Tolerance, freedom are key: Asghar

Ati Nurbaiti and Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

A central message of the Koran is freedom of consciousness, which goes hand in glove with the responsibility of the individual before the Almighty.

This responsibility entails the obligation to exert one's mind (ijtihad), and because this inevitably leads to diverse views, a healthy environment that tolerates differences and even dissent is a vital prerequisite to carry out that obligation -- particularly when it comes to interpreting religion and trying to develop rules and laws based on it.

So says a noted scholar on Islam, Ashgar Ali Engineer. He knows all too well the consequence of dissent when voiced in unwelcome surroundings.

The Indian national, whose odd name is familiar here through translations of several of his 40 books, counts five incidents of assault, one in which his house in Calcutta was destroyed.

The author of Rational Approach to Islam maintained that the cause for such hostility was that as a civil engineer (the title somehow stuck and became his surname) who was deeply interested in Islam, he was used to employing reason and his views contradicted both traditional and scholarly interpretations of Islam.

But reason is only one of four values, he says, which is needed to understand Islam and in seeking to build rules and impose them. The others, he said, are wisdom, justice and compassion.

"These four words have helped me a lot in understanding Islam; they are also (four of 99) Allah's names -- respectively (al Rasyid), al Hikmah, al Adl and al Rahman."

The need for a society tolerant of differences is why he hails Indonesia's efforts toward democracy.

"I praise Indonesians and the elections that they have been through," he said when in town a few days after the country's first direct presidential election.

"Now I have an example to show" to people who question me about a model for an Islamic, democratic country, said the founder of the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism.

In Indonesia, he says, he sees hopes of an environment that will balance what he sees as a depressing, continuing trend in many countries with Muslim populations, including his homeland India, where among its Islamic intellectuals and clerics "the door of ijtihad is closed", he said.

Hope of overcoming such "orthodoxy" and stagnancy lies, he says, in "more well informed people", which can only be brought about in "modern, not totalitarian societies".

Engineer was in Jakarta to attend a conference with some 30 other scholars and activists discussing sexuality and human rights in Muslim societies.

He says human rights must become an additional tool of reference for Muslim scholars and clerics. For example, he says in this day and age cutting off the hands of thieves is no longer feasible. Other laws must be developed, he said, instead of merely parroting forefathers who lived thousands of years ago.

Laws are only relevant, he adds, if one continually reviews the goal of the laws, and the cutting off of hands or stoning people convicted of adultery "is only a means, and today other means are available".

But in certain communities the development of Islamic law, or sharia, "has become a goal in itself; we have forgotten the maslahat (consideration of the larger good)". This is tantamount to "worshiping the law", he adds.

The obligation to understand religion based on the above values, he says, requires the scholar engaged in doing so to master the necessary tools -- Arabic and the complex development of sharia, apart from the Koran and the hadist (sayings of Prophet Muhammad).

As scores of existing hadist have doubtful origins, he said one should follow the example of the Prophet himself, who showed how one must exert his own mind in seeking to understand the Koran and take local and current circumstances into account, including the conditions of a plural society.

Delving into history, he says, would show how feudalism crept its way into sharia, for instance regarding assumptions that the man is master over the woman, thus contradicting the Koran.

Sharia would be "fine" if it was subject to change, he says, "but if traditional sharia becomes state law it is dangerous". As of today, he says he does not see any model country coming anywhere close to that ideal.

He is indebted to his father, who was also a leading local religious figure, he says. Despite their differences in understanding the religion, the preacher encouraged his son's continued studies in Islam "as long as I was motivated by my conscience and not material matters".

In his homeland Engineer continues to fight for peace amid often tense, and even deadly, relations among diverse communities.

A witness to communal violence since the early 1960s to the latest orgies of death and destruction in Gujarat, he is now involved in an interfaith movement pushing for a law seeking to punish not only those engaged in the riots, but also the politicians responsible for provoking people.

Another Gujarat, said the recipient of India's National Communal Harmony Award in 1997, could happen "if people are not vigilant" to outsiders manipulating their beliefs.

Politicians, in this case those of the Hindu nationalist BJP party, he said, are "equally dangerous" in the opposition as they were in power.

Indonesians must take note, he warns. As in India, only small- time perpetrators have been dragged to court such as in the case of the Maluku conflict -- with the likely remains of a silent grudge on both sides of the conflicting religious communities, a grudge from which politicians could again invoke bad blood for their own narrow gain.

Reason, wisdom and all that would then fly out the window in a cycle of revenge.