(AP)
President Obama has once again taken it upon himself to address the Muslim world, this time in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. In the absence of reliable opinion polls it is anyone’s guess whether the Muslim world relishes, or even indeed much cares about, what is fast becoming a biannual fixture.
What does seem increasingly obvious is that the president remains as baffled by that vast amorphous body as the rest of us.
He had not even opened his mouth before his purpose was almost derailed by, of all people, his wife, or rather a handshake between Michelle Obama and an ultraconservative Muslim Indonesian government minister.
That handshake, rather than the president’s appeal to moderate Islam, came to dominate the headlines about his visit to the country of his childhood.
At first glance, that may seem to serve only as a reminder that we live in trivial times. But it was actually a fine example of how a real-life, unchoreographed incident can effortlessly trump empty political rhetoric, however painstakingly planned the setting, and end up telling us something much more profound than even the grandest of prepared speeches.
For a start, the controversy undermined the very argument Obama had traveled to Indonesia to make: that the world’s most populous Muslim country should be hailed as a role model for moderate and progressive Islam.
That is nonsense.
In Indonesia, as in the rest of Southeast Asia, it is the extremist Wahhabi form of Islam that is in the ascendancy. Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, it is steadily eradicating the tolerant and pluralistic Islam that did indeed define Indonesia back when Obama lived there, many decades ago.
Nothing better illustrates the new Wahhabi stranglehold on Indonesian politics than the reaction of Tifatul Sembiring, the minister in question, to news reports about the now infamous handshake. Initially, he claimed that the physical contact had taken place without his consent, as if he had been seized by the well-toned First Lady and wrestled into submission.
It would certainly make a pleasant change to discover that a hard-line Muslim male, rather than a Muslim female, had been manhandled by a member of the opposite sex.
The video of the handshake, though, shows the minister warmly greeting the president’s wife, not with one but both hands, in enthusiastic violation of his oft-stated belief that unrelated men and women must avoid physical contact in public at all costs.
There is a broader point to be made here, namely that pandering to the most absurd tenets of extremist Islam merely increases the vast gulf in any Muslim country between public and private morality. In other words, it encourages hypocrisy, because in the modern world following such tenets with any degree of seriousness is well nigh impossible.
The Indonesian minister’s flip-flopping is a perfect example.
But we need only glance at his role model, Saudi Arabia, to better get a glimpse of the future that awaits Indonesia (and the wider Muslim world) if the Wahhabi extremists manage to triumph there as well.
In strictly segregated Saudi Arabia, a screaming panic seizes the clerics at the slightest sign of what they like to call “indifference to the veil.” Women risk breaking the law merely by stepping outside of their homes unaccompanied by a male relative. Extramarital sex is, in theory, punishable by public beheading or stoning.
Yet 70% of marriages in the country are now reportedly of the “temporary” variety that can last as briefly as a few hours, and are often a barely concealed cover for prostitution.
Then there is outright prostitution. Again, it is officially banned and harshly punished, but widespread in all strata of Saudi society, with the religious police even conducting regular raids on brothels in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
All this would perhaps be tolerable if the result was that people could go about their private business undisturbed, so long as they did not make a song and dance about their transgressions. That is how things played out historically, but not any more.
For a while in the early millennium, Jakarta had a reputation as the party capital of Southeast Asia. But the sight of men and women dressed incongruously in Bedouin tribal garb is becoming common there, and the loud-mouthed, pious types are cracking down on vice in all its forms.
The result is that for the ordinary Muslim in the streets of Jakarta, things are becoming as difficult as the streets of Riyadh. The lies he or she needs to tell in public grow ever taller. There is therefore a constant need for random examples to be made of hapless violators, who may be punished today for what only yesterday seemed widely tolerated, and what may again be tolerated tomorrow.
Obama should recognize the reality that there is now very little tolerant Islam to be seen anywhere, outside of staunchly secular Tunisia, so firmly have the Saudi-funded extremists seized the public agenda.
Tifatul Sembiring is merely the latest victim of the hypocrisy he helped create, and he will surely not be the last.
John R. Bradley’s latest book, “Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East” (Palgrave Macmillan), is out now.