The Classroom Battle for Indonesia's Soul
Islam and Education
by Stanley A. Weiss

JAKARTA -- With the world focused on Iraq's bloody struggle to emerge as the first democratic state in the Arab world, an old question is being asked anew: Can Islam and democracy coexist?

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the answer lies not in the Middle East, home to only 20 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim pop-ulation, is in the middle of its first direct presidential election just six years after the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship.

As the U.S. ambassador here, Ralph Boyce, tells me, "Indonesia now gets out more votes than the United States." Among 155 million registered voters, turnout in the first round of presidential voting on July 5 was 80 percent.

President Megawati Sukarnoputri now faces a run-off on Sept. 20 with her former security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired general known as SBY. Both candidates understand the need to increase economic growth from an anemic 4 percent, create jobs for the 40 million Indonesians who are unemployed or underemployed, and reduce poverty for the 110 million who subsist on under $2 per day.

Realizing such ambitious goals will be a challenge in a country that SBY's running mate Jusuf Kalla, former minister for people's welfare, described to me as "a beggar with a golden bowl - a rich country that is begging."

Indeed, while this sprawling archipelago may be rich in natural resources, Indonesia is poor in the most valuable asset of the Information Age - human capital. Public funding for education, at 7 percent of government expenditure, is the lowest in Southeast Asia. Sixty percent of children don't complete their basic education. The Philippines, with less than half the population, has four times as many doctorates, according to Juwono Sudarsono, a former education minister who is now Indonesia's ambassador to Britain.

"It doesn't matter who the next president is," Sudarsono said. "Education is the key to Indonesia's future."

That's why the real question isn't whether Islam and democracy can coexist, but whether Muslim moderates in countries like Indonesia can win young hearts and open closed minds in their battle of ideas with Islamic reactionaries. And the battle for the future of Indonesia, like the battle for the soul of Islam itself, will be won or lost in its classrooms.

Many here fear the increasing militancy of a small minority of the madrasas, or Islamic day schools, and pesantrens, or Islamic boarding schools, that now enroll up to 20 percent of Indonesian schoolchildren.

Saudi "charities" have spent millions promoting their intolerant Wahhabi strand of Islam in the most radical of these institutions. Their alumni include foot soldiers of Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist group responsible for attacks across Indonesia, including the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002.

Yet Indonesia is to the world what large banks are to the financial sector - too big to fail. A radicalized Indonesia that exports fundamentalist bombers instead of batik fabrics would be a strategic threat to global security.

Muslim nations must make education a priority, and the United States must help. The final report of the Sept. 11 com-mission called on Washington to "offer an agenda of opportunity that includes support for public education and economic openness."

But American resources currently don't match the rhetoric. William Frej, director in Indonesia for the U.S. International Agency for Development, said, "Americans think they spend something like 10 percent of their budget on foreign aid, when the real figure is less than 1 percent."

One aid program that is working, however, is a USAID initiative to modernize education across the Muslim world. Frej's office has begun an unprecedented effort to bolster Indonesian schools. Unveiled during President George W. Bush's brief visit to Bali last year, the program is spending $157 million to help improve local management of schools, train teachers and reduce dropout rates by tailoring education to the skills required in the local work force.

Frej's staff overcame suspicions that the aid was a backdoor way to teach children to "think like Americans" by making Indonesians partners is designing the program and by working with religious schools. As the Asia Foundation's Douglas Ramage told Congress last month, "In general, pesantren and religious schools are the solution, not the problem, to extremism in Indonesia." Militancy, he added, "can often be moderated simply through exposure to alternative ideas if they are presented within an Islamic perspective."

Ramage says that instead of a breeding ground for terrorism, "there is the potential for Indonesia to share some of its progressive Islamic thought and education reform with Islamic schools in other areas of Southeast Asia."

Likewise, Washington must do more to win the hearts and minds of Indonesia's future leaders. Confronted with rigid U.S. visa rules, Indonesian students studying abroad today choose Australia over America. Denied access to U.S. training and equipment, the Indonesian military chooses Russian jets over American. The result? A decade ago, 22 cabinet ministers were educated or trained in the U.S. Today there are none.

As the U.S. offers modern techniques to Indonesian schools, revitalized exchange programs should bring promising Indonesian leaders to the United Sates. Washington cannot afford a repeat among Indonesian civilians of its loss of influence in the military ranks. Since the U.S. suspended International Military Education and Training here in 1992, an entire generation of senior Indonesian leaders has had little or no contact with America.

Indonesia and the world are right to celebrate this historic election. Yet as they cast their votes, Indonesians increasingly realize that books, even more than ballots, will determine the fate of their nation.