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)