Islamic Extremism and the War of Ideas: Lessons from Indonesia

Abstract

For decades, the themesof the Hoover Institution have revolved around the broad concerns of political and economic and individual freedom. The Cold War that engaged and challenged our nation during the twentieth century guided a good deal of Hoover’s work, including its archival accumulation and research studies. The steady out-put of work on the communist world offers durable testi-monies to that time, and struggle. But there is no repose from history’s exertions, and no sooner had communism left the stage of history than a huge challenge arose in the broad lands of the Islamic world. A brief respite, and a me-andering road, led from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9 in 1989 to 9/11. Hoover’s newly launched project, the Her-bert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order, is our contribution to a deeper under-standing of the struggle in the Islamic world between order and its nemesis, between Muslims keen to protect the rule of reason and the gains of modernity, and those determined to deny the Islamic world its place in the modern interna-tional order of states.