JAKARTA—On Friday and Saturday, Aug. 15 and 16, just before proud Indonesians celebrated the 80th anniversary of their independence on Sunday, Aug. 17, I conducted in the country’s capital city four three-hour seminars on the history of Western political thought. I am currently co-teaching four additional seminars – on statesmanship, foreign affairs, religion, and human rights – with my comrade-in-arms, Harvard Professor of Law Emerita Mary Ann Glendon, who joins us virtually from the United States.
The approximately 25 seminar participants belong to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which is headquartered in Jakarta and, with around 150 million followers, is the world’s largest independent Muslim organization. A small, select group of NU senior figures, the participants – mostly but not exclusively men – are university professors, newspaper columnists, heads of NU boarding schools, and more. One of the women directs NU’s 36-million-member women’s association. In late June, the newly established Nahdlatul Ulama National Leadership Academy (AKN-NU), in cooperation with the North Carolina-based Center for Shared Civilizational Values, launched the six-month Foundational Course, which convenes seminars most weekends through late December.
NU’s ambitious educational undertaking grows out of Islam Nusantara (“East Indies Islam”), a tolerant and pluralist school of Islam that developed in Indonesia over the last 700 years. True to their religious beliefs, seminar participants welcomed their encounter with classic writings of Western political thought, ancient and modern, and, spurred by them, posed and pursued trenchant questions about freedom and democracy in the West, Indonesia, and the world.
Founded in 1926, NU combines religious devotion with political engagement. In the 1940s NU supported Indonesian independence; in the 1960s the organization played a major role in defeating communism in Indonesia; and in the 1990s it backed the nation’s transition to democracy. Today, NU fosters within Islam, across Indonesia, and among other peoples and nations respect for the equal rights and dignity of all human beings.
AKN-NU advances NU’s mission by providing a broad education revolving around the best in Islam and the best in the West. Such an education, NU believes, reflects Islamic imperatives, contributes to interfaith understanding and cross-civilizational dialogue, and will form scholars, journalists, educators, organizers, and government officials capable of strengthening Indonesia’s multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and rights-protecting democracy.
Targeted with sophisticated influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party, Indonesia ought to command greater attention from American diplomacy. A presidential republic, Indonesia boasts the largest economy in Southeast Asia and the eighth largest in the world. With some 285 million citizens, it is the world’s third most populous democracy after India and the United States, and the world’s fourth most populous nation after India, China, and the United States. Its approximately 240 million Muslims number more by far than in any other nation-state. Indonesia is home to almost 30 million Christians, almost 5 million Hindus, and more than 300 ethnic groups. Its residents speak more than 700 languages. It received the highest score in the April 2025 Global Flourishing Study. Its national motto is “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity in Diversity). Its constitution proclaims all citizens equal before the law and guarantees human rights, among them the rights of religious freedom, assembly, association, and free expression. And straddling the equator and stretching west to east for more than 3,000 miles, Indonesia’s approximately 17,000 islands form a strategically situated archipelago along major Indo-Pacific sea lanes.
Nahdlatul Ulama also deserves White House and U.S. State Department attention, and not only for its work in Indonesia. NU General Chairman KH. Yahya Cholil Staquf deplored the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East that seeks to conquer by violence, subjugate if not extirpate the infidel, and establish a new caliphate. In “The Civilizational Origins of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama and its Humanitarian Islam Movement,” Staquf and Center for Shared Civilizational Values co-founder C. Holland Taylor explain that NU has pioneered “a global strategy to reconcile Islamic teachings with the reality of the modern world, whose context and conditions differ significantly from those in which classical Islamic law emerged.”
NU’s reconciliation of Islam and modernity requires, Staquf and Taylor write, “a long-term, systematic and institutional effort to recontextualize (i.e., reform) obsolete and problematic tenets of Islamic orthodoxy that lend themselves to religious hatred, supremacy and violence.” NU’s recontextualizing and reform proceed from within and reflect fidelity to Islam. Using the same principles of Islamic jurisprudence as medieval Muslim legal scholars but to meet different moral and political challenges, NU endeavors to “bring Islamic teachings into alignment with the modern world of democracy and human rights” through “independent reasoning to formulate Islamic law.”
In the summer of 2020, on NU’s behalf, my old friend Dr. Timothy Shah wrote to me in my capacity as then-director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and executive secretary of the Commission on Unalienable Rights to convey the organization’s admiration for the commission’s recently published report. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established the commission in the summer of 2019 and appointed Professor Glendon to chair it.
Amid controversy over the status and reach of human rights, Pompeo asked the commission to reground America’s commitment to the rights inherent in human beings – unalienable rights in 18th-century American parlance, human rights in contemporary usage – in the nation’s founding principles, constitutional traditions, and the obligations that the United States embraced in 1948 in voting in the UN General Assembly to approve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Having long discerned within Islamic faith and Indonesian traditions moral, philosophical, and religious resources vindicating basic rights and fundamental freedoms, NU recognized a kindred spirit in the report’s recounting of America’s distinctive rights tradition and exploration of human rights as an essential part of a responsible foreign policy.
AKN-NU’s Foundational Course equips NU members, consistent with the organization’s 1984 declaration, to more effectively promote fraternity – among Muslims, Indonesians, and all peoples and nations. The curriculum features over 100 classes on an extensive array of topics: NU history; Islamic history, art, and culture; the Western political tradition; economic principles starting with Adam Smith; statecraft and world affairs; science, technology, and AI; Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism; and India, sub-Saharan Africa, and China.
My seminars provided an overview of Western political thought and introduced a few of the tradition’s great books, core ideas, and abiding tensions.
The first seminar focused on the ancients. We began with the famous quarrel between the ancients, who argue that politics’ highest aim is cultivating the virtues, and the moderns, who contend that politics’ primary purpose is securing freedom. In Plato’s “Apology” and “Republic” we examined the connection between justice in the soul and justice in the city, and in Aristotle’s “Ethics” and “Politics” we studied the moral and intellectual virtues, citizenship, and the variety of regimes and the factors that preserve and destroy them. We considered Muslim, Jewish, and Christian efforts in the Middle Ages to reconcile faith and reason. Everywhere we turned we found evidence supporting Plato’s teaching that the traditionally male art of statesmanship relies on the traditionally female art of weaving – that is, blending competing principles, claims, and interests.
The second seminar concentrated on the modern tradition of freedom. We scrutinized John Locke’s 17th-century account of just government’s roots in the natural freedom and equality of all persons and his defense of toleration on both religious and philosophical grounds.
The third seminar dealt with the American political tradition. Discussion revolved around selections from “The Federalist,” a collection of 85 newspaper articles published in 1787 and 1788 in favor of ratification that still stand as the single best commentary on the U.S. Constitution.
The fourth seminar delved into freedom’s and democracy’s disadvantages and how to counter them consistent with freedom and democracy. We worked through Edmund Burke’s and Alexis de Tocqueville’s accounts of the beliefs, practices, and associations that foster freedom, John Stuart Mill’s defense of liberty of thought and discussion, and Friedrich Hayek’s 20th-century restatement of classical liberalism. The case for rights-protecting democracy as the regime most appropriate in the modern world to human dignity and flourishing would have been grievously incomplete had we not also reviewed Karl Marx’s radical and massively influential critique of liberal democracy and capitalism. Finally, we reconstructed the Marxist roots of progressive wokeism and probed its threats to free and democratic self-government.
Our studies provoked lively exchanges about the striking similarities – amid dramatic differences – between the United States and Indonesia. To achieve independence, both prevailed over Western colonial powers: Americans expelled the British after almost 200 years, and Indonesians drove out the Dutch after almost 350 years. As Christians founded the United States but not as a Christian republic, Muslims founded Indonesia but not as an Islamic republic. And as Christians in America offered reasons stemming from Christianity for separating religion and state, Muslims in Indonesia advanced reasons stemming from Islam for separating religion and state.
In its first months, Nahdlatul Ulama’s Foundational Course has demonstrated that the seminal contributions of Western political thought provide a common ground for exploring issues of vital importance to rights-protecting democracies around the world.
American educators and diplomats would profit from taking this inspiring lesson to heart.
If shared study of the Western tradition can improve mutual understanding across oceans and civilizations, study of the Western tradition in America can contribute to healing the breach between right and left at the nation’s troubled colleges and universities. And it can enhance American diplomats’ grasp of their nation’s strengths and weaknesses as well as those of America’s friends and foes.
