Author: Linda
Christanty
Indonesia's
Liberal Islamic Network (Jaringan Islam Liberal, or JIL) is a group of modern
Muslim intellectuals who contest what they call "literalist" Islam.
Although the movement is small, it is highly controversial among conservative
Muslims. Who are the people of JIL, and why have its advocates been issued with
a death fatwa?
In
1997, Nong Darol Mahmada became furious with God. Her mother-who had been
active in organizing Islamic prayer meetings in her neighborhood in Labuan,
Banten, West Java-was struck with an incurable illness that would leave her
crippled for life.
Nong
thought that God had abandoned them. "My mother was a good person and a
devoted wife. Why would God let her suffer? When she became ill, everything
fell apart." At Nong's father's pesantren
religious school, the enrollment dropped from around 500 to 100. "My
mother used to take care of everything," Nong says. "No one could
replace her. I thought, why doesn't God see that by making my mother sick He
was losing so many people who had praised Him?' I was very angry."
Nong's
relationship with God has been a passionate affair. As a young woman, she
desired only to devote herself to religion. As a middle-school student at her
father's pesantren,
she dreamed of leaving the school to live alone in a rented room where she
could spend more time in solitary praise of God. Nong found her inspiration in
Rabi'ah al-Adawiyah, an 8th century woman Sufi from the area that is now Iraq,
who was well-known for her concept of divine love. "Rabi'ah didn't marry, she
spent all her time performing wirid,"
says Nong, referring to the practice of reciting the Qur'an to praise God,
usually done after completing the five daily prayers or h.
Nong
lost interest in school, preferring to spend her time reciting the Qur'an and
praying. One night in the middle of her devotions, she got up and left her
room. She walked alone through the dark streets until she arrived at the small
prayer room (musholla)
at the bus terminal. She prayed there alone until dawn. That incident led her
teacher to reprimand her, warning that a bus terminal was a dangerous place for
a young woman.
This
was not Nong's first scolding. She had grown up in a very strict religious
environment under her paternal grandmother, since her parents were busy running
the religious school. Nong's grandmother believed in a literal adherence to
Islamic scripture. It was she who made sure that Nong wore a jilbab, the scarf worn by
many of Indonesia's Muslim women to cover the hair, neck and chest. Nong
remembers her grandmother warning her, "If you don't wear a jilbab and cover your
hair, when you die your hair will burn in the fires of hell." Once she
watched her grandmother yank the hair of her older sister, which had been
fashionably curled and styled in a ponytail. "Hey, you're going to hell!
You'll be burned up!" her grandmother shouted, pulling on her
granddaughter's offending coiffure.
It
was not until Nong entered university at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Academy
for Islamic Sciences (IAIN) in Jakarta that she was introduced to
interpretations of Islam that challenged her grand`mother's thinking. Exposed
to a new world of books and Qur'anic interpretations, she came across the works
of Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan Muslim feminist.
"Fatima
says that the jilbab
exists for the political self-interests of men," Nong says. "I became
convinced that the command to wear the veil was very political. I saw the
revelation of the Qur'anic verse about the veil to have been meant not as a
requirement but as an appeal. It was revealed during the time of the Prophet
Muhammad, when people harassed Muslim women as a way of attacking the Prophet.
But now there is no difference if I wear jilbab
or not. It's a warning. The Prophet saw the clothing traditions of the Quraishi
women at the time, and he said, 'pull your coverings over your chests.' There
was no command to cover your hair. I wear modest clothes that don't attract
people's attention-that's my jilbab."
On
campus, Nong began to participate in discussions with her new friends, and she
felt that her previous understanding of Islam had been backward. "All that
I experienced in the pesantren
made me restless at university. It seemed that what I had understood to be true
wasn't right. How, I asked myself, could I have accepted those kinds of
teachings? I felt really out of it."
Like
Nong, Ulil Abshar-Abdalla was raised in an orthodox Islamic tradition. His
father was the head of a pesantren
in Pati, Central Java, and believed that formal schooling was syakkun fil Rab, a
symptom of doubt in God. Ulil's father was distressed to see his son reading
books written in Latin letters rather than the holy texts written in Arabic.
For Ulil's father, true knowledge was contained in these Arabic texts.
But
Ulil was drawn to read widely, despite his father's warning that such books
would lead him astray. By the time he was of middle-school age, Ulil had read h
(Upheaval in Islamic Thinking), the journal of Ahmad Wahib, a young Indonesian
Islamic intellectual writing in the 1970s and who died at a young age. Wahib
introduced Ulil to the notion of freedom of thought, not yet a popular concept
among Indonesian Islamic thinkers. In the introduction to his journal, Wahib
wrote, "I believe in God, but God is not a land forbidden to thought. God
exists not in order for his existence to be un-thought. God takes shape not in
order to hide from the light of critique." Wahib believed that God was
living, fresh and flexible: "He does not want to be fixed in place."
Wahib's
writings fuelled Ulil's search for new thought. Ulil also found a teacher to
offer him encouragement. He says, "Kyai Sahal [Mahfudz] introduced me not
only to modern Arab thinkers but also to the thought of Cak Nur [Nurcholish
Madjid, a progressive Indonesian Muslim thinker] and Gus Dur [Abdurrahman
Wahid, a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in
Southeast Asia and former president of Indonesia]. It gave me a sense of pride
in Islamic thought. He also introduced me to Western philosophy. Many kinds of
books were available in his school library back then." (Sahal Mahfudz is
now the head of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia, an organization of Indonesian
Islamic intellectuals.)
Books,
however, were not enough to give Ulil a clear path. He also sought a social
environment that could provide an answer to his restless questioning. "I
entered the fundamentalist milieu and became a member of their religious
community. For two years I was one of them."
The
fundamentalist outlook inspired Ulil to even greater devotion. Previously he
had followed Islam simply as a social tradition; now he grew to see Islam as
not just a set of religious rules but as a compass to guide society and state.
He remembers thinking at the time, "This is amazing."
But
Ulil's perspective changed again after listening to a lecture by a young
Islamic intellectual, Imanuddin Abdurrahim, at the Salman Mosque in Bandung.
"[Imanuddin] had once been jailed by Suharto's New Order government. I
listened to him speak and I read his books, and it was very inspiring. His
background was in physics and he had a very logical way of thinking. He said
that the law of God is natural law, having an objective quality, and that it
does not discriminate between one group or another."
Imanuddin
gave an example that stuck in Ulil's mind. "There are two buildings, one a
mosque and the other an office," Ulil recounts. "The office installs
a lightning rod, but the mosque does not. When a storm comes, the mosque will
be hit by lightning, even though it is a place for the worship of God. Because
it does not follow the [natural] law of God, it will face the consequences.
This means that if Muslims want to progress, they cannot depend only on
religious texts that were produced in a certain social and historical context,
as if they were God's law, without considering how social laws have developed.
Social law is not static. The mistake of the fundamentalists is to see it as
static."
Ulil
came to see fundamentalism as archaic. He became more deeply convinced of this
in the midst of political shifts following the fall of Suharto in 1998. Radical
Islamic movements, such as the Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI) and Laskar Jihad,
injected religious emotion into political conflicts that had been brewing
across the nation during Suharto's thirty-three-year regime-often they
advocated violence as a moral response. In areas such as Ambon and Poso in
eastern Indonesia, the issues at stake became colored as an inter-religious
war. In Javanese cities, vigilante squads of the FPI attacked cafés and
discotheques, claiming that they were protecting the public from sin. There
were raids and "sweepings" in boarding houses in Central Java,
enforcing curfews in the name of preventing immoral acts.
"This
fundamentalism comes from a sense of desperation, a feeling of disappointment,"
says Ulil. "They're disappointed because Muslims once knew a golden age
and now they feel degraded. They are experiencing political fragmentation, they
are being left behind in science and economics. Looking at American policy in
Palestine, they become spectators of injustice. 'Has God left us out?' That's
their fundamental question. They feel belittled. Fundamentalism gives them a
sense of pride. The real challenge, though, is regain their pride by
confronting the roots of the backwardness in certain fields, not to withdraw
into a conservative group."
Nong
interjects, "Fundamentalist Muslims are unproductive, exclusive and they
don't follow the developments of the times. As Ulil says, religion is a living
organism that makes us feel enthusiasm. If we feel enthusiasm, then what
Nietzsche said, 'religion is already dead,' that couldn't possibly happen."
Hamid
Basyaib adds, "These days people just react to situations, which at the
level of discourse are dominated by aggressive Islam or uneducated Islam,"
adds Hamid Basyaib. "These movements aren't terrifying, but they do
promote rigidity, backwardness and literalist thinking."
In
1999, Ulil, who graduated from the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Knowledge
in Jakarta, met with a number of friends, including Goenawan Mohamad, Luthfi
Assyaukanie, Ihsan Ali Fawzi, Nong Darol Mahmada, Ahmad Sahal and Hamid
Basyaib, all of whom shared many of Ulil's views and his determination to
address Indonesia's growing fundamentalism. Ulil says, "We've seen radical
Islam grow militant, systematic and organized, while liberal Islam has been
unorganized, weak-seeming, not militant, not resistant and unassertive in
giving voice to its perspectives. The Liberal Islamic Network was in fact
motivated by the appearance of these radical Islamic movements."
It's
January 4, 2001 in Jakarta, and a meeting is underway in a wood-floored study
with dark blue walls, the office of Goenawan Mohamad, a columnist for the
Indonesian newsmagazine Tempo and one of the founders of the Jakarta-based
Institute for the Study of the Flow of Information (ISAI). The space is
furnished simply with a table and six black-varnished wooden chairs, and a long
wooden bench covered in red pillows. The walls are decorated with paintings and
posters from European art exhibitions. An easel stands near the door, holding
drafting paper covered with pen strokes. The seven people in the room have been
engaged in serious discussion for hours.
Goenawan
picks up a phone and calls Dahlan Iskan, the Chief Editor of the Jawa Pos newspaper, to
ask him for some space to publish liberal Islamic thought. They have already
agreed to appoint Nong Darol Mahmada to work on a funding proposal, while
Luthfi Assyaukanie will be in charge of planning and managing a mailing list
for discussing liberal Islam on the Internet.
"The
Liberal Islamic Network was born in that meeting," says Nong. "All we
want is to provide a choice for interpreting Islamic teachings."
"A
lot of people don't realize that reading the Qur'an cannot be value-free,"
Ulil adds.
"In
other words, the Qur'an can be read from different perspectives or angles. Each
angle has its own validity. Even though each of these angles is valid, that
doesn't negate the possibility of mutual critique. Without mutual critique,
there's no possibility of us learning from each other."
These
days, Islamic liberal thinkers take inspiration from many sources, including
the work of Charles Kurzman, whose book Liberal
Islam: A Sourcebook differentiates between those Islamic revival
movements which reject modernity and claim to be searching for the pure Islam
practiced in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, and liberal Islam, which
supports a division between state and religion in its search for a route to
modernity. Ulil explains, however, that even within the liberal Islamic
community there are varying opinions about secularism. Some argue that an
attempt to separate politics and religion is impossible in today's world, or
even that it is an old-fashioned notion belonging to another era when
secularism seemed much simpler. In today's modern society, religion carries
with it a cultural identity, and despite attempts to marginalize it, it returns
in much more complex forms.
"This
makes it difficult to find the point at which liberal Islam diverges from
literal Islam-that's our term for the fundamentalist movements. On some matters
our positions meet-about pornography, for example, because pornography does
damage ideals about the family, and our religion places a great emphasis on the
family. Just like the Christian conservative George Bush, their rhetoric is
filled with references to family values," Ulil says.
However,
as Kurzman explains, a respect for the rights of women and non-Muslims, freedom
of thought, anti-theocracy and support for democracy provide liberal Islam with
a wide space in which to move.
Indonesia's
Liberal Islamic Network spreads their viewpoints not only by publishing
newspaper articles and hosting mailing list debates, but also by sponsoring
radio talk shows and Friday bulletins, and they have plans to launch their own
magazine. Funds for their operations come from The Asia Foundation and The
Freedom Institute, a nonprofit organization headed by the Indonesian
pro-democracy figure Rizal Mallarangeng. The Liberal Islamic Network has found
that of all these channels for publicizing their thought, it is syndicated
media that has been the most effective to date.
Ulil
says, "People's reactions to the articles we published in the Jawa Pos were amazing. I
didn't realize it until I visited local communities, especially in East Java
and Eastern Indonesia."
Not
everyone, however, has had a positive reaction to the Liberal Islamic Network.
The most heated response came after Ulil published an article in the Kompas newspaper entitled
"Freshening Up Islamic Understanding" (Menyegarkan Kembali Pemahaman Islam) on November 18, 2002.
At
seven o'clock in the evening, several weeks after the article appeared and two
days before the Muslim holiday of Idul Fitri, Nong received a call on her cell
phone from Hamid Basyaib. Hamid was in Jakarta, but Nong had already returned
to her parents' home for the holidays.
"Nong,
Ulil has had a death fatwa
issued against him. Look at Detikcom
[a news website]. I've been trying to call Ulil but I can't get through. His
cell phone isn't ringing. Ulil has to hear this. You let him know, okay, Nong?
Try to call him."
"Okay,
I'll contact him later," Nong replied easily.
After
talking to Hamid, Nong opened her laptop and logged onto the Detikcom website. Sure
enough, she found a news item saying that a group of religious scholars called
the Forum Ulama Umat
Indonesia (FUUI) in Bandung, West Java had issued a fatwa calling for Ulil's
death. Trying not to panic, Nong interrupted her father, who was busy watching
television. "Father, a death fatwa
has been issued against Ulil. Did you have anything to do with it?" Nong's
father replied that he had known about the plans for the group of religious
scholars to meet, but that he didn't know anything about a fatwa concerning Ulil.
Her father assured her that the fatwa
wasn't really serious.
Meanwhile,
Ulil was in a car driving through Central Java on the road home for the
holidays with his wife and child when his cell phone rang with a message:
"What about those religious teachers in Bandung? How should it be followed
up in Bandung?" Ulil did not understand the message.
"What
I imagined at the time was that it wouldn't be the FUUI who would execute Ulil,
but that it would be taken up by radicals on the street and they would kill
him," Nong remembers.
Ulil
stood accused of insulting the Muslim community and spreading enmity and hatred
through society by way of his writings. But Athian Ali Muhamad Dai, head of the
FUUI, denied that his organization had issued such a fatwa against Ulil.
"We never issued a death fatwa
especially about Ulil in our press release. We only called upon the state
apparatus to dissolve that network, then we noted that whoever insulted Islam
could reasonably expect the death penalty." Athian stated that he had
already turned over Ulil's case to the police, complaining that what Ulil wrote
in his article was an evil act against religion. Athian says he had reported
Ulil to the police based on complaints from the Muslim community in Bandung.
"Around 700 people complained. We distributed a questionnaire for this
purpose-this was also what the police wanted, proof of how much influence this
act had on society. Some people who were so fed up that they wanted to see Ulil
hang."
For
his own part, Athian considered Ulil's thinking dangerous for, he argued, it
positioned the human mind above God. "It's a perfect example of insulting
Islam," he said. "Ulil dares to say there is no law of God, there is
only the law of man. He calls the Islamic punishment of stoning to death and
other matters things that 'not meaningful'." Athian claimed that he would
not forbid Ulil from having an alternative interpretation of Islam as long as
he did not spread his ideas by writing in the mass media. "If Ulil wants
to scream and shout in his room or with his own group, that's not a problem. If
Ulil wants to say he has no religion at all, that's not a problem. But don't
say those things while claiming to be a Muslim."
Fauzan
Al-Ashari from the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia-a fundamentalist organization that
counts among its members Abu Bakar Baasyir, the man accused of complicity in
several terrorist bomb blasts in Indonesia-said that he disagreed with the plan
to issue a fatwa
against Ulil. "I heard about that," he said, "but the fatwa doesn't exist. It's
just a speculative thing." Fauzan said he was, however, among those who
supported the FUUI in its attempts to have the police investigate Ulil. He
suggested that the way out of the debate was to muhabalah-to leave the decision in God's
hands.
"For
example," explained Fauzan over the telephone, "we ask for a sign
from Allah within three days, that one of us should be struck by lightning and
that's how we'll know which of us is wrong."
Kedai
Tempo, an open-air Jakarta cafe, feels relaxed this March 24th afternoon. It is
near the Jaringan Islam Liberal offices, and Nong and her friends like to meet
here, drinking coffee or bottled tea, enjoying the breeze that wafts in from
the open sides of the café. But Nong Darol Mahmada's cell phone rings often and
she looks tired. She's organizing a campaign against the U.S. war on Iraq, a
campaign involving the Liberal Islamic Network and a number of well-known
Indonesian performers, including Iwan Fals, Franky Sahilatua and Trie Utami.
"When
the Bali bombings occurred," Nong says, "I thought the fundamentalist
groups would fade, because people would see that they were wrong. But now the
Iraq war becomes a new justification for the fundamentalist attitude toward
America or the West. Everything we've been working for-democracy, freedom of
thought-all seems in vain."
She
turns to Ulil. "What are we going to do now?"
"Well,
you know, we'll just continue with our agenda," he answers, already on his
feet.
Additional Notes:
This article was published in Latitude
Magazine, July 2003.