Symposium outlines tolerance of SE Asian Islam

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.