The Spiritually Expansive Vision of Indonesia's Wahid

As his small entourage slowly shepherded him to the stage, Abdurrahman Wahid, the first democratically elected president of Indonesia, appeared too frail to be steering the world's most populous Muslim country—a country which has careened from dictatorship, financial meltdown and ethnic strife to a newly minted civil society. But when he began to speak, the nearly blind former activist—for years a sharp thorn in the side of the Suharto regime—was a locus of quiet power.

A former Islamic theologian from a family of religious scholars, he spoke more in the ruminative cadences of a thinker than the hortatory tones of a politician. But his words carried weight: After becoming president last year in what many saw as a quirky compromise choice, he swiftly moved to bring the military to heel; reshaped the Indonesian parliament from a rubber-stamp body to a functioning legislature; launched investigations into government corruption; laid plans for prosecution of military officers accused of atrocities in East Timor; and (in keeping with a first career as a journalist) abolished the nation's Orwellian-sounding Information Ministry, spawning one of the spunkiest and most colorful Fourth Estates in Asia.

A purple lei of welcome still draped around his neck, Wahid was introduced from the podium as an exemplar of an emerging new world ethos: "to live together in profound diversity and multiplicity." Wahid launched into a series of remarks, which provided an unaccustomed glimpse of a Muslim head of state who enthusiastically embraced ecumenicism. He referred admiringly to Pope John XXIII's Vatican encyclicals, especially their stipulation that "each person has a right to find the eternal truth according to his own tradition." He shared the inspiration he had received from Judaism via close friendships with several rabbis. In a forum that has sometimes been accused of running more on hope than realpolitik, a head of state whose vision could only be called spiritually expansive seemed proof of a dawning epoch based on commonly held religious values.

"All traditions meet in one point," he said, "and that is the betterment of our own lives." Pluralism was the only possible path in a globalizing world, he added, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a governing principle. "Islam is about morality and faith," he declared, "not the state. Your spiritual life is a psychological relationship with your own mind, to make yourself peaceful. You have to amalgamate with the teachings of your religion and the teachings of reality."

Most interesting to the audience was the announcement that one of the "Future Visions" participating organizations, The Global Dialogue Institute, had been contracted for a pilot reform project in Java and the Celebes Islands with Wahid's enthusiastic backing. The core of the program, a technique called "deep dialogue," was described as a "transformative process" that fostered the habit of an open mind and the practice of tolerance, the only ethic appropriate to "the emerging world civilization." Ashok Gangadean, a Haverford University professor of philosophy and institute co-founder, effused: "Indonesia is the perfect laboratory. We're all vested in this experiment. We cannot afford to fail. What I call a 'dialogical awakening' is essential for the process of spiritual globalization."

When asked if he considered himself a global citizen, Wahid demurred that "as head of state, it is my responsibility to defend my national culture." But allowing himself a small smile, he added, "My mind and spirit go toward global citizenry. Only then can one see oneself as the same as the other; if not, competition and warfare will destroy all of us."

Coming from the leader of a country with a greater population than the entire Middle East, his remarks suggested to some a change as seismic as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, signaling the paradigm shift on which many at the conference had pinned their hopes. But as Wahid was led from the room, an aide whispered the news that three U.N. aid workers had been killed in West Timor. His face fell. Two days later, 20 citizens were slain in fresh fighting. It was a stark reminder that the birth of a new world will inevitably involve harsh and perhaps protracted labor pangs. Still, that Indonesia's troubled political transformation had elevated a man of such keen spiritual insight seemed to make some of the optimistic prognoses bandied at the conference, in the near long run, more plausible.

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