Look East for The Answer by Fareed Zakaria

November 4, 2002, U.S. Edition

Look East for The Answer
By Fareed Zakaria

The terror attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines seem to have opened up a new front in the war on terror. Strategists and commentators have focused their attention on Southeast Asia, asking whether radical Islam has found a new home in this volatile region. But, because of its size and severity, the Bali bomb blast has led people to the wrong conclusion. Islam in Southeast Asia is not the problem. In fact it may be the solution.

It is an awkward but unavoidable reality that Islam has not been able to make its peace with today's world. From Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to China, Muslims--or at least some Muslims--stand in stubborn, often violent, opposition to modernity. One region has been an exception to this dismal rule: Southeast Asia, where a gentle strain of Islam has flourished for centuries with tens of millions of followers.

Islam in Indonesia is still mostly moderate, says one of the region's senior Muslim politicians, Surin Pitsuwan, who warns against making too much of the Bali blast. "This was done by a tiny group, fueled from outside the country," he says. "Indonesia's problem is not Islam; it's instability." Indonesia's two largest Muslim groups--which together have 70 million members, making them the largest Muslim political organizations in the world--have forcefully denounced the bombings and urged President Megawati Sukarnoputri to crush the terrorists.

Pitsuwan is a member of Thailand's tiny Muslim community, a scholarly man well versed in Arabic and Islam, who served as his country's foreign minister for much of the past decade. At a recent conference of Muslim intellectuals held in Qatar, he argued that Southeast Asia, always considered to be on Islam's periphery, may have something to teach the Arab world, long regarded as the heartland of the faith. True Islam has often been thought to be Arab Islam.

"From the beginning we have had to be flexible and innovate," Pitsuwan explains. "Islam in Southeast Asia had to accommodate to different cultures, religions and people. In doing so, we had to decide what were the essential aspects of Islam and hold on to those, while also embracing the world we live in."

The results have been remarkable not simply in the negative sense--few bloodbaths--but in positive terms as well. Southeast Asians have done better, economically and politically, than most Muslims, but also better than most people in developing countries. Over the past 20 years Malaysia and Indonesia have been among the fastest-growing economies in the world. That's why even now, while foreign investment in most Muslim countries is sinking, it has stayed stable in Malaysia. Muslims in Southeast Asia have prospered through globalization.

But the Bali bombings result from a different aspect of globalization. Over the past few decades, religious activists from the Arab world have traveled to Southeast Asia, preaching and teaching an austere Wahhabi version of Islam. Southeast Asians have gone to the Arab world and been trained in seminaries and schools, returning to spread their newfound zeal. (The next time you praise cheap travel, think of this.) The new, easy flows of information have further complicated matters. Pitsuwan explains that "news and images from all over the world have been beamed into the homes of Southeast Asians. They watch political events in the Balkans, the Middle East and Chechnya, and it raises their consciousness in a Pan-Islamic sense."

But the spread of radical Islam was not simply the result of the natural forces of globalization. It was given a huge push by wealthy charities and individuals from Arabia. Across the Islamic world, oil money from Saudi Arabia and the gulf states has funded puritanical schools, mosques and foundations. For more than three decades, Islamic fundamentalism has been a state-sponsored export.

It has been destabilizing. "It has unsettled the accommodations we have made with other faiths, with diversity, and also with modernity," says Pitsuwan. "If we don't retain some independence from the Arab center of Islam, we will undermine the flexible and successful faith that we have developed."

Pitsuwan remains optimistic. "Most Muslims in Southeast Asia are very comfortable with their religion; it works for us. We have new movements here that are interpreting the Qur'an in light of the modern age. Perhaps others in the Muslim world can learn something from our experience."

For all of Islam's history, Southeast Asia was considered a backwater. But the flows of globalization now need to be reversed. Islam must learn not from the center but rather the periphery. As Peter Singer, one of the participants at the conference, noted, what some call the periphery, others call the frontier.