Islam, yes, Islamic party, no: A relevant call

Islam, yes, Islamic party, no: A relevant call

Rozi Ali, New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur

Cak Nur, as he is popularly called, is a respected thinker.
Observers of the Islamic revivalism in this region would have
remembered Cak Nur for his slogan in the early 1970s, one which
the likes of Pas would find blasphemous, "Islam, Yes. Islamic
Party, No".

It would be good for Barisan Nasional-led Malaysia and Umno's
Islam if Indonesia boasts of a modernist ulama as president -- an
ulama who, quite correctly, rejects the idea of an Islamic state
as a "myth". Since the 1960s, Cak Nur had already seen the
dangers of polarization in the Muslim community where the
traditionalist and pro-Islamic state modernists are pitted
against the so-called secular modernists.

A Javanese raised in the traditionalist stronghold of Jombang
in East Java and anak didik of the great Islamic thinker,
University Chicago's Fazlur Rahman, Cak Nur's writings represents
a new genre of Islamic scholarship that puts together Quranic
tafsir (commentary) with contemporary political analysis and
sophisticated social theory.

He does not invoke jurisprudential cadences of Islamic
traditions or talk about the abstract idealism of Islamic
modernism. I remember him as a thinker who initially troubled me
with his provocative scholarship on the legitimacy and role of
secularization in Islam -- now increasingly accepted and enlarged
by intellectuals like Abdullahi An-Naim, Ja'far Sheikh Idris and
Zaid Shakir.

Like Indonesia's Islamic modernists such as Djohan Effendi and
Fachry Ali, Cak Nur chose the middle road between secular
liberalism and the Kaum Tua's ideologised Islam. As early as the
1970s, Cak Nur criticized fellow ulema for misunderstanding the
essence of Islam by turning the profane into the sacrilegious.

Among the profane are the notions of an Islamic state and
Islamic political parties. In a nutshell, Cak Nur challenged the
orthodox views of the traditionalists.

Like Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Cak Nur believes in the
fundamentals of Islam but vehemently rejects the man-made
imperatives (and the attendant deviations that accrue from their
blind acceptance) such as the Islamic state. Cak Nur bristles
against those Muslims who instead of focusing on intellectual and
social renewal, waste their time on ideological bickering.
Central to Cak Nur's religious thought is the need for Muslims to
secularize the political while preserving the truly sacred in
Islam.

As he wrote in Islam, Kemodernan dan Keindonesiaan: "Islam
itself, if examined truthfully, was begun with a process of
secularization. Indeed, the principle of tauhid represents the
starting point for a much larger secularization. This commitment
to tauhid requires a never-ending effort to distinguish the
divine from the human in Islamic traditions."

In distinguishing the divine from the human in Islamic
traditions, tauhid implies a commitment to reason, knowledge and
science. This can be understood as acts of devotion to a creator
whose majesty is immanent in the natural laws of the world. Going
by the thought of Cak Nur, modernity resides in a process -- a
process of discovery in which truths are relative, leading to the
discovery of the Absolute Truth, Allah. Cak Nur's critics argue
that since Islam is a total way of life, accepting secularization
amounts to a renunciation of Islam's holism. He is accused of
being overly influenced by Western theologians such as Harvey
Cox, who wrote The Secular City.

More commonly, he is accused of ignoring the Sunnah or
Prophet's traditions. A Malaysian critic -- a certain professor
whom I had the privilege of studying under for two wholesome
years -- wrote, "to deny this precedent is to rid Islam of its
sociological wholeness, transforming it into a mere spiritual
personalist ethical system akin to what Christianity has become
in the West".

I disagree. I am inclined to believe that what Cak Nur meant
is that some areas in the Sunnah responded to the immediate
issues and concerns that had emerged during specific historical
context. Thus, the sieving of the divine from the human or the
use of reason is integral in the process of interpreting the
traditions.

Cak Nur's critics are trapped in the straitjacket of
dogmatism. Imprisoned in their worldview of 18th century West
Europe, they understand secularism as the separation of church
from state. The Muslim modernists of Cak Nur's ilk view
secularism as "a principle of public policy for organizing the
relationship between religion and the state in a specific
context" and that it must be understood in a con-textual sense of
each particular society.

Cak Nur warns that the subordination of Islam to party
politics would cause the stagnation of modernism among the ummah.
This alarm is already ringing in Malaysia.