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Much ado has been made about the flowering of democracy in Indonesia and how it serves as an example for other countries in the Islamic world. If Indonesia, which has around two-thirds as many Muslims as the entire Middle East and North Africa combined, can transform itself into a democracy, doesn’t that prove the rest of the Islamic world could possibly achieve the same?

In some ways, I suppose so.

One reason that countries with Muslim-majority populations might eventually succumb to liberal politics is that Muslims are not very much different from anybody else.

For those who think that most Muslims are narrow-minded religious fanatics, they should turn off Fox News and read the book “Who Speaks for Islam? What A Billion Muslims Really Think.”

“Who Speaks for Islam?” has never been a New York Times best seller. Its strength is that facts — not polemics or arcane theories — drive the conclusions. Based on an in-depth 2007 Gallup survey conducted throughout the Muslim world, it is nothing less than an eye-opener.

As I flipped through the survey and I read what Muslims around the world really think and want, I discovered that they sound just like Indonesians.

For example, Gallup found that the majority of Muslims don’t condone terrorist attacks.

When asked what they want most in life, the majority of Muslims said that they want better jobs and security, not conflict and violence.

The Muslim majority told Gallup’s pollsters that although they want religion in their lives, they don’t want clerics toying with their states’ constitutions — which, if you read between the lines, should make it pretty clear that the majority doesn’t like religious figures involved in their nations’ politics.

Most Westerners in general and Americans in particular, I am sure, would be surprised to read that Muslims admire the West for its democracy and technology. On the other hand, Muslims believe that the West suffers from moral decay and a breakdown in traditional values; this is not very different, however, from what the majority of Americans think about their own society when they are asked the same question.

American and European feminists alike would be heartened to learn that when Muslim women are asked what they want in life, almost all of them say they want equal rights.

Western media executives would also be delighted to read that men sitting in coffee shops in Tehran and elsewhere in the Middle East don’t like state censorship and propaganda, and that they would love to have a free press.

In a word, the majority of Muslims in the world, as in Indonesia, are outward-looking and considerably more liberal in their political views than most Westerners are led to believe.

If an even more hard-hittting survey of Muslims were possible, I am sure that this moderate majority would tell us that they are fed up with the hypocrisy of their self-appointed religious and political leaders.

Unfortunately, the moderate majority is, for the most part, powerless. They might occasionally rear their heads in anger and protest in the streets, but for those who dare, there is a risk that the Islamic gulag awaits them. Tehran is testimony to this ugly fact of life for the moderates. Hence they prefer, for the most part, to remain silent.

The voices we do hear coming from the Muslim world — the vocal minority that dominates the international media — are the politicians and the radical fundamentalists. Joining hands and enjoying power, these are the Muslims standing in the way of democracy.

We would be extraordinarily naive to believe that politicians in the Muslim world might some day willingly follow Indonesia’s lead and listen to their people’s aspirations for a more open society. Awash in cash and fabulously rich, there’s little chance that the “petromonarchs” of the Middle East would want to allow direct elections or a free press. Ballot boxes could spell the end of their Swiss bank accounts and villas on the French Riviera.

Fundamentalists are equally, if not more stridently, opposed to the types of change that the moderate majority seeks. Conservative imams and mullahs along with their unruly gangs of hard-core followers think of democracy as a four-letter word. And nothing will appease them.

I have no doubt that Indonesia is a great example for how Islam and democracy can be combined. As anywhere else in the Muslim world, most Indonesians pray to Allah five times a day and they aspire to make the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Like most Muslims, they would rather look toward Obama than Osama for inspiration. Indonesians also enjoy their democratic rights, which is something many other Muslims in the world hope for. Alas, the harsh political realities facing Muslims in other places, such as the Middle East and North Africa, have made democracy seem like a distant, if not impossible, dream.

James Van Zorge is a manager of Van Zorge, Heffernan & Associates, a business consultancy based in Jakarta. He can be reached at jamesvanzorge@yahoo.com.