Ulil goes against fundamentalism

Ulil goes against fundamentalism

Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Relatively small but vocal, Indonesia's Muslim fundamentalists
are a thorn in the side to the country's majority of Muslim
moderates. But recently, the hardliners are complaining of an
annoying sting. It goes by the name Ulil Abshar-Abdalla.

A 36-year old intellectual from the country's largest Muslim
organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, he has broken the deafening
silence of the moderate majority over the growing influence of
fundamentalism here since Soeharto fell in 1998.

Now he confronts them wherever they are found: the Internet,
radio, newspapers, television and face to face at debates.

"I prefer calling them revivalists," Ulil said in an interview
on Monday.

Revivalists, because their ultimate aim is to bring back Islam
exactly as it was practiced over 1,400 years ago. Ulil thinks
this copy-and-paste approach is unrealistic.

He agrees that Muslims need to change, but in looking for that
change Ulil urges them to leave no stone unturned.

He said the revivalists tend to stifle the options and limit
the scope of debate for a solution. "If there is no balance,
(against the revivalists) they could become a risk to free
thinking."

Ulil helped found the Islamic Liberal Network (JIL), a loose
alliance of intellectual Muslims that aims to stimulate debate on
Islamic topics.

JIL was founded in 2001 and made its debut over the Internet
as a mailing list. Ulil said JIL currently had around 500
members, mainly students, but also academicians, employees and
housewives.

The mailing list's first topic, he said, was whether a secular
state was acceptable under Islam. "The answers tended to be yes,
and that a secular state was consistent with Islam."

JIL became a website then a radio talk-show, which Ulil still
hosts at radio station 68H. The program is being aired on 50
stations throughout Indonesia.

And just as the country's current experiment with democracy
gave fundamentalists the chance to rise and expand, it also
allowed JIL's message to spread.

Soon JIL turned its attention toward institutions of higher
education, suspecting that the academia had become hotbeds of
Islamic reactionaries.

"So we go to the universities and institutes to provide
different views on Islam," he said, adding that "we confront
every effort to limit the field of discussion."

JIL blew threw the campuses like a fresh breeze. "For a long
time students had felt there was a domination of a religious
vision that was one sided ... an Islamic vision that was too
fundamentalist."

Naturally, the schools became the support bases for many
hardline organizations, even political parties. Among them the
Justice Party (PK), which Ulil said he admired, but not for their
fundamentalist religious vision. "Their vision is, in my view,
not correct, it must be countered."

It was just a matter of time before JIL's blunt messages drew
the ire of the reactionaries.

In August last year, a private television station scrapped a
JIL info-mercial, which featured the phrase "Colorful Islam", --
essentially promoting diversity and tolerance -- because a
hardline Muslim group, the Majelis Mujahiddin complained
vociferously that the ad was an insult to Islam.

Ulil demonstrated what it was to be a liberal Muslim with a
piece that appeared in the country's largest daily paper Kompas,
last November.

In it, he posed questions about various obligations under
Islamic law, or sharia, arguing that some things, like hacking
the hands off of thieves, might not be applicable in this culture
and this century.

A number of Muslim clerics were irate about the article. The
Bandung-based Indonesian People's Ulama Forum (FUUI) called it an
insult to Islam and warned that such a violation was punishable
by death.

Asked what drove him to write the article, Ulil said, "I just
felt the time was ripe."

He explained that the article was a summary of years of
debates he had had with like-minded Muslims and with the
revivalists.

Born into a family of conservative NU Muslims in the Central
Java town of Pati in 1967, Ulil was educated until the age of 19
at an Islamic boarding school run by his father and grandfather.

He remains a member of NU and continues to head its human
resource development research division.

He studied at the Institute of Islamic and Arabian Sciences
and the Driyarka Institute of Philosophy.

Ulil's solid foundation in Islamic education and his NU
affiliation lend him credibility when he discusses Islam.
However, it also begs the question as to why he became critical
toward the establishment.

Ulil said that Muslim organizations like NU and Muhammadiyah
already had a long tradition of critical thinkers. In fact, he
cited former NU chairman and president Abdurrahman Wahid as
having inspired him to think differently.

Another influential figure he recalled was Muslim scholar
Nurcholish Madjid whose progressive thoughts on Islam defied the
mainstream opinion during the 1980s.

But when he first got interested doing something was when
President Soeharto shut down the country's leading weekly
magazine Tempo in 1994.

"I got really angry," he said. "Even though I wasn't connected
with Tempo... I don't know, it just wasn't fair," he said,
explaining he had enjoyed the magazine's frank articles
at a time when political openness was rare.

He said he took part in protests against Tempo's closure, and
this led him to join the Institute for Studies on the Free Flow
of Information (ISA).

Established by noted Tempo journalist Goenawan Mohammad in
1995, ISAI promotes freedom of the press and freedom of
expression.

Religion was not ISAI's concern at first, however JIL later
took it up in the same spirit as ISAI. Said Ulil, "we feared the
rise of religious radicalism could threaten the freedom of
expression."

His work and ideas are an eye-opener for Muslims here. For too
long, most people just thought that the revivalists were the only
ones around offering a change, albeit change that would turn the
clock back several centuries.