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Sunday, July 18, 2004 Majelis MujahidinLast month in Yogyakarta I dropped in on a radical movement called Majelis Mujahidin, or the Council of Mujahidin, who are not democrats; they want sharia law in Indonesia. Their headquarters on a quiet street was a low bare building with a concrete overhang to shade a green-floored porch. The porch served as a reception office. There was a desk, where a few Majelis members interrogated me. The ranking member, or the one who took charge, was Hasyim Abdullah, a thin small intense man with a light fringe of a beard, like a lace curtain. I was there to interview them, but he started off with the questions.I had said democracy was "new" in Indonesia since Suharto's fall. Hasyim asked, Did I think Indonesia was undemocratic under Suharto? Of course: Suharto was a general, who couldn't be voted out. That's not democratic. So as a rule, he said, there was no democracy where the military was in charge? I couldn't think of a democratic military state. Aha, said Hasyim -- so was the U.S. undemocratic under Eisenhower? That was how the conversation went: mostly Socratic entrapment. I tried to argue that Indonesia under Suharto -- even though it was called a "republic" -- had all its local bureaucracies under military command, which was different from the U.S. in any decade. Hasyim changed the subject. He declared that Muslims viewed God as the only source of truth and therefore law. Democracy since the French Revolution had made "majority rule" into God, he said. But Islam provided a perfect way to order society. God offered an unimpeachable set of laws through the Koran and hadiths, which would solve all human problems. What about parking and traffic laws? I said. I wanted to know what was wrong with majority rule in setting up unimportant, moral-free regulation. This began to piss them off. With bleak sarcasm one member asked if I could think of a traffic law that might violate Islam. No, I couldn't. Then what use was my democracy? And so on. There was more to the conversation, and a lot of it was tense; even my guides were nervous. But in the end Hasyim invited me to come back and speak to the head of Majelis Mujahidin. Later I learned that the Council rarely talks to journalists, so I should have done it. But guides were expensive, and we'd had a good interview. The next day I stuck to my schedule and boarded a train for Jakarta. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:07 PM
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