Casting aspersions has been a fondness of Abdurrahman Wahid's for quite some time, long before he became president of Indonesia. Shortly after he was elected head of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) Muslim organization, for instance, he compared the diversity of those who were NU members to a group of mosque-goers. "The majority of them actually intend to perform deeds of worship, but there are also those who go to steal sandals."

That observation, which