The Moderator

It has been a week since the bombs in Jakarta. Investigations are still going on, the victims' families are slowly emerging from the painful facts, and the nation is building up momentum to further fight the terrorist activities through-out the country. This Sunday, there will be an event going on by musicians and other cultural or public figures to speak out against terrorism in Indonesia. They are trying to garner up support from the whole country to speak up and unite against extremist thinking and activities within us. It is also an indirect but bold statement from the Indonesian Muslim majority to reject the effort by the terrorists to freely hijack their religion, Islam. And they are a few more spontaneous and grass-root events like that among the communities in Indonesia that are standing up to highlight their rejection toward this sort of violent and foreign extremist activities in the country. That’s a good sight for me and am proud of it.

Once in a while in the US or European media, there is a always a talk or sort of “cry-out” of the failure or ineffectiveness or slowness of moderate Islam world-wide to contain the extremists within them. While acknowledging the progress of the moderate movements in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Turkey, the majority of the global community still expect a more effective (or “fast”) solution to this endemic. But as many experts have said on this issue, there will be no fast way to fight religious extremism like this. The key solution is always a combined effort of pervasive economic and educational strategies. It seems to me, for them, the best way to combat the surgical effectiveness of extremist terror tactics is with a long-term, slow but consistent therapy of common senses.

So in light of the two phenomena that I observed above, Indonesia, I think can be the best bet for moderates in the Islamic world to counter that narrow but potent stream of violent and extremist thinking. I hope the moderate Islam (not the ‘liberal’ one) in Indonesia can be as effective as the moderate majority in the United States in countering the resurgence of an extreme right wing thought in American politics. Well, by the way, what I mean by the moderate majority in the US is more like the NYT readers or NPR listeners although I know most people there wouldn’t think about those two as the “moderate”. One example is the recent case of Henry Gates, the Harvard professor. I am impressed to see how well the moderates there, because of their intrinsic nature, can quickly rebalance the public debates on high-expletive issue like that.

Me Too

A Hope for Baktays

I watched “Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame” on Sunday, it was part of the Kids Film Festival here. So lucky that I was able to watch it, I guess it will be pretty hard to find small film like that without Netflix. Andrea was also there, she volunteered for the event and was part of the translator team, because… as they said in the credit part of the broschure, “she has a good English”, good job ‘ndrea!

The film is quite nice with a simple message of the importance of education. It highlights the impact of war, the madness of Taliban and the American invasion, on the life of children there. It’s good enough to give the general audience a glimpse of the life there. I am sure the reality is multiple times tougher than that. The story is about the journey of a little girl named Baktay (Nikbakht-Noruz) who is innocently trying to go the school despite all the hard circumstances. The girl’s journey is only a day and that makes the 1 hour 20 minutes film felt incredible long. She plays the role quite well. She is just adorable and super cute. The only sad feeling I got after the film is thinking if the living condition of the real young girl (Nikbakht’s) is the same as depicted in the film. She is living in a cave and part of a small village in the desert. Ehm… It is very possible.

Coincidentally, the same day I watched the film, Tom Friedman wrote an article “Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No” and is about a similar subject, children education in Afghanistan. In that article, he wrote about his visit to a small village in Afghanistan with Admiral Mike Mullen to open up a school. He said in the beginning, “I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.” Then after going through his usual style of self thinking and musing in a jocular way of serious subjects, his brain churned out a concluding impression, “I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.”

Nothing I can do in that part of the world other than to hope for a success for Americans and Afghans there in rebuilding the children’s life and thus the country.