There are currently hundreds moderate Muslim organizations in
Indonesia, many of them set up following the fall of President Soeharto
in May 1998. The nurturing of these civic organizations may be as
important to the future of Indonesia’s democracy as is the curtailment
of extremists.
Furthermore, simple political maturity, such as
developing true parties with accountability and that stand for
something beyond personality as well the development of an educated and
experienced electorate should protect and stabilize Indonesia’s
democracy.
However, a critical component of Indonesia’s democratic future involves recognition of the special role of Islam in the state.
As
most Indonesian Muslims want their government to respect Islamic
customs even if they do not support the creation of an Islamic state,
the line between support for and opposition to
sharia is often blurred.
Many Indonesians, including those who are only nominally
Muslims, hold conservative values and support strict moral laws without
necessarily seeing them as purely religious or sharia-based.
It
is easy to mistake support for a conservative moral law as support for
Islamism when it is more simply a reflection of basic conservative
values.
By the same token, many Muslims in Indonesia reject some
social arrangements and norms that are commonly associated with
democracy in the West, including our pluralism and
secularism. But this
too neither makes them
theocrats nor anti-democratic.
While the
political debate is often framed by pitting Islamists against
non-Islamists, the lines are really much more subtle than this and
democratic negotiation will require all parties to recognize this so
that they can find common ground.
In this regard, Ahmad Shboul
(2005) reminds us that keeping religion out of politics is not the same
as keeping it out of society in general and that aside from the
communists, even the most secular governments of the Western world have
not attempted to do this.
Shboul suggests that the US attempts
to secularize Arab politics may have even resulted in a backlash that
has contributed to the growth of political Islam. Westerners would do
well to remember that there is not only one form democratic society can
take.
In fact, we do well to remember that even in the West,
notions over what accruements democracy must have remains in flux and
have changed over time.
As Hefner points out, whereas family was
once seen as the central base of Western culture, today individual
freedom is often elevated above family unity.
Additionally, the
very notion of family is being redefined as Americans consider a
variety of arrangements including domestic partnerships, civil unions,
and gay marriage.
Despite our consensus on many central values
there is constant stress in Western societies over the proper balance of
individual right and needs of the community, equality and freedom, and
even the proper role of religion and morality in politics.
Just
as various Western democratic societies define each of these somewhat
differently, Muslim democracies are likely to have their own brand of
pluralism.
The debate over the passage of sharia-based
legislation reflects that that Indonesia continues to map out the most
central questions concerning the basic shape of its democracy.
The
debate is less a debate about whether sharia is good or bad, but more
about the proper meaning of sharia and its relationship to the state and
thus its relationship to the national ideology of Pancasila.
Ultimately, it reflects a deep debate over the very meaning of the Indonesian nation and what it means to be Indonesian.
All
of us have multiple identities. We may define ourselves as students,
scholars, husbands, wives, athletes, musicians from an array of images
that form our composite selves.
However, for a nation state to
succeed it is essential that one of the imbedded images that a country’s
inhabitants hold of themselves is that of their national identity.
But
it is not enough to simply be an American, German, Indonesian or Turk,
for a nation to function it is necessary that one’s national identity
represent some share sense of community, and thus shared values.
Most
nations form out of a long history that creates a shared past. In most
of Western Europe these shared histories have been bound together by
common languages, religions and cultural norms.
Thus, while the
Italians and French were both Catholics, the growing awareness of their
differences became an expression of nationalism.
Indonesians
similarly may share Islam with others across the globe, but Islam can
fulfill only part of the nationalist vision. Of course this is
especially true in light of the tens of millions of Indonesians who are
not Muslims.
The challenge for Indonesia is to find a place for
sharia that neither subverts the uniqueness of Indonesia from rest of
the Islam nor undermines non-Muslim Indonesians.
Indonesian
Islamic scholarship has long and deep ties to the Middle East that form a
strong bond with the rest of the Muslim world and recent decades have
seen what is often called the Islamization or sometimes even the
Arabization of Indonesia.
It would thus be a mistake to dismiss
Indonesia as a worthy example of what the type of democratic society
that Islam has produced even if it would be a mistake to assume that
what can work in Indonesia could be exported to rest of the Islamic
world.
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