Symposium outlines tolerance of SE Asian Islam

By Jean Couteau

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia is a land of dazzling and largely positive surprises. Where else in the world can a foreigner -- a Frenchman representing no one but himself -- be called to give a lecture on the relations between Hinduism and Islam in Bali in front of a mostly Moslem audience?

This is what happened to me at the National Symposium of the second Istiqlal festival held on Sept. 25 and 26.

The Istiqlal Festival, of which the symposium is but a part, features exhibitions, contests and international meetings and can be seen as an effort by Indonesian Moslems and the government to restore to Islam its due place in the history and culture of the archipelago.

It is indeed paradoxical that although Islamic merchants originally created the inter-insular economic space now making up the Indonesian and Malay archipelago, and provided it with the lingua franca Bahasa Melayu, more is known about the scattered, agrarian pre-Islamic inland culture of the Javanese (Kejawen), Balinese and Batak than their century long cement, Islam.

Having seized control of the trade networks from its Islamic rivals, it was natural for the colonial Dutch to deny them their historical and cultural legitimacy. But, now that colonialism is passed and the history of the archipelago is again breathing at its own rhythm, isn't it also fair for Islam to carry on weaving the thread of the archipelago's tapestry?

Under the pompous name Sumbangan Agama dalam Mengembangkan Spiritualitas, Moralitas Publik dan Etos Kerja (The Contribution of Religion towards Spirituality, Public Morality and Work Ethic), the main unspoken theme of the symposium was that Southeast Asian, and especially Indonesian Islam, has shown continuous historical tolerance in its encounter with the indigenous societies it converted as well as the societies it didn't convert.

Owing to this, the reasoning goes, its claim for more visibility and additional power should be accepted with trust and openness from the other groups in Indonesia.

The secondary theme is that Islam, contrary to common perception, is a tool of genuine economic modernity. It is democratic and emphasizes the role of hard work and enterprise, not unlike the Protestant work ethic quoted by several of the participants.

This theme was underlined in an address by Dr. Emil Salim, Indonesia's former environment minister. As he sees it, the modern capitalistic economy, operating on purely economic logic, risks wreaking havoc through corruption and other symptoms of social destruction.

The alternative, he says, is to shift away from the secular anthropocentrist approach toward a God-inspired model of development led by Islamic references. He is proposing, although he did not and perhaps could not say it, the Islamic equivalent of the European Christian social democracy.

The lectures originated from all over Indonesia and analyzed the various interactions between Islam and the cultures of Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi as well as with Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and the Chinese. Most of the papers displayed, perhaps sometimes too uniformly, the spirit of unity and religious tolerance in Indonesia.

The black sheep of the symposium, Ahmad Mansur Suryanegara, stated that foreigners only invented the pithecanthropine theory to demonstrate that Javanese, Chinese and Africans were subhumans and thus show that Homo sapiens originated in Paris.

Such a devious manipulation of information was saddening. It isn't the first time, alas, that a pseudo-scientist manipulated knowledge for the sake of his own prejudices, albeit this time it was anti-European.

I discussed the new problems of cohabitation between the Hindu and Moslems in Bali. I emphasized how the structural shift away from agrarian society towards service and industry threatens the old harmony between the two faiths, as phenomenons such as competition for jobs, migration from Java and the transformation of Balinese culture into a commodity take place.

The fact I could raise such an issue without being accused of summoning the specter of ethnic tensions, speaks for the high level of the audience and of the meeting as a whole.

The quality of such an event makes one wonder why relations between Islam and the West are in such a sorry state. Each seems to perceive the other in the light of a "constructed" traumatic history.

To the West, Islam's primary sin lays in its origin, when it ripped apart unity in the Mediterranean with its call of a faith more rational and tolerant than Christianity. The misunderstanding later deepened when Islam not only refused to embrace Western secularism, but also stuck to a perceived "legalistic anachronism" concerning the condition of women and the status of law and the state. It was recently dramatized by Moslem groups manipulating religion for political purposes.

To Moslems, the West's sin is not only attempting to break Islam's political control over its own space -- during the Crusades, the Turkish wars and the colonial period -- but more recently, to impose its economic and value systems on populations little ready to accept them.

The topic of this historical misunderstanding was raised by guest speaker Vice Prime Minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim. In a rambling one-hour speech, with Malaysia's economic, inter-ethnic and political successes as his background, Anwar Ibrahim stressed that the reluctant and sometimes intolerant Islamic societies of the Middle East need not be seen as the only legitimate representatives of Islam.

The Malay and Indonesian Islam, he said, not only has behind it a long tradition of historic tolerance, but it is demonstrating that it can cope with modernity and open its arms to all traditions, as shown in modern Malaysia and Indonesia.

It can be all the more open, he said, as it is self-confident of its own values. It belongs to Southeast Asian Moslems, he underlined, to carry their message to the modern world, Western as well as non-Western.

A proposition of tolerance, modernity and spirituality originating from another part of the world. Is it an omen of the 21st century. Perhaps.

Where was the Western press? Except for the odd photographer focused on Anwar Ibrahim, it was nowhere to be seen. Is it more interested in Islamic fundamentalism than in Islamic humanism? Why is it so? In the name of freedom of the press? I wonder.