, might have felt like swallowing a bitter pill.

Today, people of Chinese ethnicity is enjoying more freedom in expressing their cultural traits, which is something to be grateful for. The new Citizenship Law of 2006 has also stated that those who were born in Indonesia automatically become “native” Indonesians, which sounds quite comforting de jure-wise.

With all those encouraging news, it is good timing for all Indonesians to return to our roots and embrace the missing pieces of ourselves with awareness that we are all part of the human race. After all, raciality is distinctiveness of one’s race or ethnicity that makes the world more colorful and beautiful, which should be distinguished from racism, which is a belief that one’s characteristics and abilities are determined by race. Raciality is something to be grateful for, while racism is something that we are learning to undo and unlearn throughout our lifetime.

Racism itself is an obsolete concept as the folks behind the Genographic Project, a joint effort betweenNational Geographic and IBM, have been collecting DNA markers to create the largest database that would record human migration patterns and ancestral origins.

Eventually, this project will provide some evidence that all people from all races and ethnicities are related to one another, and that most likely every person on Earth possesses multiple DNA markers coming from multiple ethnicities. Eventually, it would prove that skin color is merely a small part of one’s genetic makeup, not an identity for belonging to a certain class, which comes with privileges, in society.

However, one of my Tracy Press column readers said, “Being ‘post-racial’, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once beckoned that he dreamed someday his children will be judged by the content of their characters instead of by the color of their skin, might always be a utopia.” He further said that he merely hopes for tolerance and acceptance for who he is, whose skin color is different from the rest of the population.

As a human being and a citizen of the world, I have embraced and acknowledged my three cultures consciously: Indonesian by birth place, Chinese by blood line and American by residence. I will always introduce myself as such because I am not just one of them. I am all three and something greater. I have a dream that someday, the whole world will transcend as one.

The writer is a columnist and a social commentator. She is also known as the motivator and inspirator of the JiangZhe Sianghainese Indonesian Young Leaders Fraternity. She can be found at JennieSBev.com.

Wary of Islam, China Tightens a Vise of Rules

New York Times, October 19, 2008

By EDWARD WONG

KHOTAN, China — The grand mosque that draws thousands of Muslims each week in this oasis town has all the usual trappings of piety: dusty wool carpets on which to kneel in prayer, a row of turbans and skullcaps for men without headwear, a wall niche facing the holy city of Mecca in the Arabian desert.

But large signs posted by the front door list edicts that are more Communist Party decrees than Koranic doctrines.

The imam’s sermon at Friday Prayer must run no longer than a half-hour, the rules say. Prayer in public areas outside the mosque is forbidden. Residents of Khotan are not allowed to worship at mosques outside of town.

One rule on the wall says that government workers and nonreligious people may not be “forced” to attend services at the mosque — a generous wording of a law that prohibits government workers and Communist Party members from going at all.

“Of course this makes people angry,” said a teacher in the mosque courtyard, who would give only a partial name, Muhammad, for fear of government retribution. “Excitable people think the government is wrong in what it does. They say that government officials who are Muslims should also be allowed to pray.”

To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule.

The edicts touch on every facet of a Muslim’s way of life. Official versions of the Koran are the only legal ones. Imams may not teach the Koran in private, and studying Arabic is allowed only at special government schools.

Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj — are also carefully controlled. Students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and the passports of Uighurs have been confiscated across Xinjiang to force them to join government-run hajj tours rather than travel illegally to Mecca on their own.

Government workers are not permitted to practice Islam, which means the slightest sign of devotion, a head scarf on a woman, for example, could lead to a firing.

The Chinese government, which is officially atheist, recognizes five religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism and Buddhism — and tightly regulates their administration and practice. Its oversight in Xinjiang, though, is especially vigilant because it worries about separatist activity in the region.

Some officials contend that insurgent groups in Xinjiang pose one of the biggest security threats to China, and the government says the “three forces” of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism threaten to destabilize the region. But outside scholars of Xinjiang and terrorism experts argue that heavy-handed tactics like the restrictions on Islam will only radicalize more Uighurs.

Many of the rules have been on the books for years, but some local governments in Xinjiang have publicly highlighted them in the past seven weeks by posting the laws on Web sites or hanging banners in towns.

Those moves coincided with Ramadan, which ran from September to early October, and came on the heels of a series of attacks in August that left at least 22 security officers and one civilian dead, according to official reports. The deadliest attack was a murky ambush in Kashgar that witnesses said involved men in police uniforms fighting each other.

The attacks were the biggest wave of violence in Xinjiang since the 1990s. In recent months, Wang Lequan, the long-serving party secretary of Xinjiang, and Nuer Baikeli, the chairman of the region, have given hard-line speeches indicating that a crackdown will soon begin.

Mr. Wang said the government was engaged in a “life or death” struggle in Xinjiang. Mr. Baikeli signaled that government control of religious activities would tighten, asserting that “the religious issue has been the barometer of stability in Xinjiang.”

Anti-China forces in the West and separatist forces are trying to carry out “illegal religious activities and agitate religious fever,” he said, and “the field of religion has become an increasingly important battlefield against enemies.”

Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, accounting for 46 percent of the population of 19 million. Many say Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic group, discriminate against them based on the most obvious differences between the groups: language and religion.

The Uighurs began adopting Sunni Islam in the 10th century, although patterns of belief vary widely, and the religion has enjoyed a surge of popularity after the harshest decades of Communist rule. According to government statistics, there are 24,000 mosques and 29,000 religious leaders in Xinjiang. Muslim piety is especially strong in old Silk Road towns in the south like Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan.

Many Han Chinese see Islam as the root of social problems in Xinjiang.

“The Uighurs are lazy,” said a man who runs a construction business in Kashgar and would give only his last name, Zhao, because of the political delicacy of the topic.

“It’s because of their religion,” he said. “They spend so much time praying. What are they praying for?”

The government restrictions are posted inside mosques and elsewhere across Xinjiang. In particular, officials take great pains to publicize the law prohibiting Muslims from arranging their own trips for the hajj. Signs painted on mud-brick walls in the winding alleyways of old Kashgar warn against making illegal pilgrimages. A red banner hanging on a large mosque in the Uighur area of Urumqi, the regional capital, says, “Implement the policy of organized and planned pilgrimage; individual pilgrimage is forbidden.”

As dozens of worshipers streamed into the mosque for prayer on a recent evening, one Uighur man pointed to the sign and shook his head. “We didn’t write that,” he said in broken Chinese. “They wrote that.”

He turned his finger to a white neon sign above the building that simply said “mosque” in Arabic script. “We wrote that,” he said.

Like other Uighurs interviewed for this article, he agreed to speak on the condition that his name not be used for fear of retribution by the authorities.

The government gives various reasons for controlling the hajj. Officials say that the Saudi Arabian government is concerned about crowded conditions in Mecca that have led to fatal tramplings, and that Muslims who leave China on their own sometimes spend too much money on the pilgrimage.

Critics say the government is trying to restrict the movements of Uighurs and prevent them from coming into contact with other Muslims, fearing that such exchanges could build a pan-Islamic identity in Xinjiang.

About two years ago, the government began confiscating the passports of Uighurs across the region, angering many people here. Now virtually no Uighurs have passports, though they can apply for them for short trips. The new restriction has made life especially difficult for businessmen who travel to neighboring countries.

To get a passport to go on an official hajj tour or a business trip, applicants must leave a deposit of nearly $6,000.

One man in Kashgar said the imam at his mosque, who like all official imams is paid by the government, had recently been urging congregants to go to Mecca only with legal tours.

That is not easy for many Uighurs. The cost of an official trip is the equivalent of $3,700, and hefty bribes usually raise the price. Once a person files an application, the authorities do a background check into the family. If the applicant has children, the children must be old enough to be financially self-sufficient, and the applicant is required to show that he or she has substantial savings in the bank. Officials say these conditions ensure that a hajj trip will not leave the family impoverished.

Rules posted last year on the Xinjiang government’s Web site say the applicant must be 50 to 70 years old, “love the country and obey the law.”

The number of applicants far outnumbers the slots available each year, and the wait is at least a year. But the government has been raising the cap. Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that from 2006 to 2007, more than 3,100 Muslims from Xinjiang went on the official hajj, up from 2,000 the previous year.

One young Uighur man in Kashgar said his parents were pushing their children to get married soon so they could prove the children were financially independent, thus allowing them to qualify to go on the hajj. “Their greatest wish is to go to Mecca once,” the man, who wished to be identified only as Abdullah, said over dinner.

But the family has to weigh another factor: the father, now retired, was once a government employee and a Communist Party member, so he might very well lose his pension if he went on the hajj, Abdullah said.

The rules on fasting during Ramadan are just as strict. Several local governments began posting the regulations on their Web sites last month. They vary by town and county but include requiring restaurants to stay open during daylight hours and mandating that women not wear veils and men shave their beards.

Enforcement can be haphazard. In Kashgar, many Uighur restaurants remained closed during the fasting hours. “The religion is too strong in Kashgar,” said one man. “There are rules, but people don’t follow them.”

One rule that officials in some towns seem especially intent on enforcing is the ban on students’ fasting. Supporters of this policy say students need to eat to study properly.

The local university in Kashgar adheres to the policy. Starting last year, it tried to force students to eat during the day by prohibiting them from leaving campus in the evening to join their families in breaking the daily fast. Residents of Kashgar say the university locked the gates and put glass shards along the top of a campus wall.

After a few weeks, the school built a higher wall.

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

The Independent
April 26, 2007

The real scandal at the World Bank
The World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world
By: Johann Hari

While the world’s press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal
over whether the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz helped to get
his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been
ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from
Wolfie’s Washington offices.

This slo-mo scandal isn’t about apparent petty corruption in DC. It’s
about how Wolfowitz’s World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest
people in the world, and knowingly worsening our worst crisis -
global warming – every day.

Let’s start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, 70-something, living
in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to
raise her grandkids as best she can. Hawa has a problem – a massive
problem – and the World Bank put it there. She can’t afford water or
electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to
lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make
it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless
it stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The subsidies
stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren
can drink, and weeps: “Am I supposed to drink air?”

She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari – a
mother – is also thirsty. “The World Bank took away my right to clean
water,” she explains. In 1997 the World Bank demanded the Bolivian
government privatise the country’s water supply. So Maxima couldn’t
afford it any more. Now she has to use dirty water from a well her
villagers dug. This dirty water is making her children sick, and she
is sullen. “I wash my children weekly,” Maxima says. “Sometimes
there’s only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their
whole body … This is not a nice way to live.” The newly elected
socialist government of Evo Morales is planning to take the water
back – and he is, of course, condemned and threatened by the World
Bank.

Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to Latin
America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice farmer in
Haiti – only he can’t grow rice any more. In 1995, the World Bank
demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on imports. The country was
immediately flooded with rice from the US, which has been lavishly
subsidised by the US government. The Haitian government barely exists
and can’t offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So
now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.

Some 5,000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching his
tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a government-owned community
tomato cannery that provided employment for his entire community. The
World Bank ordered his government to close it down, and to open the
country’s markets to international competition. Now he can’t compete
with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is starving.

How would Hawa and Maxima and Muracin and Charles feel if you told
them none of this is considered a scandal, but business as usual?

These victims are not merely an anecdote soup; they are an accurate
summary of the World Bank’s effect on the poor. Don’t take my word
for it. The World Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Group just found
that barely one in ten of its borrowers experienced persistent growth
between 1995 and 2005 – a much smaller proportion than those who
stagnated or slid deeper into poverty. The bank’s own former chief
economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this
approach “has condemned people to death… They don’t care if people
live or die.”

Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually thrash
them? Because its mission to end poverty has always been mythical. As
George Monbiot explains in his book The Age of Consent, the World
Bank was created in the 1940s by US economist Henry Dexter White to
be a further projection of US power. The bank’s head is invariably
American, the bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permanent
veto on policies. It does not promote a sensible mix of markets and
state action – the real path to development. No: the World Bank
pursues the interests of US corporations over the poor, every time.

The bank’s staff salve their consciences by pickling themselves in an
ideology – neoliberalism – that says there is never a conflict
between business rights and human rights. If it’s good for Shell, it
must be good for poor people – right?

This ideology also backfires on us in the rich world. In 2000, the
World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy
policies. It did its best to rig it, putting the former energy
minister of the corporation- licking Indonesian dictator General
Suharto in charge. Emil Salim was even serving on the board of a coal
company at the time he was appointed. But – to everyone’s
astonishment – Salim concluded by opposing the carbon-pumping oil and
gas projects that make up 94 per cent of all the bank’s energy
projects. He said they should be stopped altogether by 2008.

The bank’s response? It ignored its own report and carried on
warming. The business climate, it seems, trumps the actual climate.
Feel the heat.

While the elites huff and puff about Wolfowitz’s alleged small
corruption and ignore his organisation’ s proven immense corruption,
there is something we – ordinary citizens – can do. In the summer of
2001, at the global justice protests in Genoa, I met Dennis Brutus, a
former inmate of Robben Island prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He
had been repelled by the bank’s actions in South Africa, and started
his protests against them by asking a very basic question: who owns
the World Bank? It turns out we do. Ordinary people in the West -
through their trade unions, churches, town councils, universities and
private investments – own it. The bank raises nearly all its funds by
issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held by socially
minded institutions, the kind who signed up to Make Poverty History.
So, Brutus realised, we have a simple power: to sell the bonds and
bankrupt the World Bank. “We need to break the power of the World
Bank over developing countries just as the disinvestment movement
helped break the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa,” he
explained.

The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as apartheid-era
investments has already begun. The cities of San Francisco, Boulder,
Oakland and Berkeley have sold theirs. Several US unions have also
joined. Even this small ripple has caused anxiety within the bank
about the threat to its “AAA” bond rating.

In the Genoa sun, as tear gas fired by the Italian police hissed in
the background, Brutus told me: “I lived to see the death of
political apartheid. Now I want to live to see the end of global
financial apartheid.”

This is the fight we should join. Not some petty squabble over which
Washington technocrat is morally pure enough to lead the forces of
subsidy-slashing and starvation.

The Independent
April 26, 2007

Super Toy, Superboy, dan Superpower

Oleh Saratri Wilonoyudho

Jawa Pos, 11 September 2008
Dua kali Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) ”dipermalukan” berkaitan dengan hal-hal yang dipromosikan sebagai barang ajaib. Yang pertama, ketika SBY memercayai kehebatan ”air api” yang disebut blue energy. Dan, kedua, soal varietas tanaman padi dengan keunggulan luar biasa yang diberi nama Super Toy. Namun, harap dibedakan bahwa blue energy terbukti menipu karena hampir tidak mungkin air bisa berubah menjadi bahan bakar, sedangkan kasus yang kedua masih ada nuansa ilmiah.

Super Toy dipercaya merupakan benih varietas padi unggulan karena merupakan gabungan Rojolele yang pulen dan besar bijinya dengan jenis padi Pandanwangi yang terkenal harum. Bahkan, padi itu diklaim dapat dipanen tiga kali tanpa menanam lagi! Hasil yang dijanjikan juga luar biasa, yakni 15 ton per hektare!

Masyarakat dan pemerintah mesti menyikapi masalah tersebut dengan penuh kearifan karena untuk ”kasus” Super Toy masih ada unsur keilmiahan. Selama ini berbagai kalangan langsung mengejek penemunya tanpa melakukan pemahaman mendalam. Yang dikhawatirkan, sang penemu itu menjadi ”ngambek” dan putus asa tidak mau melanjutkan hasil penelitiannya. Dan, yang lebih dikhawatirkan lagi, ejekan itu juga membikin minder para kreator yang lain di berbagai bidang penemuan.

Di sela-sela dunia perguruan tinggi kita yang sepi dari karya-karya besar, ada seorang Tauyung Supriyadi dengan ide yang cemerlang. Revolusi industri di Barat pada awal abad ke-19 juga tidak dimotori dunia perguruan tinggi, namun oleh para praktisi bengkel. Misalnya, Thomas Alva Edison, Graham Bell, Wright Bersaudara, Marconi, dan James Watt.

Perguruan tinggi di Eropa Barat pada saat itu baru terjebak kepada ”aristokrasi” intelektual. Para ilmuwan dari ilmu alam merasa paling jago dengan ukuran keilmiahannya hanya didasarkan kepada seberapa jauh mereka memahami ikon-ikon seperti hukum thermodinamika dan hukum Newton. Dan, ilmuwan humaniora juga angkuh dengan tolok ukur sendiri seberapa jauh memahami karya-karya Shakespeare, dst.

Demikian pula, perguruan tinggi kita. Ada ledekan bahwa IPB (Institut Pertanian Bogor) adalah gudang para ilmuwan kaliber dunia. Mereka dapat menemukan atau mengembangkan ilmu apa saja, kecuali ilmu pertanian! Di IPB ada jurusan komputer, matematika, statistik, dan sebagainya.

Pada sisi yang lain, sang penemu Super Toy, Tauyung Supriyadi, boleh dikatakan seorang ”superboy”, sama halnya Pak Mukibat, petani yang menemukan ketela pohon unggulan, maupun Pak Mujair yang menemukan benih ikan air tawar unggulan. Dia bukan seorang profesor doktor yang hanya sibuk mondar-mandir memeluk diktat atau laptop di setiap pertemuan ilmiah, dengan materi yang nyaris sama sepanjang tahun, untuk dijajakan sehingga mirip ”pengasong” ilmu.

Dari pengamatan sekilas, Tauyung Supriyadi menjadi ”korban” ABS, asal bapak senang, atau bisa juga dia korban komersialisasi. Penemuan Super Toy yang baru diuji lima kali, tanpa sronto (Jw) langsung diambil alih oleh PT SHI (Sarana Harapan Indopangan) untuk segera disosialisasikan. Dalam kondisi negara yang tengah terkurung dalam ”perangkap pangan” (food trap) negara-negara superpower, munculnya varietas unggulan itu sangatlah menggiurkan.

Hikmah dari kasus Super Toy adalah menguak kelemahan para pejabat kita. Bagaimana mungkin sekelas presiden langsung bersedia memanen perdana Super Toy di Purworejo tanpa memikirkan lebih dalam? Di titik ini terlihat lemahnya para staf ahli yang berada di sekeliling presiden.

Berbeda dengan Pak Harto, di luar kelemahan beliau, ada satu kehebatan. Yakni, Pak Harto senantiasa bergaul dengan para petani lewat klompencapir atau senantiasa menghayati sendiri kehidupan petani dengan memiliki peternakan di Tapos. Pak Harto juga paham hitungan ”pranoto mongso” karena beliau memang anak seorang petani tulen. Beliau mengalami pahit getirnya menjadi seorang petani.

Super Toy juga menunjukkan sang kreator panen perdana itu berharap akan mendapat ”berkah” dari ”keberhasilan” promosinya tersebut, yang berarti juga akan membayangkan meraup keuntungan yang luar biasa pada masa mendatang.

Kreativitas v Superpower

Sketsa di atas hendak mengantarkan kepada satu harapan, jangan matikan kreativitas para petani kita dalam menemukan varietas baru. Berbeda dengan blue energy yang ”tidak ilmiah”, Super Toy dilalui dengan metode ilmiah yang baik dan masih tetap membawa harapan baru pada masa mendatang.

Super Toy tetap menjadi harapan di tengah terkaman negara-negara superpower. Lihat saja, bangsa ini kini dicengkeram perusahaan-perusahaan multi-national corporations (MNCs) di bidang pangan, mulai hulu hingga hilir !

Industri benih pertanian atau input pertanian dikuasi raksasa MNCs, seperti Syngenta, Monsanto, dan Bayer Crop, dengan total USD 40 miliar. Demikian pula, dalam hal industri pengolahan pangan, MNCs seperti Nestle, Kraft Food, Cargill, dan Unilever juga bukan perusahaan yang asing bagi kita. Produk-produk mereka sudah kita cicipi setiap hari, dengan total penguasaan USD 490 miliar. Sampai di sini saja? Belum! Mereka juga mengecerkan hasil pangan tersebut lewat Carrefour, Wal Mart, Tesco, Metro Group, dst, dengan total USD 1.091 miliar.

Dengan kata lain, Superpower benar-benar menguasai para petani dan bangsa kita. Para petani ibarat ”buruh” di negeri sendiri. Mereka menanam benih padi impor, menjual kepada MNCs, kemudian MNCs mengolah dan menjualnya dalam bentuk jadi. Dan, petani makan olahan pangan tersebut (dari hasil panen yang mereka jual) dengan harga yang jauh lebih mahal!

Karena itu, dibutuhkan superboy-superboy yang dapat menemukan Super Toy untuk membendung kapitalisme superpower. Apa khabar perguruan tinggi kita? Sibuk menjual bangku kuliah yang mahal, namun kosong kreativitas?

—

Saratri Wilonoyudho , pengajar dan peneliti pada Universitas Negeri Semarang

Kritik kecil atas argumen aktivis Hizbut Tahrir

Oleh Ulil Abshar-Abdalla

SAYA kerap mendengar pernyataan aktivis Hizbut Tahrir (HT), gerakan Islam yang dikenal dengan “mimpi besar” untuk menegakkan negara Islam internasional itu (dikenal dengan negara khilafah), bahwa fakta sosial tak pernah bisa menjadi dasar landasan penetapan hukum.

Pernyataan ini pertama kali saya dengar dari jubir Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), Ismail Yusanto, saat saya dan dia berbicara dalam sebuah diskusi di Bogor sekitar enam tahun yang lalu. Belakangan, aktivis HTI kerap mengulang-ulang argumen serupa. Rupanya, statemen ini menjadi semacam “refrain” di kalangan mereka.

Bagi yang kurang akrab dengan ilmu ushul fikih (teori hukum Islam), mungkin statemen ini kurang begitu jelas. Supaya sederhana dan mudah dipahami, saya akan berikan contoh kecil berikut ini.

Kita tahu, bahwa Sunan Kudus membangun masjid dengan menara yang berbentuk seperti pura Hindu. Taruhlah, anda terlibat dalam sebuah diskusi tentang boleh tidaknya membangun masjid dengan arsitektur yang menyerupai tempat ibadah agama lain. Misalkan saja anda berpendapat bahwa hal itu boleh. Saat lawan diskusi anda bertanya, apa “hujjah” atau argumen anda, anda menjawab, “Tuh, buktinya Sunan Kudus membangun masjid dengan arsitektur yang menyerupai tempat ibadah agama Hindu.“

Ini hanya contoh anekdotal yang sangat sederhana. Anda bisa mengembangkan contoh ini dengan kasus-kasus lain.

Menurut aktivis HTI, cara berargumen seperti ini mereka anggap salah, sebab fakta sosial, yaitu tindakan Sunan Kudus, tidak bisa dijadikan sebagai landasan penetapan hukum tentang boleh tidaknya membangun masjid dengan gaya arsitektur yang mirip tempat ibadah agama lain. Hukum, menurut mereka, hanya bisa disandarkan atas dalil agama (dalil syar’i). Dalil atau teks agama mengatasi segala-galanya. Tindakan Sunan Kudus atau tokoh manapun, selain Nabi Muhammad, tidak bisa menjadi standar normatif. Yang bisa menjadi standar hanyalah teks agama.

Apakah argumen aktivis HTI ini tepat, terutama dilihat dari tradisi teori hukum Islam klasik sendiri? Esei pendek ini saya tulis untuk memberikan kritik atas cara berpikir aktivis HTI yang, jujur saja, merupakan ciri-khas kaum “tekstualis” di manapun.

Dalam pandangan saya, argumen semacam ini sama tak tepat. Memang, dalam teori hukum Islam, dikenal empat sumber hukum utama, yaitu Quran, hadis, ijma’ (konsensus sarjana jukum Islam atau “juris”) dan qiyas atau analogi (dalam tradisi fikih Syiah, sumber keempat bukan qiyas tetapi akal).

Tetapi, sumber hukum bukan hanya empat, sebab ada sumber-sumber lain yang kedudukannya memang diperselisihkan oleh para sarjana Islam (al-adillah al-mukhtalaf fiha). Statemen aktivis HTI bahwa fakta sosial tidak bisa menjadi sumber hukum, sama sekali tidak tepat, sebab di luar empat sumber utama di atas, ada sumber-sumber lain yang diakui oleh ulama fikih, termasuk fakta sosial sebagaimana akan saya tunjukkan nanti.

Argumen kalangan HTI ini sengaja mereka pakai untuk menepis sanggahan yang diajukan oleh para pengkritik teori negara khilafah yang antara lain disandarkan pad fakta-fakta historis dalam sejarah Islam.

Para pengkritik teori negara khilafah, antara lain, mengatakan praktek negara khilafah tidak “secemerlang” yang dikira oleh para penyokong ide itu. Banyak “khalifah” dalam dinasti-dinasti Islam masa lampau yang bertindak otoriter, despotik, dan kejam. Sebagaimana dalam sejarah negara-negara kuno, pertumpahan darah selalu menandai peralihan kekuasaan dari satu dinasti Islam ke dinasti yang lain.

Terhadap kritik semacam ini, aktivis HTI akan mengatakan bahwa fakta sejarah tidak bisa menjadi dasar untuk menetapkan hukum. Menurut mereka, negara khilafah adalah satu-satunya bentuk negara yang sah menurut dalil agama; fakta sejarah yang menunjukkan bahwa bentuk negara khilafah tak seideal yang dibayangkan, menurut mereka, tak bisa dijadikan argumen untuk menyanggah dalil agama.

Dalam pandangan aktivis HTI, dalil agama sudah cukup dalam dirinya sendiri; fakta sosial harus tunduk pada dalil agama, bukan sebaliknya.

DALAM standar ilmu ushul fikih klasik, argumen ala HT ini jelas sama sekali salah. Dalam hukum fikih, fakta sosial jelas bisa menjadi dasar penetapan hukum. Karena itulah ada kaidah terkenal, “taghayyurul ahkam bi taghayyuril azminati wa amkan,” hukum berubah sesuai dengan waktu dan tempat.

Perbedaan mazhab dalam Islam jelas terkait dengan perbedaan konteks sosial di mana pendiri mazhab itu hidup. Kenapa mazhab Abu Hanifah sering disebut sebagai mazhab ahl al-ra’y, pendapat yang cenderung rasional, karena mereka hidup di Kufah, kota tempat persilangan budaya, kota di mana kita jumpai warisan dari banyak peradaban besar sebelum Islam.

Sementara mazhab Maliki lebih cenderung berpegang pada “sunnah” penduduk Madinah (dikenal dengan ‘amal ahl al-Madinah) karena memang itulah kota tempat Nabi dan sahabatnya hidup, sehingga sunnah penduduk Madinah dianggap sebagai norma.

Sudah tentu, fakta sosial semata-mata memang tak cukup untuk menetapkan sebuah hukum dalam pandangan teori hukum Islam klasik. Fakta sosial tetap harus ditimbang berdasarkan teks. Tetapi teks saja juga tak cukup, karena teks juga dipahami berdasarkan perubahan-perubahan lingkungan sosial yang ada. Dengan kata lain, ada hubungan simbiosis antara teks dan konteks sosial. Dengan demikian, argumen aktivis HTI itu jelas sama sekali tak benar.

Seorang ulama mazhab Hanafi, Najm al-Din al-Thufi, malah berpendapat lebih jauh lagi. Dalam kitabnya yang kurang banyak dibaca luas, “Kitab al-Ta’yin fi Sharh al-Arba’in” (komentar atas kumpulan empat puluh hadis karya Imam Nawawi), al-Thufi melontarkan sebuah pendapat yang menjadi kontroversi dari dulu hingga sekarang, bahwa jika terjadi pertentangan antara maslahat atau kepentingan umum dengan teks atau dalil agama, maka maslahat harus didahulukan.

Saya kutipkan teks Thufi yang langsung berkaitan dengan hal ini:

“Wa in khalafaaha wajaba taqdim ri’ayat al-masalahati ‘alaihima bi thariq al-takhsis wa al-bayan lahuma, la bi thariq al-iftiyat ‘alaihima wa al-ta’thil lahuma, kama tuqaddam al-sunnah ‘ala al-Qur’an bi thariq al-bayan” (hal. 238, edisi yang diedit oleh Ahmad Haj Muhammad ‘Uthman, 1998).

Secara ringkas, teks itu menegaskan, jika terjadi pertentangan antara teks (nass) dan konsensus ulama (ijma’) dengan maslahat, maka kemaslahatan umum harus didahulukan di atas teks dan ijma’.

Maslahat bersumber dari konteks sosial. Jika dalil agama bertentangan dengan konteks sosial, maka konteks harus didahulukan di atas teks agama. “Mendahulukan” di sini, dalam pandangan Thufi, bukan berarti membatalkan dan menganulir sama sekali dalil agama. Sebaliknya, konteks sosial dianggap sebagai “pentakhsis” atau spesifikasi dan “bayan” atau menerangkan teks atau dalil agama yang ada.

Ini memang kompleks. Yang tidak pernah belajar ushul fikih, penjelasan ini mungkin terlalu teknis dan kurang jelas. Intinya adalah: jika dalil dalam Quran atau hadis mengatakan A, lalu konteks sosial justru menunjukkan B, maka teks Quran/hadis itu bisa “dispesifkasi” atau “diterangkan” oleh konteks itu. Dengan kata lain, konteks didahulukan atas teks.

Pendapat al-Thufi ini memang banyak diserang oleh ulama-ulama lain, karena dianggap terlalu berani. Dia bahkan diissukan sebagai seorang Syi’ah. Biasa, ini adalah semacam “black campaign“. Seolah-olah jika seseorang menganut sekte Syi’ah maka pendapatnya otomatis salah.

Apapun, pendapat al-Thufi ini sangat menarik dan memperlihatkan bahwa di kalangan ulama fikih dan ushul fikih klasik sendiri sudah ada pendapat yang menyatakan tentang kedudukan penting dari konteks sosial. Sekali lagi, pernyataan kalangan aktivis HTI bahwa fakta sosial tak bisa menjadi sumber hukum, sama sekali tak tepat, untuk tak mengatakan keliru sama sekali.

Sementara itu, banyak sekali ketentuan hukum dalam fikih yang digantungkan pada adat dan kebiasaan masyarakat setempat. Itulah sebabnya, dalam fikih dikenal kaidah yang sangat populer, “al-’adah muhakkamah“, kebiasaan sosial bisa menjadi sumber hukum.

Sudah tentu adat bukan sumber hukum yang mandiri, sebab harus ditimbang berdasarkan parameter teks agama. Tetapi, teks agama juga tak bisa berdiri sendiri tanpa bantuan adat sosial. Dengan kata lain, ada hubungan simbiosis antara adat dan teks agama. Adat dan teks agama, dua-duanya menjadi sumber hukum.

Contoh sederhana adalah mengenai mas kawin atau mahar. Quran menegaskan bahwa seorang lelaki harus memberikan mas kawin kepada perempuan yang dinikahinya (wa aatu al-nisa’a shaduqatihinna nihlah, QS 4:4). Tetapi Quran tidak menerangkan, berapa jumlah mahar yang harus diberikan oleh suami kepada isterinya.

Di sini, ada ruang “legal” yang dibiarkan terbuka oleh teks agama. Adat masuk untuk mengisinya. Jumlah mahar, menurut ketentuan yang kita baca dalam literatur fikih, diserahkan saja pada adat dan kebiasaan sosial yang ada. Oleh karena itu, jumlah mahar berbeda-beda sesuai dengana adat yang berlaku dalam masyarakat. Itulah yang dikenal dalam fikih sebagai “mahr al-mitsl“, yakni mas kawin yang sepadan dengan kedudukan sosial seorang isteri dalam adat dan kebiasaan masyarakat setempat.

Fakta ini dengan baik menunjukkan bahwa kebiasaan sosial bisa menjadi sumber hukum. Teks saja tidak cukup kalau tak dilengkapi dengan konteks sosial.

Kalangan santri yang belajar di pesantren-pesantren NU tentu sudah terbiasa dengan kenyataan bahwa hukum bisa berubah-ubah karena perubahan konteks. Fatwa beberapa kiai berubah-ubah dari waktu ke waktu karena perubahan konteks sosial. Pada zaman kolonial Belanda dulu, banyak kiai yang berfatwa bahwa memakai celana dan jas hukumnya haram, karena menyerupai adat kebiasaan kaum kolonial yang “kafir”. Setelah zaman merdeka, kiai-kiai mulai berubah pendapat dan bisa menerima “baju kolonial” itu, karena konteksnya sudah berbeda.

Jadi, sekali lagi, apa yang dikatakan oleh aktivis HT itu sama sekali keliru!

Wednesday, Apr. 09, 2008

The Story of Barack Obama’s Mother

By Amanda Ripley/Honolulu

Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama’s mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.

“When I think about my mother,” Obama told me recently, “I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn’t comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box.”

Obama’s mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children.

“She cried a lot,” says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, “if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn’t being understood in a conversation.” And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. “She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable.”

Today Obama is partly a product of what his mother was not. Whereas she swept her children off to unfamiliar lands and even lived apart from her son when he was a teenager, Obama has tried to ground his children in the Midwest. “We’ve created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn’t do for us,” he says. “My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing.”

Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama’s life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man’s story.

But Obama is his mother’s son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother’s credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they’re responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.

It turns out that Obama’s nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.

In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.

Stanley Ann Dunham

Born in 1942, just five years before Hillary Clinton, Obama’s mother came into an America constrained by war, segregation and a distrust of difference. Her parents named her Stanley because her father had wanted a boy. She endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town.

During her life, she was known by four different names, each representing a distinct chapter. In the course of the Stanley period, her family moved more than five times—from Kansas to California to Texas to Washington—before her 18th birthday. Her father, a furniture salesman, had a restlessness that she inherited.

She spent her high school years on a small island in Washington, taking advanced classes in philosophy and visiting coffee shops in Seattle. “She was a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events,” remembers Maxine Box, a close high school friend. Both girls assumed they would go to college and pursue careers. “She wasn’t particularly interested in children or in getting married,” Box says. Although Stanley was accepted early by the University of Chicago, her father wouldn’t let her go. She was too young to be off on her own, he said, unaware, as fathers tend to be, of what could happen when she lived in his house.

After she finished high school, her father whisked the family away again—this time to Honolulu, after he heard about a big new furniture store there. Hawaii had just become a state, and it was the new frontier. Stanley grudgingly went along yet again, enrolling in the University of Hawaii as a freshman.

Mrs. Barack H. Obama
Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. “I suddenly realized,” he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, “that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen … was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different.”

By college, Stanley had started introducing herself as Ann. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class. He was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii and a focus of great curiosity. He spoke at church groups and was interviewed for several local-newspaper stories. “He had this magnetic personality,” remembers Neil Abercrombie, a member of Congress from Hawaii who was friends with Obama Sr. in college. “Everything was oratory from him, even the most commonplace observation.”

Obama’s father quickly drew a crowd of friends at the university. “We would drink beer, eat pizza and play records,” Abercrombie says. They talked about Vietnam and politics. “Everyone had an opinion about everything, and everyone was of the opinion that everyone wanted to hear their opinion—no one more so than Barack.”

The exception was Ann, the quiet young woman in the corner who began to hang out with Obama and his friends that fall. “She was scarcely out of high school. She was mostly kind of an observer,” says Abercrombie. Obama Sr.’s friends knew he was dating a white woman, but they made a point of treating it as a nonissue. This was Hawaii, after all, a place enamored of its reputation as a melting pot.

But when people called Hawaii a “melting pot” in the early 1960s, they meant a place where white people blended with Asians. At the time, 19% of white women in Hawaii married Chinese men, and that was considered radical by the rest of the nation. Black people made up less than 1% of the state’s population. And while interracial marriage was legal there, it was banned in half the other states.

When Ann told her parents about the African student at school, they invited him over for dinner. Her father didn’t notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man’s hand, according to Obama’s book. Her mother thought it best not to cause a scene. As Obama would write, “My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people playing in her head.”

On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama’s parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II. Friends did not learn of the wedding until afterward. “Nobody was invited,” says Abercrombie. The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. “I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?” Obama wonders. “I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more.”

Even by the standards of 1961, she was young to be married. At 18, she dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records. When her friends back in Washington heard the news, “we were very shocked,” says Box, her high school friend.

Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics. He had also been accepted to the New School in New York City, with a more generous scholarship that would have allowed his family to join him. But he decided to go to Harvard. “How can I refuse the best education?” he told Ann, according to Obama’s book.

Obama’s father had an agenda: to return to his home country and help reinvent Kenya. He wanted to take his new family with him. But he also had a wife from a previous marriage there—a marriage that may or may not have been legal. In the end, Ann decided not to follow him. “She was under no illusions,” says Abercrombie. “He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society.” Ann filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964, citing “grievous mental suffering”—the reason given in most divorces at the time. Obama Sr. signed for the papers in Cambridge, Mass., and did not contest the divorce.

Ann had already done things most women of her generation had not: she had married an African, had their baby and gotten divorced. At this juncture, her life could have become narrower—a young, marginalized woman focused on paying the rent and raising a child on her own. She could have filled her son’s head with well-founded resentment for his absent father. But that is not what happened.

S. Ann Dunham Soetoro
When her son was almost 2, Ann returned to college. Money was tight. She collected food stamps and relied on her parents to help take care of young Barack. She would get her bachelor’s degree four years later. In the meantime, she met another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, at the University of Hawaii. (“It’s where I send all my single girlfriends,” jokes her daughter Soetoro-Ng, who also married a man she met there.) He was easygoing, happily devoting hours to playing chess with Ann’s father and wrestling with her young son. Lolo proposed in 1967.

Mother and son spent months preparing to follow him to Indonesia—getting shots, passports and plane tickets. Until then, neither had left the country. After a long journey, they landed in an unrecognizable place. “Walking off the plane, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace,” Obama later wrote, “I clutched her hand, determined to protect her.”

Lolo’s house, on the outskirts of Jakarta, was a long way from the high-rises of Honolulu. There was no electricity, and the streets were not paved. The country was transitioning to the rule of General Suharto. Inflation was running at more than 600%, and everything was scarce. Ann and her son were the first foreigners to live in the neighborhood, according to locals who remember them. Two baby crocodiles, along with chickens and birds of paradise, occupied the backyard. To get to know the kids next door, Obama sat on the wall between their houses and flapped his arms like a great, big bird, making cawing noises, remembers Kay Ikranagara, a friend. “That got the kids laughing, and then they all played together,” she says.

Obama attended a Catholic school called Franciscus Assisi Primary School. He attracted attention since he was not only a foreigner but also chubbier than the locals. But he seemed to shrug off the teasing, eating tofu and tempeh like all the other kids, playing soccer and picking guavas from the trees. He didn’t seem to mind that the other children called him “Negro,” remembers Bambang Sukoco, a former neighbor.

At first, Obama’s mother gave money to every beggar who stopped at their door. But the caravan of misery—children without limbs, men with leprosy—churned on forever, and she was forced to be more selective. Her husband mocked her calculations of relative suffering. “Your mother has a soft heart,” he told Obama.

As Ann became more intrigued by Indonesia, her husband became more Western. He rose through the ranks of an American oil company and moved the family to a nicer neighborhood. She was bored by the dinner parties he took her to, where men boasted about golf scores and wives complained about their Indonesian servants. The couple fought rarely but had less and less in common. “She wasn’t prepared for the loneliness,” Obama wrote in Dreams. “It was constant, like a shortness of breath.”

Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son’s room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn’t afford the élite international school and worried he wasn’t challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.

Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, but Obama’s household was not religious. “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew,” Obama said in a 2007 speech. “But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I.”

In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son’s life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. “She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era,” Obama says. “She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals.” Ann gave her daughter, who was born in 1970, dolls of every hue: “A pretty black girl with braids, an Inuit, Sacagawea, a little Dutch boy with clogs,” says Soetoro-Ng, laughing. “It was like the United Nations.”

In 1971, when Obama was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend Punahou, an élite prep school that he’d gotten into on a scholarship with his grandparents’ help. This wrenching decision seemed to reflect how much she valued education. Ann’s friends say it was hard on her, and Obama, in his book, describes an adolescence shadowed by a sense of alienation. “I didn’t feel [her absence] as a deprivation,” Obama told me. “But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know.”

A year later, Ann followed Obama back to Hawaii, as promised, taking her daughter but leaving her husband behind. She enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia.

Indonesia is an anthropologist’s fantasyland. It is made up of 17,500 islands, on which 230 million people speak more than 300 languages. The archipelago’s culture is colored by Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Dutch traditions. Indonesia “sucks a lot of us in,” says fellow anthropologist and friend Alice Dewey. “It’s delightful.”

Around this time, Ann began to find her voice. People who knew her before describe her as quiet and smart; those who met her afterward use words like forthright and passionate. The timing of her graduate work was perfect. “The whole face of the earth was changing,” Dewey says. “Colonial powers were collapsing, countries needed help, and development work was beginning to interest anthropologists.”

Ann’s husband visited Hawaii frequently, but they never lived together again. Ann filed for divorce in 1980. As with Obama’s father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo and did not pursue alimony or child support, according to divorce records.

“She was no Pollyanna. There have certainly been moments when she complained to us,” says her daughter Soetoro-Ng. “But she was not someone who would take the detritus of those divorces and make judgments about men in general or love or allow herself to grow pessimistic.” With each failed marriage, Ann gained a child and, in one case, a country as well.

Ann Dunham Sutoro

After three years of living with her children in a small apartment in Honolulu, subsisting on student grants, Ann decided to go back to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Ph.D. Obama, then about 14, told her he would stay behind. He was tired of being new, and he appreciated the autonomy his grandparents gave him. Ann did not argue with him. “She kept a certain part of herself aloof or removed,” says Mary Zurbuchen, a friend from Jakarta. “I think maybe in some way this was how she managed to cross so many boundaries.”

In Indonesia, Ann joked to friends that her son seemed interested only in basketball. “She despaired of him ever having a social conscience,” remembers Richard Patten, a colleague. After her divorce, Ann started using the more modern spelling of her name, Sutoro. She took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings. Unlike many other expats, she had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on women’s work. “She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace,” Zurbuchen says, “where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce.” Ann thought the Ford Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.

Her home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers, musicians and labor organizers. “She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more eclectic circle,” Zurbuchen says. “She brought unlikely conversation partners together.”

Obama’s mother cared deeply about helping poor women, and she had two biracial children. But neither of them remembers her talking about sexism or racism. “She spoke mostly in positive terms: what we are trying to do and what we can do,” says Soetoro-Ng, who is now a history teacher at a girls’ high school in Honolulu. “She wasn’t ideological,” notes Obama. “I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant.” He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn’t mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. “When I was writing that speech,” he told nbc News, “her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?” When it came to race, Obama told me, “I don’t think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics.”

In the expat community of Asia in the 1980s, single mothers were rare, and Ann stood out. She was by then a rather large woman with frizzy black hair. But Indonesia was an uncommonly tolerant place. “For someone like Ann, who had a big personality and was a big presence,” says Zurbuchen, “Indonesia was very accepting. It gave her a sense of fitting in.” At home, Ann wore the traditional housecoat, the batik daster. She loved simple, traditional restaurants. Friends remember sharing bakso bola tenis, or noodles with tennis-ball-size meatballs, from a roadside stand.

Today Ann would not be so unusual in the U.S. A single mother of biracial children pursuing a career, she foreshadowed, in some ways, what more of America would look like. But she did so without comment, her friends say. “She wasn’t stereotypical at all,” says Nancy Peluso, a friend and an environmental sociologist. “But she didn’t make a big deal out of it.”

Ann’s most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to ’92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. “I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program,” he says. Today Indonesia’s microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit.

While his mother was helping poor people in Indonesia, Obama was trying to do something similar 7,000 miles (about 11,300 km) away in Chicago, as a community organizer. Ann’s friends say she was delighted by his career move and started every conversation with an update of her children’s lives. “All of us knew where Barack was going to school. All of us knew how brilliant he was,” remembers Ann’s friend Georgia McCauley.

Every so often, Ann would leave Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance job. She and her daughter sometimes lived in garage apartments and spare rooms of friends. She collected treasures from her travels—exquisite things with stories she understood. Antique daggers with an odd number of curves, as required by Javanese tradition; unusual batiks; rice-paddy hats. Before returning to Hawaii in 1984, Ann wrote her friend Dewey that she and her daughter would “probably need a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our bags on the plane, and I’m sure you don’t want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments.” At his house in Chicago, Obama says, he has his mother’s arrowhead collection from Kansas—along with “trunks full of batiks that we don’t really know what to do with.”

In 1992, Obama’s mother finally finished her Ph.D. dissertation, which she had worked on, between jobs, for almost two decades. The thesis is 1,000 pages, a meticulous analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia. The glossary, which she describes as “far from complete,” is 24 pages. She dedicated the tome to her mother; to Dewey, her adviser; “and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field.”

In the fall of 1994, Ann was having dinner at her friend Patten’s house in Jakarta when she felt a pain in her stomach. A local doctor diagnosed indigestion. When Ann returned to Hawaii several months later, she learned it was ovarian and uterine cancer. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, at 52.

Before her death, Ann read a draft of her son’s memoir, which is almost entirely about his father. Some of her friends were surprised at the focus, but she didn’t seem obviously bothered. “She never complained about it,” says Peluso. “She just said it was something he had to work out.” Neither Ann nor her son knew how little time they had left.

Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother’s side when she died. He went to Hawaii to help the family scatter the ashes over the Pacific. And he carries on her spirit in his campaign. “When Barack smiles,” says Peluso, “there’s just a certain Ann look. He lights up in a particular way that she did.”

After Ann’s death, her daughter dug through her artifacts, searching for Ann’s story. “She always did want to write a memoir,” Soetoro-Ng says. Finally, she discovered the start of a life story, but it was less than two pages. She never found anything more. Maybe Ann had run out of time, or maybe the chemotherapy had worn her out. “I don’t know. Maybe she felt overwhelmed,” says Soetoro-Ng, “because there was so much to tell.”
—With reporting by Zamira Loebis and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

Source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1729524,00.html