Merci bien.
Thank you very much, everyone, and good afternoon.
I am very proud to be here today.
That will be the extent of my French today. I hope, therefore, the translators will know that I'll be speaking slowly enough to make it sensible to them as much as to you.
I'm truly honoured to be back on my old stomping ground. I was telling the clerk of the subcommittee that I used to work here as a legislative aide many years ago, and despite the fact that I now work and live in New York City my love of Parliament has never diminished, including some of the friendships that I have around this table.
The topic you have asked me to address today is very important, as all topics are, of course, that you wish to explore further, but I would argue that this one, Indonesia, has heightened importance to the world, not just to Canada, given that Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim majority country and indeed only five years ago could claim credibly to be a role model of democracy for Muslims worldwide.
That can no longer be said with any credibility. I will say more about the new state of affairs in just a moment, but let me give you some background about where I'm coming from. I grew up in Canada and attended a madrassa—a religious school—in the Vancouver area for several years from about 1975 to 1981. That is where I began asking very simple but apparently inconvenient questions, questions relevant to Canadian multiculturalism and diversity, questions such as: “Why can we Muslims not take Jews and Christians as friends? Please explain that to me.”
But after asking one too many of these sorts of questions, I was expelled from my madrassa at the age of 14. However, I didn't leave Islam, because I decided that this particular educator might be giving us wrong information, and so I took advantage of something that we call the public library—pre-Google days, you might remember—and every Saturday when I was no longer welcome at the madrassa, I would take these hours and spend them at the public library, reading up on religion and culture, as much as I possibly could.
That is where I realized that Islam itself has a progressive and pluralistic tradition of independent thinking, of questioning and of reinterpreting, and that tradition, which, by the way, most Muslims are not even aware of, let alone non-Muslims, is known as “ijtihad”. Yes, it sounds eerily like “jihad” to many non-Arab ears; it comes from the same root, which means “to struggle”. But unlike any concept of violent struggle, ijtihad is all about struggling with the mind in order to comprehend the wider world, and this is precisely the tradition that was demonstrated to me five years ago in Indonesia.
Five years ago, I went to that country to introduce the Indonesian version of the book to which Mr. Reid referred, The Trouble With Islam Today, and I remember very clearly that at the launch, held at their national public library, both the Muslim extremists and the transsexuals came out to the event, and everybody you could imagine in between, and they disagreed on this or that with me, and they disagreed on this and that with each other. But as far as I knew, everybody went home safely. Debate was civil. In between, Javanese dancers kicked up their heels. Guitarists strummed. Poetry was recited. It was a brilliant demonstration of ijtihad in action.
Five years later, just this past May, my colleague and I went back to Indonesia, this time to discuss the newest ideas that, as a Muslim reformer, I'm engaging a young global audience about. Our experiences could not have been more different as compared with five years ago.
On the first night we arrived, I was informed that my book will not be carried by the major chain in Indonesia for no other reason than security concerns.
The very next night, I began doing my public appearances. The first one happened in Jakarta, a cosmopolitan city. No more than five minutes into this presentation, at a vibrant community centre where the auditorium was filled with young Muslims eager to hear and discuss peacefully, a police officer stopped the proceedings. He said that he was representing the community, who did not want me to be there.
Not two minutes later, a group by the name of the FPI—in English, we would call them the Islamic Defenders Front—arrived, 80 members strong, demanding that they shut everything down.
The young people, who were there to hear me out, argued back: over the last number of years, bit by bit, we have been giving away our freedoms under our constitution, and it will stop now.
The organizers pulled me up to the third floor of this community centre, with windows about as large as the ones in this committee room. The rage being expressed by Islamist extremists was so loud and so intense that I could hear those windows, three floors up, rattling and shaking.
When I finally was safe enough to exit from that building, accompanied by human rights lawyers, these lawyers and the organizers of the event quickly had our hotels changed. It was now obvious that we needed far more security than what we had at the relatively bargain-priced hotel we'd checked into. The reason I bring this up is that hours later it was reported to us that the chief of the Jakarta police, his office, tweeted out the name of our new hotel.
The point is that corruption in the country of Indonesia, the complicity between the security forces and the political class, has become far deeper than we would know even by reading articles about these issues.
I will jump now to the next and almost final point in my testimony.
That wasn't the worst of the attacks that my colleague and I experienced on this visit. The worst of them happened a few days later, in what can only really be called.... To be Canadian about it, I'll use the name “Waterloo” as opposed to, say, “Berkeley”. When I speak about these issues in the United States, I describe it as the Berkeley of Indonesia. But in this case, let's call it the Waterloo of Indonesia—a small, liberal university town, mostly always quiet. I was speaking at a community centre there.
This time, about an hour into the proceedings, a hundred, possibly more, religious extremists—on motorbikes this time—bashed down the security gates. We saw immediately that they were wearing riot gear. How convenient: they could not be identified. Worst of all, they were wielding iron crowbars and smashing everything in sight, including people's heads.
My colleague was cornered, and they took a huge whack at her arm, dislocating her vertebrae in the process. She, along with six others, had to be rushed to the hospital immediately afterwards, and those six others, by the way, sustained head injuries. The only reason I emerged from this unscathed is that a few exceptionally courageous young Indonesians—most of them women, I will add—surrounded my body with theirs, creating literally a human shield, knowing that their bodies would be the first to be injured if the extremists, who were shouting, “Where is Manji?”, found their answer.
We of course have kept in touch with many of the human rights activists on the ground since May, and they have asked us in no uncertain terms to bring this message to all of you: that there is a movement, what they themselves are calling a moral courage movement, to reclaim the freedoms that have been given away under their secular constitution over the last few years. But they need our help, and the way they tell us that we can help is for high-level political people such as you, politicians, yes, but diplomats too, to put pressure on the Indonesian government to accept an independent investigation by the UN special rapporteur on freedom of belief to look at what has happened to freedom in that country in the last half-decade and begin open conversations about these issues with Indonesians themselves.
I'll say one final thing, if I may, and no doubt we'll get into these issues further during the question period. There's no doubt that many factors are in play here. It's not simply of course a weak leadership under the current president of Indonesia. That is a huge part of it, but there's more: Saudi money. Saudi petrodollars are flowing into Indonesia at record levels. We see this even when we arrive at the airport in Jakarta: wealthy Saudis, or those from the Persian Gulf, and their Indonesian assistants schlepping the luggage. You see it with your own eyes.
There is also globalization, the relatively free movement now of capital and technology, and when you take this into consideration, you see that what the Indonesian government is seeking to do is create an image of stability for Indonesia so that overseas investors will see this country as a safe place to invest. But here's the paradox. Stability is achieved not by cracking down on religious extremists but by cracking down on human rights activists who have the courage to talk and speak up about extremism. Therein lies the complicity between the political class and security enforcement.
I have to believe that, at the very least, Canadians at your level of influence can help bring a special rapporteur into Indonesia for further discussion. If and when that happens, you can count on human rights activists and people who don't yet consider themselves as such but who desperately want their country back. You can count on them to do a lot of the work thereafter.
I'll end on that note. I welcome your questions.
Thank you very much.
