Islamophobic insanity

(Kirk)


It's enormously surreal, and more than a little depressing, to watch my country descend even further into the basest and most ignorant Islamophobia that I can imagine. Here I am in the most Muslim country in the world, during Ramadan, and all the people I have met have been so welcoming and patient and generous. It's appalling the level of idiocy that passes for reasoned discussion about this in the United States, and it's clearly inciting violence and hatred in the worst traditions of my country. So far the most visible religious intolerance I have seen comes from the American Christians at the school here, most of whom appear to be here in order to convert everyone around them (one had the gall the other day to mention to Laura how many "unbelievers" there were in Sumatra - the fact is, more than anywhere I have ever lived, as far as I can tell, almost no one appears to be an "unbeliever." I've never seen so many committed believers. But of course "unbelievers" are people who believe the wrong belief). 

So, I can say it here, loudly, based on my experience here and my experience the last two summers with Middle Eastern students visiting Bozeman:  at moments like these, from abroad, the United States looks like a miserable small-minded country full of petulant religious baiters. To be sure, Indonesia has a history of religious violence as well, sometimes in the most extreme ways, but where I live, in Salatiga, a more Christian town than most, and where I teach, at a Christian University where we have prayers to begin and end our staff meetings, people from a variety of religious perspectives intermingle with respect and communal feeling. Restaurants that are open during Ramadan shade themselves from the street to respect those who are fasting, and clearly Muslim servers at the restaurants (Muslim women who work the KFC have KFC uniform headdresses) serve non-Muslims comfortably during fasting periods. We have mosques everywhere here - at least 10 in a mile radius from our house, always crowded at important times of the day and getting busier as Ramadan winds down and the most important Muslim family holiday of the year begins (Idul Fitri, which starts next week, and which will see 3.6 million motorcycles and 1.5 million cars hitting the highways to visit home - this on an island 1/3 the size of Montana...we'll be staying home). It's as obvious to most people that we aren't Muslim as it is that we aren't Indonesian, and we've never felt anything like disdain or pettiness toward us in our daily interactions with the people. One of Indonesia's national struggles, in fact, in its 65 years of nationhood, has been to come to terms with the religious diversity in the country, and the struggles flare up here now and then in more local ways (in the last week, on another island in the archipelago, several restaurants were closed by the local govt. because they served food during fasting time, and there are clearly anti-Christian actions happening all over the country on a fairly regular basis). But where I am living, where Christians are very visible and the largest church in the city is right across the street from the largest mosque, I have not seen evidence of such acrimony at all. 

It's infuriating, and sad, to listen to the usual crowd of buffoons make self-righteous noises about God and family and etc. all in the name of hating other people's beliefs, and I hope it ends soon, because people all over the world are watching.