Column

Obama’s readiness and ability to use the momentum will deliver double outcomes: the positive image of the US will restore and the seeds of radicalism and terrorism will lose its justification. Quoting Irshad Manji, Obama have to prove that the US is rather a non-fulfilled expectation than the main villain in the Middle Eastern turmoil. 

If Islam were superior, why isn’t there any Muslim country which is progressive and leading in terms of education, technology, culture or economy? Many of Muslim countries were even black-listed because of their poor appreciation upon women and human fundamental rights, the fragility of government bureaucracy and corruption. In the academic level, none of the Islamic universities were listed as the international highest standard. Definitely, these complex social matters cannot be solved by yelling “Allahu akbar” and scapegoating the west.

I think that the tension between interfaith communities in Indonesia will reduce if the liberating verses were becoming priority within the substance of any missionary endeavors in Indonesia. Since the muballigh (Muslim preacher) and the evangelist will no longer focus on the accumulation of their respective religion’s membership, but on the collaboration to advocate and liberate the oppressed society. On the contrary, if the paradigm shift does not happen within the Islamic and Christian missionary endeavor, the turmoil which involves both religious disciples will be hard to end.

The whole furor and controversy over Ahmadiyah sect is just a parcel of a larger dynamic in the Indonesian politics. Over the last ten years after the unleashing of democratic movement in Indonesia, one development stands out to be worthy of our analysis, namely the radicalizing trend among Muslim society. This trends manifested in various form, including the vigorous campaign launched by Islamists to adopt and implement sharia or Islamic law. The entire campaign to dissolve Ahmadiyah, to me, cannot be analyzed separately from this larger trend.

Many observers argued that almost every militant Islamic movement today is part of, or at least influenced by, Wahhabism. Where trouble is found, Wahhabism may thrive. Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaida, which have been launching several terrors across the world for years, have officially adopted this ideology. Wahhabi extremism and terrorism continue to plague Indonesia, although its real supporters in this country are few in number.

The principle of unity asserted that human soul is sacred and therefore must be preserved by all mankind. Quran said: …that whosoever killed a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saved the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. (QS. 5:32)

Moreover, despite the fact that these elites hold such meetings after every outbreak of religious based violence, the violence keeps recurring. Despite this problem, there are a number of factors involved in interfaith dialog that make it an important arena for transforming destructive religious attitudes into loving ones.

However, the revival of Islam in South East Asia is not so much a reaction to western modernity as it is an integral part of a reformation process which indicates the viability of Islam in history. The revival of Islam in South East Asia constitutes an alternative Muslim discourse and is neither a threat to the west, nor a threat to Muslim society, since it is a revival based in Islamic tradition.

To have a different interpretation about certain doctrines in Islam cannot be seen as blasphemy. The orthodox mullahs or ulama who see themselves as the guardian of “truth” always think that their interpretation embodies the truth of Islam itself. They deliberately efface the line demarcating between “religion” and “the discourse on religion”, between din and al-khithab al-dini, as Egpytian thinker Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd once aptly put. 

In the midst of this miserable condition, determination to achieve Islamic independence in the intellectual, social, political and economical field has blown the wave of reformation in the Muslim world. However, the independence must not be understood as reclusion and rejection upon other civilizations. Islamic reformation is the result of incessant dialectic interaction between the Islamic normative doctrines and the surrounding contemporary symptoms.