1. ULIL: 1 LINE, 28 COUNTS

1. ULIL: 1 LINE, 28 COUNTS

Ulil goes against fundamentalism

Tiny but vocal, Indonesia's Muslim fundamentalists are a thorn to the country's vast majority of Muslim moderates. But recently, they too complain about an annoying sting. It goes by the name Ulil Abshar-Abdalla.

The 36-year old activist from the country's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, has broken the majority silence over the growing influence of fundamentalism here since Soeharto fell in 1998.

Now he confronts them where ever they are found: the Internet, the radio, newspapers, television, and face to face at campuses.

"I prefer calling them revivalists," Ulil said in an interview at the Freedom Institute's office.

Revivalists, because they try to bring back Islam exactly as it was practiced over 1,400 years ago. Ulil thinks this copy-and- paste approach is unrealistic.

But just like the revivalists, he too thinks that Muslims need to change. Ulil urges Muslim however to look at all options in Islam and in doing so leave no stone unturned. that there are options out there when deciding how to change, so that even if the revivalists turn out to be right they are not, until people have seen the options.

The revivalists tend to stiffle the options and limit the scope of debate for a solution. "If there is no counter (against the revivalist) it could become a risk to free thinking," he said.

Ulil helped founded the Islamic Liberal Network (JIL), a loose group of intellectual Muslims that aims to stimulate debates on Islamic topics.

JIL was founded in 2001 and made its debute over the Internet as a mailing list. Ulil said JIL had around 500 members, mainly students. Others were academicians, employees, even housewives.

The mailing list's first topic, he said, was whether a secular state was acceptable under Islam. "Their answers tend to be yes, and that a secular state was in line with Islamic vision."

JIL became a website then also a radio talkshow, which Ulil still hosts at radio station 68H. The program is being aired at 50 stations throughout Indonesia.

And just as new found democracy gave fundamentalists the chance to rise and expand, it also allowed JIL's message to spread fast.

Soon JIL turned its attention toward campuses, suspecting that the academia had become centers of the spread of Islamic radicals.

"So we go into campuses to provide different views on Islam," he said, adding that "we confront every effort to limit the field of discussion."

JIL swayed over campuses like a fresh breeze. "For a long time students had felt there was a domination of a religous vision that was one side....an Islamic vision that was fundamentalist."

Naturally, campuses became the support bases for many hardline organizations, or political parties. Among them the Justice Party, which Ulil said he admired but not so their fundamentalist religous vision. "Their vision is in my view not correct, it must be countered."

It was just a matter of time before JIL's blunt messages sparked a reaction from the fundamentalists.

August last year, a private television station scrapped JIL's commercial, which featured the phrase "colorful Islam", after the Muslim group Majelis Mujahiddin called the ad an insult to Islam.

Ulil demonstrated what it meant to be liberal with his article appearing in the country's a largest daily Kompas last November.

He questioned various obligations under the Islamic law, or sharia, argueing some might not be applicable anymore as time had

2. JORDAN, 1 LINE, 35 COUNTS

Swiss conductor loves tormented composers

Swiss conductor Armin Jordan has a passion for the works of Dmitry Shostakovich, both victim and icon of the official musical world of the old Soviet Union.

The shock-haired, 70-year-old Jordan says Shostakovich was "for me the greatest composer of the 20th century".

Shostakovich, whose death in 1975 was marked by effusive Kremlin grief after a career in which he at least once came close to disappearing into a labour camp, was for many admirers the epitome of an artist wracked by inner torment.

For Jordan, the Russian's musical fascination lies in the coexistence of soaring lyricism with strong tones of irony and sarcasm in his greatest works for orchestra, ballet and opera.

Jordan has recently brought to the stage of the Geneva Opera two long-neglected pieces by another tormented composer, Austrian Alexander Zemlinsky to whom, he says, he was led by his passion for Shostakovich.

A gifted pianist who has conducted the world's greatest orchestras in his long career, Jordan is clearly fascinated by the private passions of the legendary figures of music.

He says he adores the still controversial Richard Wagner -- whose Ring Cycle was performed in Geneva under his baton over the past three years -- "because as a person he had both qualities and defects, contradictions, because he was a human being, neither white nor black."

Zemlinsky, the Lucerne-born Jordan suggests, had all of these things, and perhaps more.

A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf, written by the Austrian Jewish composer between 1915 and 1921 and included in the 2002- 2003 Geneva Opera season, certainly back this view.

Both are based on little-known works by another tortured personality, Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde, and were all but forgotten long before Zemlinsky died in the United States in 1942, a broken exile from Nazi-occupied Europe.

Occasionally resurrected since the early 1980s, Jordan has brought the two one-act pieces to Geneva's Grand Theatre to critical acclaim, boosted by a powerful performance from U.S. tenor David Kuebler as the deluded dwarf.

But the theatre has set them in the social context of their time with an accompanying exhibition on Zemlinsky, born in Vienna in 1871 and a key figure of the transition period as musical romanticism gave way to new forms.

Expressionism, Jordan explains in the Geneva Opera monthly La Grange, aimed to bring art -- painting and writing as well as music -- closer to real life by setting ugliness alongside beauty, "mixing the pure and the impure". It was through this means, says the conductor and musical director at the city's Grand Theatre, that Jewish composers like Zemlinsky, his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, and even later Kurt Weil, made their mark in history.

The clash of opposites, Jordan believes, was at the core of all Zemlinsky's works -- symphonies, operas, chamber and choral compositions -- after 1900, the fateful year when he met and lost the great love of his life.

Already renowned as a teacher as well as a composer whose talent had won the admiration of 19th century giant Johannes Brahms, he had, in Jordan's words, "the misfortune to fall in love with his pupil, Alma Schindler".

Schindler, a 20-year-old Viennese beauty as photos at the exhibition confirm, described him in her diary after their first meeting as "one of the most comical men imaginable, a caricature, chinless, short and with bulbous eyes".

These words came to haunt Zemlinsky when she abandoned him after a few months to live with and then marry his fellow composer Gustav Mahler, another lion of Vienna's early 20th century cultural elite who was 20 years older than her.

And although he married in 1906, his obsession with Alma grew after Mahler's death in 1911 as he watched her move through a series of affairs.

For Jordan, the choice of themes for the operas reflected two aspects of Zemlinsky's mental turmoil -- depression at being rejected, as he saw it, because of his unprepossessing physique, and thoughts about how he could have won her back.

In the first, based on a Wilde story, an ugly dwarf brought up in ignorance of his appearance and convinced he is a handsome and elegant young man, is given to a Spanish princess as a birthday present, and immediately falls in love with her.

The thoughtless girl destroys his illusions by ensuring that he sees himself for the first time in a mirror, and with a cry of horror he dies of a broken heart.

In A Florentine Tragedy, discovered in Wilde's papers after his 1900 death in exile in France following a homosexual scandal that rocked London society, an ugly merchant returns home to find his wife with a young and noble lover.

After long verbal skirmishing, marked by musical flights of both beauty and dissonance, the deceived husband -- sung in Geneva by Ukrainian tenor Viktor Lutsiuk -- kills the lover. In a dramatic finale, the wife -- German-American mezzo-soprano Fredrika Billembourg -- turns to him in admiration, declaring: "I never knew you were so strong?"

"And I never knew you were so beautiful," he responds.

Alma, present at the opera's Vienna premiere in 1917, assumed that Zemlinsky was making reference to her liaison with architect Walter Gropius, and wrote to him to protest.

"This is a true tragedy because it takes the sacrifice of a human life to save two others," Zemlinsky replied. "How could you of all people fail to understand?"

3. TUSCAN: 1 LINE, 20 COUNTS

Toscan du Plantier dies at 61

PARIS: French film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier, a tireless ambassador for French movie-making, died of a heart attack in Berlin on Monday night at the age of 61, French officials said on Tuesday.

In a career that spanned almost 30 years, Toscan du Plantier helped bankroll French classics like Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro and Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh.

"His death is a tragic loss," said French film star Alain Delon as the news reached Paris from Berlin, where Toscan du Plantier had been representing his country at the 53rd Berlinale film festival.

Toscan du Plantier's main cause was promoting French cinema outside France, and since 1998 he had headed Unifrance, a group which helps French films reach a wider world audience.

"French cinema has lost its best ambassador," said Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre, president of the Chamber of French Film Producers and Exporters.

"His extraordinary personality, his irresistible humour and his panache make him a legendary character in the history of French cinema."

Toscan du Plantier presided over the film academy which hands out the Cesares, the French equivalent of the Oscars. The next annual ceremony is planned for Feb. 22, with Roman Polanski's The Pianist among the contenders for the award.

Born on April 7, 1941 in Chambery in the Savoie region of France, Toscan du Plantier started his career in the media before moving to the French film house Gaumont.