Indonesia is the world's biggest Muslim country: of its 210m people, about 170m believe with varying degrees of conviction the ideas that came into Muhammad's mind in the Arabian desert 1,400-odd years ago. That is why a more confident Indonesia can be a powerful shaping force in the international politics of Islam. It is also why, if they could work together, Indonesia's Muslims might be a prime shaper of their own country's future. Because Islam drifted into South-East Asia over the centuries in many different ways, it is a much more variegated religion here than it is in the western part of the Muslim world. That has produced, among other things, an encouraging amount of tolerance. Indonesia's constitution protects the religious beliefs of non-Muslims. The two biggest political parties—Golkar, the ruling party of Suharto's time, and Miss Megawati's Democratic Party of Struggle—both proclaim their support for that principle. Before he was president, Mr Wahid spent nearly two decades as leader of the 3om-strong Nah-dlatul Ulama, the world's biggest Muslim organisa- tion, arguing for the separation of mosque and state and for dialogue between different faiths. Alwi Shi-hab, his foreign minister, says the message the new Indonesia brings to the world is: This is Islam.
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机译：印度尼西亚是世界上最大的穆斯林国家：在其2.1亿人口中，约有1.7亿坚信穆罕默德在1400多年前的阿拉伯沙漠中想到的各种想法。因此，更加自信的印度尼西亚可以成为伊斯兰国际政治中的强大塑造力量。这也是为什么如果他们可以一起工作，印度尼西亚的穆斯林可能成为其本国未来的主要塑造者。由于几个世纪以来伊斯兰教以多种不同方式漂流到东南亚，因此这里的宗教比穆斯林世界的西部更加多样化。除其他外，这产生了令人鼓舞的容忍度。印度尼西亚的宪法保护了非穆斯林的宗教信仰。苏哈托时代的执政党加尔卡（Golkar）和梅加瓦蒂小姐的抗争民主党（Democratic Party of Struggle）这两个最大的政党都宣布支持该原则。瓦希德先生（Wahid）担任总统之前，曾担任世界上最大的穆斯林组织3om强势的纳赫达拉（Nah-dlatul Ulama）领导人近二十年，他主张将清真寺与国家分开，并进行不同信仰之间的对话。他的外交部长阿尔维·希哈布（Alwi Shi-hab）表示，新印尼给世界带来的信息是：这就是伊斯兰教。
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