Speech to the Committee on the Present Danger and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
By Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC, Wednesday, September 29, 2004

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As democracy grows in the Middle East, it becomes easier for peacemakers to succeed throughout the region.

There are many wonderful Muslims who will be our best allies in fighting this ideological battle. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to just tell you briefly about three that I’ve been privileged to know personally.

One of them is the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Aziz. I first met him about 10 years ago when he was a highly successful executive of Citicorp; I was a poor dean, out raising money for Johns Hopkins University. I was struck even then by his interest in substance. This was a man who has given up an incredible career in the American business world—some even talked about him as the next CEO of Citicorp—to go to his native country, to help that country achieve prosperity. He has been rewarded with one nearly successful assassination attempt. But that hasn’t stopped him, or intimidated him, or his brave president, Pervez Musharraf.

Another old friend of mine is Abdurrahman Wahid, the first democratically elected president of Indonesia. He is perhaps even more distinguished for his long leadership of an organization called Nahdlatul Ulama. With 40 million members, it’s the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia and, indeed, it’s larger than most countries in the world. Abdurrahman Wahid is a Muslim leader, but he is also a true apostle of tolerance.

One of his first acts as the new president of that predominantly Muslim country was to go to a Hindu temple in Bali to participate in Hindu prayers. While he was in Baghdad in the 1960s studying his own religion, he studied Shia texts with an ayatollah now known to the world as Sistani. And tragically, he studied with a distinguished Sunni cleric, al-Badri, who was taken away while Wahid was one of his students, tortured with hot irons and brutally murdered. Abdurrahman Wahid has never forgotten what Saddam did [to his teacher.]

The third one, I’m happy to say, is a former deputy prime minister who was recently released from six years of unjustified imprisonment in his own country, Malaysia. Anwar Ibrahim, again, is a devout Muslim, who started his career as a leader of the Muslim student movement in Malaysia.

I attended a conference in Kuala Lumpur some eight years ago where Anwar was asked about his views of the relationship between Islam and politics, and he replied, “I have no use for countries that call themselves Islamic and then deny basic rights to half their population,” clearly meaning their women.

These are three of the most wonderful human beings in public life anywhere. It’s men and women like them who will lead change throughout the Muslim world.

Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan knows that his life is on the line every day, yet he continues to push toward what will be historic presidential elections next week. A few months back he said that if they registered six million people to vote, he’d consider it a great success. Well, 10.5 million people have defied the Taliban philosophy and registered to vote. Forty percent of those registered are women.

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Anwar Ibrahim and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (2004)