Power holders use Islam as political vehicle
Power holders use Islam as political vehicle
YOGYAKARTA (JP): Power holders tend to use Islam as a political vehicle, Moslem scholar Ahmad Syafii Maarif said yesterday.
History shows time and again that kings, presidents and leaders use Islam to achieve their "immoral" political ambition, he said at a seminar on religions at the Muhammadiyah University here.
"Our faith tells us that it's Islam that should be using politics as tools, but, instead, we have been forced to watch a painful scene of religion being used for political targets," Syafii said.
The lecturer at the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic Institute said, however, that there was one time when Moslems in Indonesia could use politics in their efforts to uphold Islamic moralities.
He cited Masyumi, an influential Islamic party which was dissolved in 1960, as an example of a successful attempt to turn politics into tools for religious and morality purposes.
"It's the factor of the quality of the leadership that determined the success," he said. "Masyumi at the time was able to cultivate quality human resources, with prime moral and intellectual skills, for its political activities."
"Unfortunately, at that time, we didn't have the appropriate software, namely the Islamic theories for various spheres of people's lives," he said.
"Establishing this software should be our intellectual agenda in the future," said Syafii, who is former visiting professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Without such software, he said, Moslems would always be entrapped in dilemma after dilemma, either in their political, social, economic, science or cultural lives.
An example of such dilemma is the existence of any so-called Islamic institution which does not bring prosperity and justice to the people, he said.
"Likewise for political institutions which bear the Islam name but are full of corruption and oppression..they will soon become bad advertisement for Islam," he said.
Attended by 600 experts from across the country, the seminar also featured researcher Mochtar Pabottingi, non-governmental activists Aswab Mahasin and Muslim Abdurrahman, and mass communication expert Jalaludin Rakhmat.
Pabottingi, who is a senior researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, discussed at length the requirements of democratization. "We should, for instance, pay more attention toward and empower members of the middle class in the rural areas," he said.
Pabottingi said democratization needs stronger rural people.
"It's urgent for us to improve the bargaining position of the rural people," he said. "This is why we must stop urban people from increasing their control of rural land." (har/swe)