My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist

By Sadanand Dhume

Book Overview

A nation once synonymous with tolerance, Indonesia, the fourth-most populated country in the world and its most populous Muslim country, now finds itself in the midst of a profound shift toward... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1634504216
• ISBN13: 9781634504218
• Release Date: February 2016
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A firsthand account on the many Islamic movements

Sadanand Dhume's My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist, investigates Indonesian's advancement toward Sharia law. The author provides a firsthand account on the many Islamic movements inside Indonesia that are contributing to this change. As a participant observer and yet an outsider to Islam, Dhume writes an ethnography with the aid of his key informant, Herry, a radical Islamic magazine writer who is able to arrange interesting meetings, interviews, and tours inside Indonesia's radical movements. These include such infamous figures like the alleged mastermind behind the 2002 Bali bombing, Abu Bakar Bashir, infamous schools like Ngruki and Gontor in Java, and radical Islamic groups like Jemaah Islamiyah. The purpose of these meetings is for the author to provide his audience with a clearer understanding of where, "things were headed, what Indonesia would look like in ten years or twenty [years]" (Dhume, 5). The purpose of this book review is to verify whether or not the content of Dhume's book supports this goal. The book is written for anyone with an interest in radical Islam, including people with no prior knowledge to leading experts who have studied the topic for years. The author, Sadanand Dhume, is able to write for such a wide ranging audience because he provides both a clear historical context and inserts himself into such unique situation that allows him to provide new information. The historical context does two things; providing a working frame of knowledge so that people new to Islam and those with expert knowledge can fully understand how he comes to his conclusions. Likewise, his writing is relevant to anyone reading the book because it is new information that both someone new to Islam and a leading expert in the field would not have known otherwise. Dhume organizes his book into two parts that are accompanied with a prologue and epilogue. The first part titled Java, contains different chapters that serve to introduce Dhume as a journalist writing for important international publications and his intention for writing this book. He outlines the history of Indonesia throughout part one, including the conflict that separates the Nationalists from the Islamists and comparing radical Islam in one place compared to another by meeting with anyone from the ordinary radical Muslim to important figureheads of radical Islamist movements. In part two, Dhume continues in a similar format integrating the history of different regions and cities of Indonesia with his actual visits to these places and the ideas he forms. He uses the history and his new experiences to explain the reason behind such changes in radical Islam and its growing popularity. The important distinction between these two parts is the bias and judgments Dhume makes. In part one Dhume's writing is close to being objective as he makes little to no judgments about Islam. This helps the book's overall argument about radical Islam because it forces the reader t

Journey Among Indonesia's Believers

In the early twenty-first century, Indonesia is one of the world's pivotal countries. It occupies a geo-strategic position between the oil-producing Middle East and the energy hungry-East Asian economies, is an important trading partner for India and China, and has the world's largest Muslim population, with long-established Christian and Hindu communities. Indonesia has also become a critical battleground between two of the forces shaping the early twenty-first century - globalization and militant Islam. Caught in the middle is Indonesia's rich culture, partially based on Javanese and non-Islamic traditions. At stake is the country's future as defined by what type of socio-economic and political systems its people will select and how those choices will impact the region. Considering the growing role of Islam in Indonesian politics and society, it is increasingly important to have an understanding of how the small-in-number, but increasingly more influential radical Islamists think and act and what they are planning for their country's future. With more than an echo of V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers, another Indian writer Sadanand Dhume's My Friend the Fanatic takes the reader on a voyage through parts of this militant Islamic world. What gives Dhume's opus an inner sense of tension is that the narrator is torn between the dangers arising from radical Islam in Indonesia and his friend the fanatic, Herry Nurdi, then the managing editor of the fundamentalist mouthpiece Sabili. Sadanand captures the difficulty that many of us face in seeking to resolve tough issues - it becomes more of a challenge when the issue is no longer an abstract, but a person. Dhume sets the tone of the book by noting that he regards himself as open-minded, but is a "life-long atheist", who "had little sympathy for organized religion." Of fundamentalist Islam in particular he observes "...it was hard to think of many things more daft or dangerous than the utopian idea of running a modern society by the medieval norms enshrined in the sharia. The experiment had failed in every country that tried it - Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Taliban-era Afghanistan." Despite these views, the author states he would "do his best to understand its followers." And so the tone is set, an unbeliever traveling with a believer through Indonesia from 2002-2004. What Dhume discovers once he travels outside of the decidedly more liberal circles of Jakarta (where he enjoys the company of the country's literary and entertainment elite who are portrayed in a relatively hedonistic fashion) is a world tilting increasingly in an Islamist direction. That is a world in which there is growing segregation between men and women, the jilbab (long and loose-fitting garments meant to maintain a devout Muslim woman's modesty), and a sterile and un-imaginative education system. Mind you, Dhume spends most of time visiting several pesantren/radical Islamic schools such as Ngruki and Gontor in J

Islam from the inside out

Through the gentle yet witty voice of the narrator, I find myself transported to Indonesia and for the first time, from the inside out, understand what Islam is about. I would recommend this book to anyone curious about Islam and Indonesia beyond the skindeep coverage in the news.

Extraordinary reportage, sensitive writing

I would rate Sadanand Dhume's work as one of the most readable books on Islam and its contents and discontents. Dhume is a superb, sensitive reporter, and has endless stamina and courage. His narrative flows lucidly. You will want to read his book again and again.

My Friend the Fanatic

Until just a few weeks ago, discussions of Islam-inspired terrorism in Indonesia were not much in demand. Things there were on a roll. The stock exchange in Jakarta had recovered nicely from its slump at the end of the last year and was continuing higher. The Indonesian economy had dodged the recessionary bullet, and a reformist-looking president had just been re-elected in a decisive victory that left his rivals in disarray. The sense that Indonesia's moment was at hand was reflected in news stories around the globe. The bad news is that this triumph was dented with the recent coordinated bombing attacks on two Western-owned hotels in the heart of the Jakarta financial district. A bit of good news, however, is the publication of a new and important document for Indonesia and the world to weigh as they retrench to fight terrorism and reconsider why these attacks persist. This valuable document is My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist by Sadanand Dhume. The My Friend author is not comfortable with limiting himself to academic musings about how things evolved to their current state. Nor is he someone who delivers reports with a mosque in the background. Sadanand Dhume's achievement is to get inside the proverbial mosque and report on the radical Islamic forces that are shaping the foot soldiers of terrorism. Through his contact with a self-described follower of Osama bin Laden, the author keeps his mouth shut and his eyes wide open as he is invited along to meet Abu Bakar Bashir, who is often cited as the inspiration to terrorists throughout Southeast Asia, and visits Bashir's Pondok Ngruki boarding school and interacts with students there. Here, and elsewhere in his travels with his "friend the fanatic," Dhume takes every opportunity to ascertain the religious depth and breadth of the faithful, to explore the ideology of those who seek to traffic in terror, and to capture the disconnections and disfunctions in what his subjects themselves said. Soon after having these encounters, the author committed to paper all he observed, and we the readers reap the benefit of a well-written, well-presented account with a just-experienced quality that is quite unlike anything else in the existing body of anti-terrorism studies. Sadanand Dhume's My Friend the Fanatic is the story of being a fly on the wall as would-be terrorists are recruited and indoctrinated. It's the story of those radical Islamic schools and their support networks that serve as training grounds for those who will graduate to violence. Even more interesting, the author examines how all of this occurs within a context where the majority of the Islamic population does not support the methods and goals of terrorists. Throughout the narrative, there is a push-pull dichotomy of a modern Islam well-integrated within an increasingly prosperous society versus a separatist Islam that seeks to impose Sharia on all of Indonesia's people regardless of their religion