From Reuters:
JAKARTA - Indonesia's top Islamic council issued a religious edict on Friday forbidding any liberal interpretation of Islam in the world's most populous Muslim nation."Religious liberalism is haram (forbidden)," said a fatwa, or doctrine, issued by the Indonesian Ulemas Council (MUI) and seen by Reuters.
"This is a reminder for Muslims to follow the religion in a correct way and not to try to deviate from the principles," Ma'aruf Amin, chief the MUI's Fatwa Commission, told Reuters.
Another fatwa banned inter-religious marriages in Indonesia where 85 percent of its 220 million follow Islam.
There is widespread debate in Indonesia over inter-religious marriages with some clerics saying Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women.
But Amin said the MUI had decided to ban such marriages "for the sake of Indonesian Muslims".
"This is the strongest view at the MUI and we are doing this to improve the religion quality of the Muslim," Amin added.
The fatwas underlined the growing influence of hardliners in Indonesia, where most Muslims embrace a moderate form of Islam...
Readers of C. Snouck Hurgronje will not be surprised. Others, who refuse even to read a page of Hurgronje, may well be. And the non-surprise to future events of one group, those who have learned about Islam, and the continued surprise of the other group, those who have not, will continue to be observed for each Muslim-related act or saying or failure to act -- surprising to some, unsurprising to others.
The American government's goal should be to staff the upper reaches of the Defense Department, the State Department, the C.I.A., the F. B.I., with people who will be in the group of the permanently unsurprised --- not the gorup of those who remain, almost wilfully, not only surprised, but surprisable.
Isn't this against the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights?
Why isn't Kofi Anan flying in anon to protest this and have a coffeeklatch about the 'teapot' temple demolition - a whimsical structure owned by a weird little off-shoot sect who just had their religious buildings bulldozed by Islamic fanatics?
Where are the always-ready-to-march European students? The symnpathetic-to-their-own-annihilation trade unionists? The perennially pubescent peaceniks? The unrestrainable uber-tolerant? Why aren't they marching about this outrage? (If George Bush were a Muslim, they'd be flooding into the streets by the millions, from Oslo to Bologna, Madrid to Munich, decrying such blatant religious extremism and cultural imperialism.)
Indonesia is often cited as an example of a place where "tolerant" and "moderate" Islam reigns. Please tell that to the hundreds of ethnic Chinese Christians who were raped and whose businesses were looted in 1998. Tell it to the Timorese. Tell it to the people in Sulawesi who have been forced at the point of the sword by Laskar Jihad. Tell it to the members of the over 700 churches which have been bombed or burned in the last 5 years. Tell it to the victims of the Bali bombing. And tell it to those Acehnese who aren't Muslim, and who are now living under a form of sharia.
Extremely sad, really.
Our society, breathing the gas of the PC Zeitgeist, will (at best) tell you that C. Snouck Hurgronje was an "Orientalist" who was part of evil Western (Dutch) Imperialism, and so cannot be trusted.