Meaningful discourse on religion in SE Asia suppressed

Ati Nurbaiti, The Jakarta Post, Sanur, Bali

A lack of a freedom of expression and a crisis of leadership among religious leaders and institutions is suppressing a discourse on religion in Southeast Asia and hampering efforts of social and political change, a discussion has concluded.

Speakers said that particularly after Sept. 11, discourse had been highly politicized and limited to the labeling of radicals and progressive liberals, instead of discussing how religion, particularly Islam, could serve humanity.

Speakers and participants at an overcrowded panel discussion on religion and politics in Southeast Asia here on Saturday, the second day of the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) People's Assembly, cited conditions in their countries regarding Muslims and the Catholic Church.

"It was partly ostensibly democratic, but authoritarian governments in Southeast Asia contributed to radical conservatism, mainly among Muslims," said speaker Farish A. Noor, who studies Islamic movements in the region.

"Conservatives became vocal while liberal progressive Muslims," he said, "were caught in a battle of Muslim souls."

One result was a dependency on the state to which Muslims fled for protection against hard-liners -- who, because they were formerly hunted by the government, were forced to form their own networks, independent of the government, Noor said.

Participants, including former foreign minister Ali Alatas, said there was a lack of courage in leadership among religious leaders to speak up.

The liberal Muslims, Noor said, had retreated and lost sight of the challenge of how Islam should be used as a powerful tool for a new form of politics, just as Islam was used by nationalists in the region to fight colonial rule.

This new form referred to the essence of universal values of human rights and democracy in Islam, he said, or how Islam could serve humanity.

Leaders instead were using Islam for their political existence, just like Ali Bhutto in the late 1970s in Pakistan when he felt he might lose the elections, Noor said.

However, excluding hard-liners from discourse would make them even more isolated, he said.

"It is good that the Malaysian All Islamic Party (PAS) is engaging in a discourse on democracy, while these kinds of parties are also expected to practice what they preach," he said, adding that despite the practice of free speech, lynch mobs were assigned in the name of religion to hate campaigns against those considered to have dissenting views.

In Indonesia, the editor of Aksara magazine, Hamid Basyaib, said it was more important to retain the original article on religion in the Constitution, which stresses that the state guarantees the freedom to practice religion among its believers, rather than arguing to maintain a unitary republic, as stressed by the leaders of the country's largest Muslim organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah.

Although calls to adopt sharia in the Constitution failed in the last amendment, those making the calls have said they will continue to try, blaming all the country's problems on the absence of formally adopting Islamic law.

Hamid also called on a continued discourse on theology amid the rise of groups "who think that complex contemporary problems can all be solved" by ancient scriptures, which have yet to be studied and interpreted further into today's context.

Speaker Zulkifli Baharudin from Singapore said what was urgent was the recognition and acceptance of Muslims because of their diversity.

"Since Sept. 11, Singaporeans can only see the problem of Muslims and problematic Muslims and they fail to understand the expression of spirituality among its Muslim population," he said.

This has led to politicians not understanding the concerns that minority Muslims in Singapore have for fellow believers in the Palestine and Bosnia, he said.

Public awareness of Muslims' expression of spirituality only captured the public's attention and concern after Sept. 11, while teenagers going on the haj and religiosity among the affluent had occurred long before Sept. 11, he said.

"There is a need to provide more public space for Muslims rather than the mere labeling of them," he said.

Zulkifli and other participants also called for changes in government policies regarding freedom of expression. Governments in Southeast Asia focusing on stability, he said, would surely see the value in this. But not recognizing this need will be felt in the long run, he said.

From the Philippines, Father Roberto Reyes cited the crisis of leadership in the Catholic Church.

Apart from the condition of the aging and influential Cardinal Sin, he said the church had made the mistake of playing a crucial role during the first show of the people's power in 1986, then retreating and even resuming close ties with the country's politically and economically powerful elite, rather than staying consistent with its pledge to speak for the poor.