Stanford University

Islam

Islam in Indonesia, Fear in America - A Child's and a Country's Horizons

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Donald K. Emmerson
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Anyone who has followed the US presidential race knows that Senator Barack Obama, if he runs and wins, will be the first African-American to live in the White House. Fewer know that, if that happens, he will also become the first US president to have lived in Indonesia as a child and to have had an Indonesian stepfather.

Until now, this bit of biography might have mattered only to fans of political trivia. But elements of the conservative press have made an issue of Obama's links to Indonesia by insinuating that during his time there he might have absorbed radical Islamist ideas at a Muslim school. "Hillary's Team Has Questions about Obama's Muslim Background" ran the headline in Insight Magazine that started the flap. The editor may have wished to kill two birds - the presidential hopes of both Obama and his main rival for the Democratic nomination - with a single stone. Readers who believed the report would have thought twice before supporting Obama, while those who considered it false would have thought less of Hillary for stooping to plant it.

Official spokespeople for Obama and Clinton, respectively, quickly denied the allegation as "completely false" and "an obvious right-wing hit job." But not before the charge had been repeated by Fox News and debated in the blogosphere.

Barack Obama's parents met at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was born in 1961. Two years later his parents divorced. His mother remarried. His new stepfather was Indonesian. In 1967, when Barack was six years old, the family moved to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. There, as described in his 1995 biography, Barack attended a private Catholic school and, later, a "predominantly Muslim" one. In 1971, when he was ten, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling.

Investigative reporting by CNN, the Associated Press, and other responsible media has established that the notion that Obama was influenced by a radical Islamist agenda is absurd. He was never enrolled in a madrasah. Nor is it surprising that students at the secular public school he did attend were "predominantly Muslim" - nearly nine-tenths of all Indonesians are. The atmosphere in Jakarta in 1967-69 was basically secular. Muslim head scarves, for example, were rare. I know because I lived there then.

Obama was sent to a Catholic and then to a secular public school. His parents, of modest means, could not afford tuition at the international school. At the public school, which welcomed pupils of various faiths, Obama's parents registered him as "Muslim" only for convenience. The Indonesian Communist Party had just been destroyed, and atheistic Marxism outlawed. Pupils were required to state an affiliation with a major world religion. When enrolling a child, the common practice was to list the father's faith.

Obama's stepfather, Soetoro, was only nominally Muslim. Like many if not most other ethnic-Javanese Indonesians at that time, he was a "statistical Muslim." That label was applied to those who, if required by a school registrar or a census taker to state their religion, would say "Islam," but who were Muslims far more from habit or heritage than by practice or conviction.

Should we be glad that this smear has been so quickly put to rest, and move on? Yes. But not before noting - and regretting - an irony: Precisely when tides of disregard for the United States and its policies are sweeping the world, when Americans more than ever before need to understand Muslim societies, American fears of Islam are being evoked and stoked.

Far from being seen as a detriment to his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama's prior exposure to a foreign culture should be counted as an asset.

At the same tender age as Obama's when he was in Jakarta, I was in Moscow attending a Soviet elementary school. I remember my teacher frowning at me when, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, unlike my Russian classmates, I couldn't manage to cry. My parents, my sister, and I could have lived in the building that housed the American Embassy - a "golden ghetto." But my father wanted us to learn the Russian language and experience Russian life. I am grateful that he did.

The idea that Americans, children or adults, should wrap themselves in familiar cocoons and avoid encounters with anything strange, including Indonesian Islam, is worse than just bad parenting. It is a willful parochialism that the United States as a country cannot afford. Not in this post-9/11 world. Not if we wish to engage with that world as it actually is - rather than as we might, in fearful isolation, imagine it to be.

This opinion piece was printed in the San Jose Mercury News on February 1, 2007 under the title "Obama's international background an asset, not a flaw." To read the version that was printed in the Mercury News please click on the link below. It was also printed in Yale Global Online. There is a link below to that version.

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Joshua Teitelbaum

CDDRL
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University
JoshuaTeitelbaum082007.jpg PhD
A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Dr. Joshua Teitelbaum took his B.A. in Near Eastern Studies at UCLA and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of two acclaimed books: Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia's Islamic Opposition (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and The Rise and Fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia (New York University Press), a study of the early modern history of Saudi Arabia. His edited volume - for which he has written the introduction - Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He has published numerous scholarly articles on the modern Middle East and his work has also appeared in The New Republic and The Jerusalem Report. Dr. Teitelbaum is a Senior Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, where he studies the politics and history of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, as well as Palestinian issues. He is CDDRL Rosenbloom Visiting Associate Professor for the Spring quarter of 2008.

Teitelbaum was a legislative aide to Congressman Paul N. McCloskey, Jr., of California's 12th District.

He has been a visiting professor in Cornell University's Department of Near Eastern Studies and at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, and a Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has spoken at the Council on Foreign Relations, San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, the Middle East Institute, the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, the US Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Army War College, the Italian Ministry of Defense, Israel's National Security Council, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and most major university Middle East centers in the US and Canada. His comments and expertise have been sought by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun, the Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz, Ma'ariv, Yediot Aharonot, the Straits Times and the Voice of America. He regularly reviews scholarly manuscripts for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, New York University Press, Palgrave, and C. Hurst & Co.

Dr. Teitelbaum is an Associate of the Proteus Management Group, US Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership, under the sponsorship of the Office of the Director, National Intelligence.

CDDRL Visiting Associate Professor, Spring Quarters 2007, 2008 & 2009

Donald Emmerson, Indonesia expert - on Barack Obama's early religious instruction in Indonesia

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On Tuesday, January 23, Shorenstein APARC's Donald K. Emmerson was interviewed by WDEL's Allan Loudell about the allegations made by FOX News and Insight Magazine that Barak Obama attended a madrasah while living in Jakarta, Indonesia when he was a young boy. "This story, which I originally thought was about Indonesia is really not about Indonesia," says Emmerson. "Instead, it's an illustration of just how dirty politics are going to get in this presidential campaign here in the United States. It's about media manipulation and it's about the fear of Islam post 9-11 here in the United States." You can hear the complete interview from WDEL's website.
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Pakistan: the Limits of Islamization

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The islamization process in Pakistan is at the core of the contradictions and identity conflict of Pakistan. It is the permanent attempt to rewrite the history whose founding fathers intended to make the homeland for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent, much the against the will of the clergy. However it is also an instrument of perpetuation in power of a largely secular military, which constantly manipulates Islamic symbols.

Although widely discussed, the process of islamization in Pakistan has remained relatively limited. No elected legislature went beyond the expression of the idea of the supremacy of the Islamic law. No elected legislature ever passed a somewhat substantial provision. Despite an increasingly strong, or at least vocal religious pressure, the constitution and the legislation of the Pakistani state are still based on a compromise between modernist institutions and ever more pressing religious demands, yet still limited. The supremacy of the Sharia is regularly reaffirmed, yet its implementation does not progress.

The presentation will analyze the impact of the islamization policies, less however on the legal and constitutional system than on the economic, political and social life of Pakistan. Starting from the observation that the islamization process is more limited that it may seem, the presentation will draw on to say that this process reinforces more than it challenges the existing political and social order, and its most salient political expression, the current military regime, by preventing, on the one side the emergence of any real alternative political project and, although in a more pragmatic manner, by bringing back in mainstream politics the fraction of the social body which could possibly be tempted by more radical means of actions.

In this perspective, four dimensions will be more specifically studied: 1) The evolution of the role of religious movements and parties within the Pakistani state; 2) The relationship between these same religious movements and parties and the Pakistani establishment; 3) The specific role of the madrasas in this relation; 4) The relation the religious parties entertains with democracy.

Frederic Grare is a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He will lead a project assessing U.S. and European policies toward Pakistan and, where appropriate, recommending alternatives with Ashley J. Tellis and George Perkovich. Grare will focus on the tension between stability and democratization in Pakistan, including challenges of sectarian conflict, Islamist political mobilization, and educational reform. Grare also will facilitate interactions between U.S. experts and officials and European counterparts on the main policy challenges in South Asia.

Grare is a leading expert and writer on South Asia, having served most recently in the French embassy in Pakistan and from 1999 to 2003 in New Delhi as director of the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities. Grare has written extensively on security issues, Islamist movements, and sectarian conflict in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He also has edited the volume, India, China, Russia: Intricacies of an Asian Triangle.

His most recent publications include: "India, China, Russia: Intricacies of an Asian Triangle, with Gilles Boquerat"(eds), (New Delhi, India Research Press, 2003); "Pakistan and the Afghan Conflict, 1979-1985: At the Turn of the Cold War" (Karachi, Oxford University Press, 2003); "Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent: The Jamaat-i-Islami" (New Delhi, Manohar, 2001)

Grare has an advanced degree from Paris Institut d'Etudes Politiques and received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International Studies.

Dr. Grare's talk is the first seminar of the winter quarter South Asia Colloquium Series.

Philippines Conference Room

Frederic Grare Visiting Scholar Speaker Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Seminars

Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay

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The current trend toward suicide bombings began in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The practice soon spread to civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and Chechnya. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1990s and during the Al Aqsa intifada further highlighted the threat. Al Qaeda's adoption of the tactic brought a transnational dimension. Interest in the phenomenon then surged after the shock of the 2001 attacks, which involved an unprecedented number of both perpetrators and casualties. Since then, suicide bombings have expanded in number and geographical range, reaching extraordinary levels in the Iraq War and spreading around the world to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Britain.

This review covers thirteen of the books published on the subject since 2002. Three analyze the Palestinian case and four others focus on Islamist violence. The other six, including two edited collections, intend to be comprehensive. This review also refers to a few selected publications that discuss the arguments presented in the works reviewed. It aims to give readers a glimpse of the content of the different volumes as well as offer a critique.

The essay reviews these works:

  • Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
  • Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
  • Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  • Mohammed M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
  • Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
  • Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, translated from the French by David Macey (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
  • Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  • Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
  • Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
  • Ami Pedahzur, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
  • Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
  • Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
  • Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus Pa.: Rodale [distributed by St. Martin's Press] 2003).
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Islam in Europe

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Olivier Roy is research director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). He holds a state Agrégation in philosophy (1972), a Master's in Persian

language and civilization from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (1972), a PhD in political sciences from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris (1996) and has been qualified to supervise PhD candidates since 2001. He currently lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the IEP and has acted as consultant to the French Foreign Ministry (Center for Analysis and Forecast) since 1984. Olivier Roy was also a consultant with UNOCA on Afghanistan in 1988, special OSCE representative to Tajikistan (August 1993 to February 1994) and headed the OSCE Mission for Tajikistan from February to October 1994.

Among his many publications is Globalised Islam: The search for a new ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).

Sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Cubberley Auditorium
Stanford University
485 Lasuen Mall
Stanford, CA 94305

Olivier Roy Research Director Speaker the French National Center for Scientific Research
Lectures

The Phenomenon of Conversion: from Christianity to Islam, and from Islam to Christianity. A comparison between Salafism and Evangelism

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Olivier Roy is research director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). He holds a state Agrégation in philosophy (1972), a Master's in Persian

language and civilization from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (1972), a PhD in political sciences from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris (1996) and has been qualified to supervise PhD candidates since 2001. He currently lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the IEP and has acted as consultant to the French Foreign Ministry (Center for Analysis and Forecast) since 1984. Olivier Roy was also a consultant with UNOCA on Afghanistan in 1988, special OSCE representative to Tajikistan (August 1993 to February 1994) and headed the OSCE Mission for Tajikistan from February to October 1994.

Among his many publications is Globalised Islam: The search for a new ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).

Sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Olivier Roy Research Director Speaker the French National Center for Scientific Research
Seminars

Karaula (Border Post) - Lunch seminar

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Rajko Grlic was born 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated a feature film directing from the FAMU Film Academy in Prague, Czech Republic. He has directed and cowritten ten theatrical feature films, including Border Post in 2006 and Josephine in 2002.

His films have been distributed all around the world and shown in competition at many major film festivals. They have received more than fifty international awards, including the Tokyo International Film Festival Grand Prix and Best Director.

He has written nine produced feature screenplays and two television serials. He has received numerous awards for writing, including a UNESCO award, FIPRESCI award, and Peter Kastner award. He has produced four theatrical feature films and five short films. He has also directed three television documentary serials and a dozen short films.

Grlic is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, Athens, OH and Artistic Director of Motovun Film Festival, Croatia.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Forum, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CREES, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Film Studies Department
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Rajko Grlic Filmmaker Speaker
Seminars
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