Koran burning, illuminated

I decided to write a commentary about Florida Pastor Terry Jones and his now-delayed International Burn a Koran Day. A modified version may appear soon on the Beachwood Reporter site--if so, I'll post a link--but this is the original.

By Brett McNeil

Like other Americans living in Indonesia, I was aware of plans by a bigoted Florida blowhard to burn a bunch of Korans. I'd read about Pastor Terry Jones, the aggressively mustachioed eBay furniture salesman turned internationally renowned Islamophobe, and his promised score-settling with the Muslim holy book. Then late last week, the U.S. embassy in Jakarta sent an alert urging ex-pats to avoid local demonstrations against Jones' promised conflagration. “Americans are advised that there may be anti-American, possibly disruptive, demonstrations,” the embassy warned, “to mark an announced Koran burning on September 11 in Florida.” Hmm. You don't say.

As I understood his plan from afar, Jones intended to put the Muslim world on notice: The Koran and its teachings were responsible for 9/11. I didn't exactly follow the details—had the Koran actually financed and organized the 9/11 attacks, or was that still Al Qaeda?—but Jones' intent was clear enough. By torching a couple hundred paperback copies of the Koran—or even just talking about burning the books—he meant to stick his thumb in the eyes of Muslims everywhere. He meant to insult them, and maybe to provoke them. Up. Yours. Muslims. That was the message, and it was received loud and clear.

Of course, that message was delivered by a goof. That much is obvious to any honest person watching this particular media tempest from the sidelines. Jones represents a constituency of one, and easy money says he would have remained the anonymous backwater huckster preacher he is and deserves to be if America weren't caught right now in a moment of embarrassing and disconcertingly open xenophobia. We can't cotton a Muslim community center in Manhattan because it's too close to Ground Zero. And we can't quite shake the stubborn rumor that our president, our black president, is also secretly a Muslim. I understand the economy sucks and that middle-class upward mobility threatens to permanently become a thing of the past—I, too, have a house I can't sell for what I owe—but I'm sorry. This is ugly and it's fake and it's several kinds of morally and ethically wrong. But I'll spare you the sermon.

What I wanted to say, as someone who came to teach high school English in the world's largest Muslim democracy, is that Jones' provocations couldn't have come at a more incongruous time in Indonesia. All across the giant archipelago this weekend, Muslims and non-Muslims alike are celebrating Lebaran, or Idil Fitri, marking the end of the Ramadan fasting month. It's like Thanksgiving and Christmas wrapped in one, a hugely important holiday—elsewhere known as Eid—that unites Muslims as believers and Indonesians as countrymen, and reunites families all over these islands with something like the entire nation headed back home for a long weekend. The mosques are overflowing, the stores are shuttered, and the homes are full of friends, families, and neighbors. Kids and food, food and kids, presents and holiday finery. It's a big deal, a touchstone celebration, and it's been beautiful to witness. What would Terry Jones know about that? What would he care to know about that? I'm guessing nothing. “Why would he bring this up now?” an Indonesian friend asked about the Koran-burning threats. “It's Lebaran. It's a time for family.”

The festivities start the day before. At sundown Thursday, the sounds of calls to prayer go out from minaret loudspeakers across the north side of Bandung, a West Java city of about 7 million. The songs overlap and arrive from near and far, more and less amplified, a Doppler-ed wash of sound-on-sound. High-pitched singing and lower-pitched, shrill and sonorous, pleasing and less-so. Evening calls to prayer are an everyday thing here but tonight is different. The songs don't stop, or they don't seem to. All night and into the early morning, men and boys take turns at the microphones singing. They work in shifts; the sound is constant, trebly. I don't understand them but at points, especially late in the night, they seem to be winging it. They fill the air with song, with amplitude. It goes on and on. And the fireworks. All seemingly ad hoc. Neighborhood displays, backyard pyrotechnics. The air is full of color and smoke, sizzles and bangs and booms. Crackling, and fizzles. Pops and whizzes. It's all night, past four a.m. It's the Fourth of July on the North Side of Chicago for hours and hours, a house dog's quivering nightmare and everyone else's jubilant display. Pffffth … Bam! And again. And again. Arcs of red, constellations of gold and silver. A purple burst. A green streak against the black sky. Ahhh! Nobody's sleeping.

In a cab on the way home from dinner, the streets are crowded and the sidewalks, as always, are impassable for the vendor carts. But tonight they aren't hawking chicken satay and friend rice. Instead, they're selling flowers. A hundred different sellers, maybe, along a mile-long stretch of road. Buckets jammed with orchids, lilies, flowers I've never seen. And everyone on foot with a bunch in their hands. Everyone buying flowers! People double-parked and out of their cars, people off their motorcycles and stocking up. A riot of color and softness. Everyone all smiles. Flowers literally littering the streets. It's fantastic.

The next morning, the morning of Lebaran, the mosques are all mobbed. People worship on the ground outside, on playing fields, on sidewalks, roads, wherever the can find space. Seas of white. Kneeling in unison. An enormous communal huddle. And when they're done, they break their fast. A day of eating and of visiting, Lebaran is the Indonesian equivalent of the Passover seder or the Thanksgiving dinner, only imagine cooking for the entire neighborhood. Visitors are the norm, for an hour or the day, the front door revolving, people in and out in a procession of humble greeting: Mohon maaf lahir dan bathin. Roughly translated it means, I beg forgiveness for my mistakes, and it's offered freely. A day of atonement and apology, of anti-egotism. Kind of nice. During an afternoon visit to a home shared by our Indonesian language teachers, a group of Americans offered their own mohon maafs as our hosts, and later their neighbors, offered theirs in return. Terry Jones didn't come up, and we wouldn't have spoken for him in any event. He can beg his own forgiveness, but I don't think I'll hold my breath. No, Jones was a long, long way off. In my teachers' living room, on a hill in West Java, surrounded by friends and comfortably stuffed with rice and fish and fruit, we were thinking mostly how happy we were to enjoy the generosity of others.