|
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Pondok Ngruki
One excuse for the Indonesia trip was research for a novel. The other reason, which became the main one, was to write a travelogue about the 2004 (Indonesian) presidential elections. I talked to a lot of people -- Muslims, non-Muslims, university students, taxi drivers, artists, Pramoedya Ananta Toer -- about how the democracy experiment in Indonesia has gone, overall, since Suharto's fall in 1998. In Surakarta I paid a visit to Pondok Ngruki, the Islamic boarding school founded by Abu Bakar Ba'asyir. Those guys didn't especially want to talk. But I took a snapshot of the school gate, shown here behind my rickshaw driver, Robin. The banner reads "Welcome home Abu Bakar Baasyir." It's proof that even radical Muslims have an ironic sense of humor. Last April the Jakarta government almost freed Ba'asyir from jail, only to arrest him again. A few of those banners still fly across the streets leading to the school in Ngruki.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
12:39 AM
|  |
|
|
|
|
Too Much of Nothing, a novel
Politics and Prose
about our editor
The Underground Grammarian
current Berlin blog page
 |
