Paul Berman

A new book about Indonesia called My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist, by Sadanand Dhume arrived unrequested in the mail. I felt compelled to take a glance. Next thing I knew, I had reached the last page. Dhume is the son of Indian diplomat. He lived in Indonesia as a child, studied journalism in the United States, and returned to Indonesia to report on its Islamist movement. And he struck up a peculiar friendship with a local admirer of Osama bin Laden, which makes for quite a tale. At the end of the book, Dhume returns to Indonesia for one last visit, and he discovers his old friend, lately morphed into a successful author of paranoid tracts about Zionist and Masonic conspiracies in Indonesia, addressing an admiring crowd at a Jakarta book fair—an appalling scene of intellectual rot, vividly presented by a worried Sadanand Dhume.