Islam in Indonesia: just add water

I was listening to Glenn Reynold's and Helen Smith's podcast with Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan, which I found very engaging (more here).

Dunnigan's comments on Indonesia, however, differ from my perceptions when I was living there (I was there for two years in the mid seventies, young and jewish in java). Indonesia is the world largest Moslem country, yes, but Dunnigan painted it as a "partial conversion" which made it sound like people practiced a syncretic religion like what we see with Christianity in Haiti or Brazil. However, there is really less separation from the Arabs, theologically and in religious practice, than there is between the Baptists and the Catholics (far less than between the Orthodox and Reform Jews). The Indonesians I knew were very, very Moslem (but not Wahabi. That's a very recent import, and I'd guess there's more Wahabi in New York than in Jakarta)..

The cultural separation, of course, is huge. Especially among Indonesians around my age, the important forces are related to the memory of authoritarian governments (Sukarno, Suharto) fighting communist (or otherwise separatist) "insurgencies" (Timor, Flores). The problem of forging a country out of an archipelago spread over an area larger than that of the U.S., containing the world's most densely populated islands, creating a common language, dealing with religious differences among the islands (Bali is largely Hindu), land reform, are all different.

But, of course, the main difference between Indonesia and Arabia is that Indonesia has humidity. Dry heat makes people cranky. Everyone knows that.