A bookish Husam Musa had from his days as a boy in Salor, on the outskirts of Kota Baru, argued with his friends after religious classes on questions concerning the physical world and the spiritual.

“My friends used to say that the world was flat and I would try to explain to them that it was not,” he recalled of his early battles with a mindset skeptical of worldly knowledge.

“They would laugh at me for trying to argue with them as if the worlds of faith and physical reason were opposed,” he elaborated.