Islam as a 'cultural movement'

Islam as a 'cultural movement'

By Arief Fauzi-Marzuki

YOGYAKARTA (JP): The politics of Islam has resurfaced as a
lively intellectual exercise after the relatively peaceful June 7
general election.

Three important things may have prompted the emergence of this
matter. First, most political parties taking part in the general
election were based on Islam. Second, the winner in the recent
elections was not an Islam-based party, but the Indonesian
Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan), a nationalist
party, which is even considered by certain quarters to be anti-
Islam. Third, the nomination of PDI Perjuangan chairwoman
Megawati Soekarnoputri as a presidential candidate has led to a
new problem for Muslims: Can a woman be president?

These three issues have become a problem and an agenda that
the nation must solve and discuss in the post-election era.
Nevertheless, for some Muslims, these three concerns are not an
important problem because they believe that whoever wins the
elections must be given an opportunity to lead this nation.
Such proponents believe that the issue of the country's
leadership must be exercised on the basis of the principles of
justice and with the interest of the entire nation put first.

Unfortunately, a tendency to say that one is acting "on behalf
of Muslims" in the interest of certain groups has become
increasingly common. Such groups have fanned issues which may
provoke Muslims to anger and trigger inter-religious conflicts.
To all intents and purposes, this group has revived a "nostalgia"
on the part of Muslims for fundamentalist movements.

Therefore, this article seeks to find an answer to the
following question: Why have fundamentalist groups reappeared,
and how should Muslims change their movement into one which is
more cultural than political in nature?

Two factors are generally responsible for recent leanings
toward fundamentalism in Indonesia. First, we are now in a
transitional period from a traditionally religious life toward a
modern and open life, a change which will lead to the
disappearance of psychological and cultural roots. In this
transitional period, many religious followers are yet to respond
to these new times and accept openness when professing a
religion.

Second, a religion has become a venue for the pursuit of
political interests and used as a political banner against people
professing another religion. This is an example of how a religion
has been made so hollow that the interest of the religion is
placed in an exclusive and important territory. The result is, of
course, the presence in the community of religious exclusiveness.
An exclusive attitude has then led to an effort to politicize a
religion, namely turning it into a political commodity in order
to topple a political group.

Politicizing a religion often has its beginnings in a not
always correct theological perception. Believers of a particular
religion are yet to be able to see where the interests of another
religion lies and where the position of the believers of another
religion are. Adherents to each religion usually generalize about
matters and consider those who profess other beliefs to be their
foes. This belief that those who profess to another belief system
are enemies is so widespread that people are easily provoked into
generating animosity and perpetrating riots in the name of
religion.

To prevent the emergence of fundamentalism, which may
endanger national integration and safety, it is now time for
Indonesian Muslims to revive the idea of "Islam as a cultural
movement". Muslims should first try to discard the orientation of
practical politics as a reflection of new developments which must
be responded to in a more intelligent and realistic manner.
Muslims must be aware that the New Order administration -- which
was influenced by the myth of disobedience or opposition to Islam
-- had a tendency to accommodate only the nonpolitical
aspirations of Islam.

As a consequence, Muslims must be able to undertake what
Bassam Tibi (1994) calls "cultural revitalization". This move is
seen as an effort to reinforce the multifaceted Islamic dimension
of culture in the context of promoting Muslim potentials and
qualities and to elicit a sympathetic response from the
government.

This form of cultural revitalization would finally lead to the
emergence of "cultural Islam", the appearance of Islam as a
source of ethics and morality and a cultural foundation in the
life of the entire Indonesian nation.

Efforts to present cultural Islam are noticeable not only from
an enthusiasm to articulate Islamic injunctions in order that
they may contribute to the ongoing development process, but also
from efforts made in educational and socioeconomic areas to
promote Muslim qualities.

The presence of a cultural movement of Muslims does not mean
complete negation of the political movement. The political
movement of Muslims may be geared toward efforts to substantiate
the values of Islam.

In this respect, significant efforts must be made to ensure
that political thoughts and orientations will emphasize
substantial manifestation of Islamic values in political
activities. This manifestation must be seen not only in the
appearance but also in the format of political institutions of
cultural Muslims.

In this way, leaders of Islamic parties and Muslims will
realize that the intrinsic existence and articulation of Islamic
values in Indonesia's political climate play an important role.
Indeed, the values are adequate to develop Islamization with the
cultural face of modern Indonesian society.

This is the view held by the substantialists, who base their
understandings on the historical perspective that a cultural
process has given birth to competition among various cultural
forces.

In order that Islam may win this competition, the process of
Islamization must assume a cultural format, not a politicized
one. In this way, Islamic movements should manifest themselves as
cultural movements, rather than political ones.

The Muslim intellectual Nurcholish Madjid has introduced to us
the concept of cultural Islamic movements. His attachment to
substance is seen when he elaborates on what is called
parallelism, or the total integration of being Muslim and being
Indonesian.

He has said that in Indonesia, Islam is accepted and
comprehended within broader circles as one of the main sources
for fostering common values serving as the foundation of national
development in its entirety. In other words, as one of the
pillars and main source of values for being Indonesian Islam is
expected to appear with productive and constructive cultural
approaches.

It is, therefore, demanded of Indonesian Muslims to be better
able to present and introduce their religious teachings as the
harbingers of virtue to all (rahmatan lil'alamin in Arabic terms)
without resorting to communal exclusiveness.

It is certainly not Nurcholish's intention to nurture an idea
of a "national Islam". Rather, he tries to emphasize that
according to Islamic tenets it is true that it is always possible
to use local methods and solutions to solve local problems
without necessarily losing contact with the universal teachings
of Islam.

For Nurcholish, a substantial theological problem for Islam in
Indonesia is to make Indonesian Muslims no longer see a distance
between being Muslim and being Indonesian. As stated earlier,
this is only possible if Islam also appears with productive and
constructive cultural proposals. In regard to these three offers,
at least three requirements must first be met.

* These offers must not merely concern narrow-minded and
partisan matters, for example in a political or ideological
format alone. The offers must be concerned with cultural Islam
and encompass all its aspects. This is the main requirement.

* Islam accompanied with cultural proposals must be more
responsive to the ever-changing challenges of the era.

* Islam, appearing with cultural offers, must be the result of
dialog held over time. In the context of Indonesia, Islam must
certainly dialog with the range of views emerging in Indonesia.

In this regard, Nurcholish takes poverty as an example. If
Muslims see poverty as simply an individual problem, and not a
structural one, poverty will prevail because it will end up with
an economic structure that will only exploit the lower-class.
Conditions will worsen if such a simplistic framework also
includes various tendencies which do not help solve poverty-
related problems, such as a scriptural approach for a religious
life, a legal-formal attitude in social life and a completely
apologetic worldview.

In line with this notion, Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid has
proposed the need to: (1) link efforts to eliminate poverty with
an attempt to properly honor human dignity inasmuch as man is a
social creature with his/her own basic rights and basic needs;
(2) provide religious legitimacy in a social context as long as
it can promote the development of human dignity; and (3) be
willing to introduce basic changes in religious thoughts in order
to accommodate the necessity to promote human dignity and the
social context needed for this purpose.

In this way, Muslims will see poverty-related problems as not
only problems of a micro nature but also problems of a macro
nature; problems which must be solved through a social vision and
not by means of social or charitable services.

Regarding the question of Islam as a cultural movement, Gus
Dur has his own idea about "turning Islam indigenous". This idea
is based on a postulate that the establishment of the Indonesian
state was prompted more by a nationalist awareness rather than
the factor of Islamic ideology.

Gus Dur is of the opinion that the teaching of Islam, as a
component that forms and substantiates the social life of
Indonesian citizens, should be assigned a role complementary to
the roles played by other components. In this way, Islam would
not function as a counterforce, a catalyst which could cause the
entire national life to disintegrate.

The writer is a staff member of the Bentang Budaya Foundation
in Yogyakarta.