ABSTRACT
But what I fi nd intriguing and paradoxical is that this general anti-American and anti-Western mindset is paired with an eagerness by the Islamic educational community to embrace modern and cutting-edge knowledge, scientifi c inventions, and technological breakthroughs that originate largely from-you guessed it, the United States and other Western countries. This interesting coupling of hate and love towards the United States and the West deserves our closer examination. In the previous chapter, we looked at how the majority of Islamic schools in Indonesia are open to non-Islamic studies and have designed their curricula and pedagogy to enhance the students’ rationality and autonomy But to reside in and express an educative tradition, these schools also need to subscribe to and promote the control beliefs of religious pluralism, strong rationality, and strong autonomy. Whereas religious pluralism ensures that we are open to and engaged with
other religious traditions, strong rationality and strong autonomy guide us to interpret and assess existing and new beliefs, and order our individual lives deliberately and refl ectively. To what extent have the Islamic schools in Indonesia achieved that?
