Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Weak religion

The Indonesians are chasing out the Australians -- who provided some of the fastest and best relief to that hard hit area -- because they might taint Islam's purity:

"'Please Australia, move your feet from Indonesia as soon as your humanitarian work is done,' he said. 'They should not corrupt Islamic sharia law in force in Aceh, because we know that these foreign soldiers like to bring prostitutes with them. Also, these soldiers drink alcohol and in Aceh it is strictly forbidden.'"
Follow this link for a more complete story. My question: How infirm is the Muslim people's faith if they cannot withstand any contact with the West? It seems to me that the Indonesians must be selling their people a pretty unsatisfying brand of faith if they're so concerned about exposure to competing ideas. But then again, I've always been a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, and I'm sure that belief is antithetical to conservative Islam's prevailing wisdom.