Indonesian Islam at a crossroads

"A religion is trying to survive and move forward, amidst political struggles apparently between hard-line Islam and the state. But political realities are more complex with opportunist secular politicians playing games with Islam."
___________

By Terry Lacey

(September 28, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) The roads of Java have been jam-packed with millions of Muslims who have just gone on the “mudik”, the Indonesian traditional Idul Fitri journey to their home towns. As they drive back by car and motorbike to the cities, which road is Indonesian Islam going to take next ?

Noordin M. Top the Malaysian Muslim terrorist leader is dead after a shoot-out with the Indonesian anti-terrorist police. The attempt by an outgoing defeated parliament to introduce the pre-Islamic punishment of stoning to death for adulterers in Aceh is grinding to a halt as provincial and central government put rocks in its path. But local government sharia by-laws introduced by populist politicians are proliferating.

A religion is trying to survive and move forward, amidst political struggles apparently between hard-line Islam and the state. But political realities are more complex with opportunist secular politicians playing games with Islam.

Two seminal articles in The Jakarta Post summed up historical realism about Indonesian Islam, the first contrasting the Christian Reformation in Europe with the prospects for the Muslim Reformation and the second looking more hopefully to the victory of Muslim feminism and an Islam of choices rather than tramlines.

Julia Suryakusuma, who usually writes about more swinging things, spent three days in Ramadhan looking up the Indonesian Muslim Yellow Pages or the Kitab Kuning classic texts for teaching in pesantren (Islam boarding schools) which ulemas brought back from Mecca and were used here since the mid-19th century.

She attended a three-day course with a progressive Muslim women`s NGO learning about fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), aqidah (faith), akhlak (character building), tasawuf (spiritualism), hadiths (words and deeds of the Prophet) and tafsir (interpretations).

She also learned about mazhab (schools of thought) and despite the oppressive Sura 4 verse 34 (which allows a husband to beat his wife) that the tradition of ijtihad might lead to the critical use of reason in interpreting the Koran in a more progressive way. (Jakarta Post 23.09.09).

So Islam means choices for followers and their families for the future and not necessarily tramlines leading to terrorism and intolerance.

Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, or MDS for short, argues the Abrahamic faiths all contain the seeds of hatred as well as goodness, in their denunciation of heresies to sanctify their own righteousness. (Jakarta Post 25.09.09).

This tendency to the dark side explains why the late Mohammed Roem, the first Indonesian Foreign Minister, described Indonesia´s large Muslim population as a source of both pride and concern.

And why the Indonesian patriot and founding father Mohammed Hatta refused the requests to insert sharia law into the Indonesian constitution and instead substituted simply “a belief in one God” instead of agreeing to impose Islamic sharia law on a multi-cultural society.

These contradictions echo why many Arab and Muslim states see the distortion or politicization of Islam as their greatest threat, rather than a united and modernized Muslim community as one of their greatest assets.

As long as the Muslim reformation and modernization process remains substantially inconclusive and incomplete these two sides of the coin will remain and the image of Islam presented to the non-Muslim world will remain ambiguous and threatening.

Similarly Christian fundamentalism remains a political problem which has been used to justify hard-line policies in the Middle East, as does religious-based Jewish ultra-nationalism among settlers and political extremists in Israel, while the Northern Ireland conflict partly reflected religious tribalism going back three hundred years to the political fault-lines of the reformation.

MDS sees the Christian reformation, and the struggle of modernizers to get the Church to see reason instead of imposing dogma as a useful historical lesson for Muslims. Don`t ignore history and make the same mistakes!

He concludes Islam remains “a fertile breeding ground for extremism” as long as Islam`s silent majority allows it to be hijacked by noisy advocates who use Islamic texts to justify violence and intolerance.

Islam is six centuries younger than Christianity so catching up with political modernity could take five centuries.

But economists say the Indonesian economy will overtake South Korea, Japan, the UK and Germany by about 2045.

This cannot happen without a Muslim reformation, to leave behind the legacy of feudalism, backwardness and under-development. So the pace will quicken. But rapid Muslim modernization must mean some problems, as well as rapid progress.

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.

-Sri Lanka Guardian