'Crossing over' lifts religious barriers

'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.