If you walk around one of Jakarta's many shopping malls, you will see women wearing the hijab along with tight jeans and sexy shoes. You will also see women in short dresses, often walking with and talking and laughing with the hijab-wearers. If you smile at any of them, they will usually smile back. Some might also want to take a selfie with you.
Nearly all of them, regardless of how they are dressed, are Muslims.
When I read about people disparaging Muslims because of the vicious minority who claim to follow their faith while chopping people's heads off, raping women who don't follow their particular brand of Islam, slaughtering Parisians indiscriminately or flying airplanes into buildings, I think about those people in the Jakarta malls. Ordinary people, going about their lives, supporting their families, enjoying a shared laugh with their friends.
I think about the Bedouin guide I and my co-workers had during a survey job in Saudi Arabia, chatting about local cuisine and saying he'd like to go to Israel some day, because he thought people there are "just like us", regardless of what his government says. I think about the guy I bumped into in the middle of the Arabian desert who shared his sack of camel's milk with me, then went his way without a word.
I think about the transvestite motorbike-taxi guy in Yogyakarta who remained polite when I told him gently I wasn't interested in him in "that way".
I think about the lovely, intelligent Muslim girlfriend of my wife's oldest nephew, a nominal Buddhist.
I know it's silly to pretend that Islamic extremists "have nothing to do with Islam". I know they can easily justify their atrocities with the Koran. Like the other two major monotheistic religions, Islam espouses violence. I don't know how the many gentle, bright, educated Muslims I've met reconcile their own behaviour with the nastiness written in their holy book, but they do. Just like none of the Christians I've met would ever dream of murdering an abortion doctor, and most would never discriminate against a Jew or an immigrant, and many vote social-democratic.
Would the world be better off without religion? I don't know; probably. But it's a pointless argument, because it's never going to happen.
All we can do – we, the great majority of human beings who only want to live in peace, do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, nurture and be nurtured by our families, joke and play with our friends, learn about the wonders of the universe – is get along, cope as best we can on a planet weighed down by 7 billion people.
Leave the intolerance and hatred to the extremists.
