ASIAN CENTURY COMING SOON - MAYBE

Australia discovers Asia – cautiously                  

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Asian Century policy is full of warm words.  Here are some cold facts:

Australians are mainly big, white, brash, irreligious, pragmatic and well paid.  We live in a nation where powers are separated and the rule of law rules.

Indonesians are generally small, brown, restrained, religious, superstitious, exploited and poorly paid.  You live in a nascent democracy dominated by moneymen and the military. 

We’re eighth on Transparency International’s corruption perception index where being number one is pure. You rank at 100

Our background is as recent transplants, Judaeo Christian, British democratic and colonial. Our independence was granted amicably.

Your history is ancient with Hindu and Buddhist traditions, feudal, patriarchal and colonised.  Liberal Islam dominates.  Independence was bravely won only after four years of brutal fighting.

Our education and health services are free. Yours are supposed to be free.

You have to carry ID cards and follow an approved religion. We don’t, and won’t.

You celebrate community – we praise individualism.

One hundred Australian cents buys almost 10,000 rupiah. For every one of us there are 11 of you.

Our friends speak English and live far away in Europe and the US.

Your friends are – well, we don’t really know, but fear they’re in the Middle East.

We eat foods based on wheat and milk, and drink alcohol.  Often to excess.

Your diet is based on rice and water.  Moderation is a virtue.

We speak the international language.  You use a language unrelated to any European tongue and unknown elsewhere

We play rugby, Australian Rules and cricket on excellent facilities and we do all sport well. You play soccer badly and practise in the street.

You live in a sprawling archipelago with porous land borders where scores of ethnic groups still hold their ancient lands.  We occupy an island continent stolen from the original inhabitants.

Your home is the tropics, rich, fertile and well watered.  Ours is an arid land.

These and other factors have shaped our identity and made us different.

How can such two such radically different cultures intersect peacefully? 

Governments seem to think the way is through trade and aid.  So Australian taxpayers give around half a billion dollars a year to Indonesia. 

There’s no sign kampong folk know of this generosity, or if they did it would enhance their understanding.

We’ve been neighbors since Gondwanaland split. For much of that time we’ve viewed each other with suspicion laced with ignorance and travel warnings.

There was a moment when this wasn’t so.  In July 1946 Australians accompanying PM Sutan Sjahrir in Yogya were showered with petals and  shouts of ‘Australia, Australia!’ 

It was a hosanna moment when we backed Indonesian independence.  It could have led to a permanent bonding where Asian Century statements would have been as unnecessary as reproclaiming the Commonwealth of Australia.

Sadly, tragically, the baton was dropped and our arena shifted to Europe, our spiritual homeland.  The decades of distrust began.

Now we’ve heard that you’ve got money.  That means you must need foods and goods. It’s time to say hello, see what you want and how much you can pay.

Are these the foundations for a good and lasting relationship?

We want to join Asia but does Asia want us?  I haven’t heard anyone in Indonesia talking about the Australian Century.

All the ideas in the White Paper are good.  They are also too few and too limited.  Maybe too late.

One of the best is expanding a scheme to allow 1,000 young Indonesians to wander and work in Australia for a year. Previously the number was 100.

Generous? Do the maths: Indonesia has 240 million people. The median age is under 28.

Working Holiday Visas have been available for years for other, mainly European nationals, keen to go Down Under.  What better way to learn of another culture by getting dirt under the fingernails, make friends alongside workmates?

For Indonesians it’s the Work and Holiday Program.  The same?  Not quite.  For this deal applicants have to pass an English test, be tertiary graduates and approved by their own government.

The scheme is reciprocal but Indonesian bureaucrats have built barriers.  Australians are only allowed to teach English, work in hospitals and tourism.  There are reports of students giving up on the paperwork and going elsewhere.

Though jobs are not restricted in Australia, Immigration demands applicants have at least AUD $5,000 – 50 million rupiah.  Fees, insurance and air fares put visas even beyond the reach of the new Indonesian middle classes, defined as those who earn more than US $3,000 (29 million rupiah) a year. 

Are Australian leaders really serious about an Asian Century where curious and open-minded youngsters can poke around their neighbor’s culture to erase prejudices and load facts? 

If so Australia needs to cease discriminating against Indonesia.

And Indonesia needs to stop being fearful of its neighbor.  We’re not all Kuta bar slobs determined to fracture the Unitary State and steal jobs off becak drivers.

Just as you’re not all fundamentalists bombing your way to a Southern Hemisphere caliphate.

Australia’s Asian Century policy is a gentle shuffle forward.  The hype makes it sound like a Southeast Asian version of the open border European Community that’s helped dissolve ancient hatreds and foster unity through people-to-people contacts. 

It’s not. It should be.

 

(First published in The Jakarta Post 8 November 2012)

YOHANES NYOMAN SUKO UTOMO

Indonesia's Ambassador of dance                                              

Indonesia’s got original talent – so why do many acts mimic Western pop?

Why has the plump South Korean rapper Psy’s Gangnam Style You Tube video garnered more that 620 million hits (and rising) while the indigenous Poco Poco gets scant attention?

(An Indonesian version has attracted only 200,000 viewers –a Swedish clip with women in overalls trying to imitate the Indonesian moves almost six times more.)

These questions puzzle choreographer and dancer Yohanes Nyoman Suko Utomo (below) as he tries to decode the international entertainment industry.

Unless the media-manipulated appetite for hype over substance is reversed, Nyoman will remain bemused long after his supple limbs succumb to cramp.

In the meantime he throws up his hands and laughs:  “Itulah Indonesia.” (Well, that’s Indonesia.)

However there may be another explanation for his Blitar Rose Dancers not getting the publicity they deserve.  Nyoman dances not just for dollars but to delight.

“I’m not money oriented,” he said.  “Money must not be first. Art cannot be measured by money.  Art is to provide satisfaction.”

These sound like the words of a virgin dilettante yet to be bruised by a world more interested in profit than supplying soul food.

Yet Nyoman is no ingénue.  He has performed in Turkey, Switzerland, France, Holland (three times), South Korea (eight times), New Zealand (where he spoke to The Jakarta Post), Britain (twice) …

The list must stop somewhere but a phone call halted the flow.  Enough to say he has danced through desert sheikdoms and robust republics, showcasing Indonesian culture for much of his adult life.

Now 42 he’s old enough to be sour and cynical about a business that chews up and spits out the good, the bad and the luckless.

That he’s not says more about his sunny outlook than torrents of words.  Like many artists Nyoman prefers to communicate through his medium, often referring to himself in the third person, a distracting trait for the interviewer. 

A favorite punctuation involves drawing his hands up from his stomach, expanding the palms, and then thrusting outwards.

It’s a gesture that embraces a flowering of expression from a deep inner source, and it illustrates advice given by his teacher Guruh Soekarnoputra:  “Let it flow – don’t expect anything too much. Trust.”

Although a member of his sister Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, Guruh is best known as a performer than a politician.

The youngest son of the late president Soekarno ran a dance studio in Jakarta.  Here the multi-talented Nyoman (he can play several instruments), studied for two years before turning professional.

Nyoman’s first group formed in 1995 was called Suryo Linuwih (see more light).  Two years later the title shifted from Javanese to English and became Blitar Rose.

What’s in this name?  Best consult Shakespeare: ‘That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.’

“Many people love roses,” said Nyoman. “The name attracts.  It’s different and I love Blitar.  It’s where my grandfather performed in the kuda lumping.”  (A traditional Javanese dance featuring mock horses.)

The East Java city and last resting place of Soekarno was also home to Nyoman during his formative years.  Although he says his affinity for art encountered few obstacles at school it hit a hurdle that’s tripped many other creative kids from conservative families.

As the son of a policeman who believed only a public service career could provide security, young Nyoman didn’t glide into his chosen career. 

The situation might have been different if the family maid hadn’t taken her charge to a concert of classical dancing.  He was just four and remembers it clearly.  The door to the magic had been unlocked.

Later after Nyoman had visited Holland and seen modern dance he declared:  “This is the real me.”  His father relented and the gifted lad skipped out of a future of khaki-clad boredom and onto the stage.

Much of Blitar Rose’s international work comes through Kemenparekraf (the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Energy) to promote Indonesian culture abroad.  It’s currently touring four works featuring five women and two men, including Nyoman.

The dances originated in West Java, Bali, Aceh and Sumatra and include the mesmerising Tari Piring (plate dance) where the swirling artists perform with large pieces of crockery ready to spin away and shatter should concentration lapse.

Nyoman has adapted the dances, shortened them to suit modern audiences and fit the locations where Blitar Rose performs.  These are often diplomatic and trade events where culture is a warm up, not the principal purpose.  Cavernous convention centers aren’t ideal venues.

Getting and holding the attention of an unfocussed audience is a tough gig. Nervous presenters shuffle notes; distracted delegates adjust nametags hoping they’ll be spotted by VIPs. 

So Nyoman’s technique is to present short, dynamic, high-energy dances that shout ‘stop and watch’.  That’s because they’re clearly professional and refreshingly different from the shuffle-and-twist TV routines. 

When the dances end the audience is left wanting more, not thankful they’ve done culture and can now do commerce.

“I watch modern and traditional dance from elsewhere and I like some of Michael Jackson’s movements, but I don’t borrow from other choreographers,” Nyoman said.  “Everything is from my head. I design the costumes and steps, combining the traditional and modern. 

“I select dancers from the 60 students at my Jakarta academy. I choose them for their attitude and ability to bring out their inner beauty.  Their skills must be professional. I prefer dancers who are tall and slim. I use my instinct and I’m usually 99 per cent right.”

Nyoman laughed a little at the suggestion he’s an ambassador of Indonesian culture.

“I prefer to take a low profile,” he said.  “We are here to entertain.  It’s difficult to change people’s perceptions about Indonesia but we try through art. 

“I love my country and our culture and showing it around the world.  I don’t want it discarded by the younger generation.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 5 November 2012)

##

THE TEMPLE OF BUREAUCRACY

An office affair                                                  

The first time I entered the entrails of an Indonesian government department it took time for my pupils to dilate.  The place was Kedari in Southeast Sulawesi during the 1980s and I was seeking permission to visit an isolated island.

Columns of khaki-clad men and women were sitting at plain desks reading newspapers or watching TV on full volume.  An occasional one-fingered typist clacked out a letter. Only the boss had a phone.

The lights were squint-level dim, the air thick with the fug of fags, the heat unchallenged.

It was a woodcut from a Dickens novel minus ledgers and goose quill pens. Later I discovered it was typical.

Somewhere in Indonesia is the template for a department building.  Rows of square concrete columns in-filled with bricks to create sets of cells, then plastered with white tiles for that special toilet ambience. This arid design has created a matching culture.

Buying jobs, promotion through seniority, policy packaging being more important than delivery, corruption and arrogance have all crimped competent administration.

Seen from afar Jakarta is a modern city – the high-rise skyline makes a statement of power and authority.  But behind the tinted glass are poor Internet connections, petty rules, lousy wages and worker exploitation.

Is there enough of this to support 600 pages keeping the general reader informed and entertained?  Only when written by a talented journalist following the number one rule of his craft:  Take the ordinary and make it irresistibly interesting.

Gideon Haigh is a prolific Australian writer best known for his books on cricket, a skilled wordsmith clicking his mouse into nooks and crevices to find the facts within.

A lesser journeyman writing on the evolution of the office would be struggling to lay 1,000 words in a straight line, let alone make them sexy.  Haigh finds fertility at every level in the high-rise phallic symbols dominated by men but largely staffed by women.

Consider how the big Indonesian banks present themselves.  Cathedral foyers to crush creditors but comfort investors; security guards to open doors and tellers who stand so you feel important and don’t notice how severely they clip your credit cards - and everyone in sight as young as an Olympic swim squad.

The office isn’t just where we work.  It’s also the environment where ruthless bosses ensure we spend more daylight hours than at home with our kids.  The office is where we interact with others, gain friends, make enemies, get rewards, plot – and often find romance.

Who hasn’t waited mad with thirst till a certain someone headed for the water cooler, hoping no one will notice your coincidental rendezvous?  The heat generated in the photocopy room doesn’t always come from the machines.

It’s not an office without an affair, a place where reputations are ripped like a memo in a shredder and the politics have a brutality equal to a Jakarta gubernatorial contest.

The modern office grew out of banking and public administration, particularly in England.  The famous diarist Samuel Pepys has given us a view of 17^th century office doings, little different to today apart from the technology. 

The invention of the telegraph and typewriter created a social revolution.  Nimble-fingered women were better than men at many tasks and paid less.  They were, notes Haigh, the first knowledge workers.

There was resistance.  ‘(Women’s) flighty temperaments would prove ill-suited to the rigors of the working day and a distraction from its serious cares; they would be de-natured by diversion from their biological destinies’ reports the author. But reality intervenes and firm policies crumble when weathered by economics, shifting attitudes and time.

A lesser writer would have found a few literary and historical references and cemented this rubble with quotes and statistics.  Haigh goes further and deeper, noting the evolution of the office in popular culture.  How many rom-coms are set in offices compared with the casting floor at Krakatau Steel’s foundry?

Haigh’s book may be an epitaph.  Western countries faced with rising costs are pushing the electronic office.  Many overseas banks have already downsized and are little more than small shops, their customers on line.

Outside Indonesia government departments are doing the same.  Why travel far through vile traffic and queue for hours when you can download and submit forms electronically 24 / 7?  Office towers are being converted into apartments, reversing the trend for workers to commute from dormitory suburbs.

Soeharto’s policy of disguising unemployment with make-believe jobs in the bureaucracy has resulted in the population equivalent of Singapore living on the public payroll.  Getting their child into a lifetime government office job with pension remains the prime ambition of many parents.

Against this conservative mass, reformers seeking to shrink the public service face a task so formidable that ousting the Dutch from their former colony would be just a poke with a bamboo pole.

After reading The Office it seems there’s little left to reveal other than the fate of this institution in Indonesia.  Where will we poor supplicants be when the rest of the working world has turned to the Web?

Probably still sitting on benches outside bland buildings waiting respectfully for the fuehrer of the filing cabinets to wield his rubber stamps and give us permission to keep on living.

THE OFFICE – A Hardworking History

Gideon Haigh

The Miegunyah Press (Melbourne University Publishing) 2012

610 pages

(First published in The Sunday Post, 4 November 2012)

A LESSON FROM THE MINISTER

Have faith in the curriculum

I was once warned by a cynical Australian academic to never run after a bus, a pretty woman or an education policy: That’s because another would arrive shortly.
He was right.  To be appointed an education minister’s deputy is to be anointed with the right to churn the curriculum without consulting the public.  Consequently Musliar Kaslim’s top down decision to shake up the system after just a year in office is no surprise.
First an apology and retraction. When I read the Deputy Education and Culture Minister’s plans to ban teaching English in elementary schools I assumed the fellow was a grunting Neanderthal, awarded this important job for services involving envelopes and politics.
Wrong, and wrong again.  Prof., Dr., Ir., H Musliar Kaslim MS is the former rector of Andalas University, the nation’s oldest outside Java.  .
So why is such an eminent, Philippines-trained scholar trashing the syllabi like the Islamic Defenders Front in a Blok M bar?
Here’s the clue: Andalas doesn’t have an education faculty.  This gives Dr Kaslim a warrant to wreck.  For the authority to revolutionize the classroom can only be exercised by those who’ve never scraped their fingernails across broken blackboards for decades.
The Deputy Minister’s speciality has been agriculture.  This involves tilling the passive soil, manipulating trace elements, destroying weeds, nurturing the right growth, dosing with pesticides.  The similarities with education are obvious.
Chalkies who’ve coped with crowded classes of mixed abilities and backgrounds without succumbing to sedatives might differ.  Their experience shows children pick up languages best when young, their minds supple.
Almost 500 years ago St. Francis Xavier said ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man’ – but he was the unbeliever who brought Catholicism to the Moluccas, so an inappropriate role model.
Religion and Indonesian are to be given primacy. Heaven forbid the Republic should follow bilingual Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, the dunces of Southeast Asia, ridiculed by everyone. 
The best teachers are forever flexible. Obviously they are not the right people to write policy. Nor are parents. Better leave it to the doctrinaires. Their slogan: Never let the facts get in the way of a good ideology.
Imagine Dr Kaslim in the health portfolio. He’d be telling doctors how to pen prescriptions. Moms would have to check baby’s whereabouts before he tossed out the bathwater. Patients would demand drugs and get dogma, seek surgery and be offered scripture.
Some believe faith is personal and the state should keep out of its citizens’ soul space.  They think children should learn about all religions, then be left to decide what path – if any - to select once they can reason.
Could this be Dr Kaslim’s hidden agenda, the liberation of young minds, even freethinking? 
Perhaps not. The Deputy Minister, who has been to Mecca, has been quoted as saying that teaching English in primary schools is haram.  This BTW also doubles as a polite invitation for footnotes so scholars can research his interesting assertion.
Some of Dr Kaslim’s ideas on trimming topics are laudable. There’s evidence of subject overloading. The eradication of English at primary school should stop harassment by grubby lads shouting ‘Allo Mister’ and giving foreigners the finger.  In future they’ll use grammatically perfect Indonesian embellished with respectful gestures.
Lacking the full picture some educators have reacted negatively to Dr Kaslim’s other plans to scrap science in primary school and noted contradictions.  Earlier this year he lamented the lack of Indonesian PhDs – just a fraction of those in nearby nations – and encouraged higher education.
A most worthy goal.  If these future doctorates are in theology they’ll have to be studied in Arabic or Hebrew - those in the hard sciences researched and written in a language other than Indonesian.  Maybe in the global tongue.
But not to despair – the Deputy Minister allegedly told journalists that English could be understood in six months.
Teachers nonplussed by the new policy can relax.  Just schedule half a year to master the medium used in science, technology, medicine, the arts, mathematics and computing.  But first the serious stuff: Religion. 
There must be some Nobel prizes there. Duncan Graham

(First published in The Sunday Post 4 November 2012)
##

WORKING WITH WIZARDS

Michael Reynold Tagore

 

Imagine the scene.  Which is appropriate, because this story is a lot about fantasy.

It’s late December 2001.  The place is a cinema in the Pluit Mega Mall, North Jakarta.  In the dark sits Michael Reynold Tagore, a young man feeling, almost knowing, that in the next three hours he’s about to experience something special in his life.

He’s right.  The curtains open on another world, Middle Earth.  It’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the recounting of Professor J R R Tolkien’s classic British novel written 70 years earlier.

The US $93 million epic, which won four Academy Awards, had been made by New Zealand director Sir Peter Jackson in his homeland.  It grossed more than nine times its budget. The following two films were also major hits.

Reynold wasn’t aware of the book – it hadn’t been published in Indonesia.  He only knew about the film from a poster.  Lacking suburban ghosts, teen tearies and car chases it was never going to be a ripper success in Indonesia. But the watcher in the stalls was entranced and imagined his name on the big screen.

“This was my world,” he recalled. “It was the film I’d be waiting for with dragons and wizards.  Most normal people weren’t interested in this geeky movie, but I wanted to be involved. I watched the DVD again and again till I knew every scene.”

Apart from getting to understand animation techniques he also built his language skills listening to Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen who plays the wizard Gandalf.

On 19 December 2011, exactly ten years after the opening of LOTR, as fans know it, Reynold signed on as a texture artist to work on the sequels.  He moved to Wellington, the centre of NZ filmmaking, and met his language coach. 

He’s employed by the visual effects company Weta.  (Weta is a Maori term for a grasshopper-like insect.) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will have its world premiere in Wellington on 28 November, prior to international release on 14 December.

One year later The Desolation of Smaug will be in cinemas, and There and Back Again in June 2014.

For creative artists continuity of work is another dream come true.  The film industry is no place for those with a mortgage.  Jobs run for as long as it takes to make the movie.

“This doesn’t worry me,” said Reynold who is 33 and single. “Once you start to feel comfortable you take your foot off the gas.  I like to do new things.  I have to aim higher.

“I never wanted to wear a suit, to be a ‘real person’. My parents hoped I’d get into business or be a doctor, though I can’t even look at blood.

“I was a rebel, but I’m really a nice person.  Just a bit stubborn.  All I wanted to do was draw, but no one could see a career in art.

“I never wanted to end up in my friends’ jobs. They told me to grow up – but I didn’t.  I just knew I had to get away, go overseas, though I wasn’t sure how.”

As a child in East Java where his father had a paint factory, and later in Jakarta as a teen, young Reynold preferred to doodle rather than swot.  While his classmates were studying spiders, Reynold was sketching Spiderman.

Teachers must have despaired.  “I was getting punished a lot,” he said.

His mother had a talent for embroidery but her son wasn’t into bouquets and blooms.  “For me the more disgusting the idea the better, provided it wasn’t real,” he said.  You can see some of his creations at http://michaelreynold.blogspot.co.nz/

At Tarumanagara University he still couldn’t settle, taking six years to finish a four-year degree in graphic design. It was a course he hated but the only one available close to his interests.

He got work as a commercial storyboard artist, drawing multiple illustrations of the scenes to be shot.  The job wasn’t well paid and there seemed to be no striving for excellence.

Time to jump a jet. He enrolled at Sydney University of Technology, got more certificates, then worked in Melbourne and Adelaide on films and computer games.

He also discovered directors rely heavily on applicants’ show reels and references, focusing on compatibility.

“Negativity can be contagious,” he said.  “That’s not good for morale or creativity. There are lots of different personalities involved.  You’re competing with people from all over the world.”

Like most digital imaginers Reynold is a contractor putting in 50 hours a week, more when deadlines loom.  He works with nine others, cans on ears, coffee in one hand, mouse the other, finessing 3D detail.  Mediocrity is not an option.

Each artist confronts large computer screens – on one side reality, the other virtual reality.

In the computer-animated Happy Feet 2, made in Australia, Reynold worked on landscapes and snow.  With the Hobbit films he’s been refining computer images so neither the audience, nor the creators, can tell whether the original was a man or a manipulation.

Reynold became an Australian.  He now has a passport that allows permanent residence in NZ and easier entry to the countries where his skills are in demand.  “I want my freedom,” he said. “I want to go everywhere.”

But not to work in Indonesia because dual citizenship isn’t allowed. “The industry still isn’t big enough or sufficiently professional,” he said “I visit my mother in Surabaya and enjoy Indonesian food, my great hobby, but I now have to buy a visitor’s visa.

“My tip on getting into film?  Practise like crazy; otherwise you’re just wasting your time.  Aim higher.

“I love going to work. It’s important to do what you want to do.  Give it one hundred per cent – you only live once.  

“This is the job I’ve been dreaming about for years. This is where I know I’m worth something.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 1 November 2012)

##

THE NEW RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE

Here’s SBY’s bedside read  

Attack on Ahmadiyah compound (International Crisis Group)

 

What sort of liberty must a good society give to members of minorities whose religion the majority finds incorrect, or even sinful and bad?  What limits could a decent society impose on religious behavior?

These questions, articulated by American philosopher Martha Nussbaum in The New Religious Intolerance, confronted settlers in the United States in the 17^th century.  Many were escapees from mainstream religious persecution in the Old World, determined to fashion a fresh social order. 

The issues surfaced again in 1945 when Soekarno rejected hardliners seeking to impose Sharia law.  He needed the minority Christians, Hindus and Buddhists on board to launch the new nation in a world tired of religious conflict, praying for an example of accord.

The questions remain valid today as the Presidential Palace ponders the right response to attacks on churchgoers in Bogor and Bekasi. Then there’s persecution of Shiites and Ahmadiyahs trying to sustain their belief in Chapter XI of the Constitution - the section guaranteeing religious freedom for all. 

In seeking solutions to these questions President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his advisers could enrich their decision-making by reading this book and mull over its central idea – that fear drives hate, and little will change till this is understood and confronted.

What sort of fear? Professor Nussbaum (she teaches law and ethics at the University of Chicago) includes primitive anxieties about the unknown, and threats of difference driven by ignorance. 

Heading the list is Islamophobia, the black death of reason and respect, infecting the West in ways that lead voters and legislators to react irrationally.

In Switzerland, a nation famed for its prosperity and independence, a referendum resulted in a ban on mosque minarets.  Only five per cent of the population is Islamic.  The restriction was opposed by the Parliament, Jewish communities and Catholic bishops, but 57 per cent of the population, stoked by agitators using cartoons that made the minarets look like missiles, voted to prohibit. 

France and Italy (centers of world fashion) have banned burkas even though only a wisp of women choose this dress – one estimate is under 3,000.

In the US and Britain the media immediately assumed that last year’s massacre in Norway that took 76 lives was the work of Al Qaeda. Later we learned the gunman was a psychopath hating Muslims.

In the US there are too many stories to list here of travellers with Islamic names and ‘Middle-Eastern appearance’ being targeted by zealous immigration officials.

Then there’s the case of Park 51, the Islamic proposal to build a multi-faith community center close to Ground Zero, the site of the twin towers destroyed in 2001.

It wasn’t a mosque, though it did include prayer space.  The controversy features heavily in this book as an example of the need for informed leadership, to comment with care and to never let such debates get hijacked by demagogues.

At first people supported the center and saw no harm.  Then a campaign of hate and lies began and what the author calls the ‘cascade’ of hostility, with people rushing to join others who claim to know the truth.

The proposers weren’t faultless. Comments Professor Nussbaum: “Park 51 was a set of good ideas too hastily put forward with too little clarification of goals and concepts, and much too little consultation with the local community.” 

At the start of the 2010 Ramadhan President Barack Obama, a skilled orator and wordsmith, said “… I believe that Muslims have the same right to practise their religion as anyone else in this country.”

However a day later he “clarified” his position saying he was only commenting on the constitutional question, not “the wisdom of making the decision to build a mosque there.”  Presidential prevarication isn’t exclusive to Indonesia.

Two stand-outs make this book valuable.  The author writes with clarity, rare for an academic. She’s also a moderate, pragmatic about the need for tough security measures but arguing these must be based on the unbiased presentation of facts.

Till recently the FBI taught recruits about Islam using writings varying from the questionable to the grossly bigoted. Simplistic clichés smothered truths.  The difference between Sunni and Shiite was misrepresented or ignored.  So was the fact that Indonesia and India have the world’s largest populations of Muslims. 

The author concludes “that the suspicion and mistrust of academic scholarship by the FBI that began during the McCarthy era have never really ended.”

In the interfaith business it’s easy to get depressed. Just when imams and bishops shake hands the warped ones decide that hate is better than harmony.  All the fine words are blasted apart and it’s start-over time again. 

The fearmongers move in with disguised agendas, their half-truths and untruths fill the hole left by the ditherers, and the rat is off and running. There’s no rest for the righteous.

The Greek philosopher Socrates advocated the ‘examined life’ with a democracy “thoughtful rather than impetuous, deliberative rather than unthinkingly adversarial.”

Sounds good, but there’s a catch, as the author reveals:

“The insight that Socrates lacked was that politics and government have no business telling people what God is or how to find the meaning of life.

“Even if governments don’t coerce people, the very announcement that a given religion (or anti-religion) is a preferred view is a kind of insult to people who in all conscience cannot share this view.

“That’s a point that Socrates and many philosophers after him, have utterly failed to understand.”

The New Religious Intolerance

Martha C Nussbaum

Harvard University Press 2012

(First published in The Sunday Post, 22 September 2012)

##

PROMOTE THE REAL INDONESIA. INCLUDING ISLAM

Time to rethink the sales pitch

Not a tourist show - this parade in Malang, East Java, was for the locals and a traffic stopper - literally.  And yes, they are wearing headscarves

  I’d like to claim credit, but that has to go to Patrick Winn, a man with a nose for nuances.  The Bangkok-based correspondent for the US on-line news site Global Post was first to comment on the Indonesian government’s latest tourist lure Wonderful Indonesia.

“In the chief promotional video you won't find a single skull cap, hijab or minaret at sunset,” he reported. “Islamic life, one of Indonesia's defining qualities, is conspicuously absent.”
He’s right.  The five-minute tape – and a shorter TV commercial version - is professional.  There are cute kids flying kites and bare-shouldered beauties flicking fingers – but it’s more Benoa than Bekasi.
In the global competition for visitors with visa stamps and Visa cards, seduction has become big business, no longer a fill-in for a handyman with a handycam. 
High production values require matching budgets.  Sadly creativity and cost don’t always marry well.  This is an industry that plagiarises shamelessly, though that’s not always the director’s fault. 
Calling the shots are the executive producers who’ve seen their rivals’ spectaculars and reckon that a look alike will be just as successful.
So they demand more slim-waisted couples watching an Armageddon sunset over a placid beach having just scuba-dived clean coral alive with rainbow fish. 
Over a dinner of fresh-caught crays they’ll watch a cultural floor show. Later come close encounters with plump furry creatures and the chance to sample even more local fare served by jolly gap-toothed rustics.
These are five-star resort images, accessible only to those who think a massage is hard work – for them, not the masseur.
The tone was set long ago by campaigns like Malaysia, Truly Asia.
Indonesia’s latest offering is beautiful – and boring. It could be anywhere in Southeast Asia. Even the title is bland. (The alliterative ‘Incredible’ has already been pinched by India.) Popular?  Sadly, no. When writing this BTW it had scored less than 2,000 hits.
Mr Winn asks if the absence of Islamic symbols is intentional.  Perhaps producers fear references to the faith followed by most Indonesians will turn-off prospective visitors with different beliefs.
Why shy? The Global Peace Index ranks Indonesia above the US, India and Thailand, all major tourist destinations. Recent outbreaks of religious violence in Indonesia have been appalling but they’ve been small, isolated and inter-religious, not anti-tourist.
Visitors don’t need to follow the world’s second largest religion to appreciate the beauty of Islamic artistic expression, richly inventive because living things can’t be depicted.
Mosques are obvious attractions.  There are hundreds – here’s a few I know – Tuban’s multi-minaret, intricately-patterned Grand Mosque and Surabaya’s Chinese themed Zheng He.
If age and culture appeal, the mosques constructed after the arrival of the nine saints (Wali Songo) are must-visits.  There’s Surabaya’s Ampel (plus Arab kampong) and Demak’s Grand Mosque built in timber in the 15^th century.  This is pure Javanese architecture – no dome but a tiered teak roof.
The blending of Hindu, Buddhism and Islamic symbols indicates that the shift in religions was probably gradual and relatively peaceful.

The women of the Archipelago are just as beautiful as those in Bali particularly when wearing the elegant and colourful headscarves of the most fashionable.  Sensuous? Absolutely.
The pre-Islamic Majapahit Era is alive in East Java through the dances, stories, carvings and performances still found in villages.  They’re authentic, staged for cultural maintenance, not tourist dollars.
Although poorly preserved, the statuary and temples that have survived climate, neglect and vandalism are accessible, though not well known. It’s not exaggerating to say archaeological marvels are everywhere and seldom corrupted by commercialism.
Here’s one of a hundred examples: Just off the Surabaya-Malang highway flanking a narrow nondescript street stand two giant stone dvarapala, the gate guardians of the Singosari kingdom, 800 years old and remarkably telegenic. 
Last year Malaysia got 25 million visitors, Singapore around half that number.  Vast Indonesia, with far more attractions, is targeting just eight million with its new campaign.
By ignoring Islam and the nation’s rich cultural history the curiously labelled Ministry for Tourism and Creative Economy is another misnomer.  How about a Ministry of Creative Tourism to market the magic and mystery – and boost the economy beyond Bali?   

(First published in The Sunday Post, 22 September 2012)
##