'Crossing over' lifts religious barriers

Passing Over: Melintasi Batas Agama (Passing Over: Crossing Religious Borders); PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, in cooperation with Yayasan Wakaf Paramadina, Jakarta 1998; Edited by Komaruddin Hidayat & Ahmad Gaus AF; Foreword by Nurcholish Madjid; 464pp + xi

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Redefining the meaning of a religion is needed to prevent understanding a religion from deteriorating into a religious cult and fundamentalism, expressed as fanaticism in the way a religion is professed.

When a community professing a certain religion mentions religion, what is actually meant is religion at the syari'ah (normative) level.

Social scientists studying religious affairs define religion as an empiric historical and sociological fact. This is because different patterns of religious behavior stem from the different patterns of understanding of the holy books brought about by different holy books and prophets (Nabi in Arabic, meaning messenger).

It is this pattern of religious behavior that is sociologically called a religious institution, which is also the most concrete form of being religious.

It is often the case that the followers of a particular religion consider understanding their religious teaching as an absolute and superior truth.

This, in essence, is an act of giving prominence to the superiority of the value system regarding the textual authenticity of the holy book of a particular religion.

This implies that the value system of other religions is often considered illicita (false) and even heretical; their origins in divine decrees are denied by followers of other faiths.

To avoid such a claim of truth by different groups of religious followers, it is necessary to hold a constructive dialogs by performing a religious and intellectual pilgrimage ("crossing over") to broaden one's horizon of understanding and enable one to understand the universal message contained in a divine decree.

The religious and intellectual pilgrimage to cross over to another religion must be coupled with an attitude of returning to one's own religion.

Conversion

So, the spirit of passing over must make one cling firmly and be committed to the teaching of one's own religion, so that one is convinced of the correctness of one's own religion without claiming that other religions are heretical.

One should admit that other religions also provide a guarantee of salvation, a view which would not contradict with divine decrees passed down through His messenger.

This method is developed by experts in interreligious dialogs and is known as "intellectual conversion", namely, allowing oneself to be converted to another religion at the level of ideas, not at the essential level of faith. Peter Berger, a contemporary American sociologist, called it methodological atheism.

A religious and intellectual pilgrimage must be conducted to avoid religious exclusiveness. From this, one moves toward religious inclusiveness and finally arrives at religious pluralism, which must be understood and accepted as a certainty.

It is at this point that we may know why God has created pluralistic, not monolithic, mankind. It is also at this point that we may find out why God has created different syir'ah (ways) for each group of followers of a particular religion to arrive at kalimatun sawa' (a meeting point) with the same objective.

In this book, an anthology, all the writers, many of them famous names here, emphasize that one should not fall into the trap of "rigid" religious formalism as usually understood by religious followers, be they Moslems, Jewish, Christians and so forth.

Rigid understanding is born out of an inability to get the universal "message" of a divine decree. A case in point is the rigid understanding in the Christian tradition prior to the Holy See Council II, known as the doctrine of extra ecclesius nulla salus (beyond the Church there is no salvation).

Unfortunately, slogans in the same vein as the above doctrine are also found in other religions today.

Although the writers here view the subject matter from different angles, none indicate a conflict between religions.

Instead, the writings show optimism that in the future, different religions will exist side by side in a global village. Followers will not only be actively involved in acknowledging the existence of other religious but also help other religions to exist.

The book is divided into four sections, each of which consists of three detailed chapters.

The first part is about religious dialogs -- their context, problems of religious dialogs and the perspective of religious dialogs.

Nurcholish Madjid begins with al-Islam as a universalism. Al-Islam, generically meaning the teaching of "total submission to the will of God" as taught by all prophets, is, to borrow a term from the Koran, called al-hanafiyyat al-samhah, namely the spirit of seeking broad and open truth.

This is what is called professing a religion in the real sense of the word, namely, religion being accepted beside God, who teaches the spirit of Islam.

Therefore, Prophet Abraham is called someone who is hanif, one who sincerely and purely seeks truth, without any bond to organized religion, namely religion as an empiric historical ad sociological fact, which is, therefore, normative.

From a different viewpoint, using a new approach of missionary theology, Barbara Brown discusses dialogs as a contemporary issue, particularly as regards the relationship between Islam and Christianity.

Komaruddin Hidayat, another contributor, is keen on theology dialog, which is often forgotten, so that there is a paradigm shift, a topic that Abdurrahman Wahid discusses.

Abdurrahman dwells on the causes of a paradigm shift, which has brought about religious shallowness and brings up examples from across the country.

Still in the first section, dialogs have become problems as yet to solve among internal quarters called ukhuwah islamiyyah in many different versions.

Mohamad Sobary writes about this matter and uses the term "sociological imagination" instead of normative imagination. The section is closed with an essay by Wahyuni Nafis, who approaches dialogs from the historical angle.

Problems of religious freedom, world religions and interreligious relationships and religious figures are systematically arranged in good order in the book.

The different views of the contributing writers gradually take us to the essence of the matter; the necessity of religious and intellectual pilgrimage needed to cast away religious exclusiveness.

-- Chusnul Murtafiin

The writer is a student of religious comparative studies at the state-run college of Islamic studies, IAIN Sunan Kalijaga in Yogyakarta.