Exposing moderation of Indonesian Islam

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 10/22/2006 10:48 AM  |  Life

Soe Tjen Marching, Contributor, London

Approaches to the Qur'an in Contemporary Indonesia Abdullah Saeed, ed. Oxford University Press, January 2006 336 pp. (Hardcover)

In the United Kingdom where I have been living for nearly two years, Islam and the interpretation of the Koran are often related to the Middle East rather than to any other part of the world.

The study of Islam, which is becoming more and more popular in the UK, thus mainly concentrates on the study of the Middle East. The number of people learning the Arabic language, for instance, has increased enormously in the past few years in this country, but the number of students learning Indonesian has not.

One time, I met a student who was about to conduct a study on Islam, and when I told him that Indonesia was the largest Muslim country in the world, he was very surprised. His ignorance, I thought then, was very poor.

However, it may not have been his fault, because the mass media and the production of books may have influenced people's knowledge in such a way that Indonesia and the study of Islam seem rather incongruent.

For this reason, Approaches to the Qur'an in Contemporary Indonesia, published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2005, is indeed a kind of a breakthrough in this country.

For myself personally, reading and learning about Islam are always intriguing. Having been born and raised in Indonesia, I often feel that I am part of its Islamic culture. At the same time however, as a non-Muslim Indonesian of Chinese descent, I have also experienced certain tensions and suspicions between the Muslim pribumi (indigenous Indonesian) and non-Muslim ethnic Chinese.

I became more and more interested in this religion only a few years ago because of my closeness to some liberal Indonesian Muslims overseas, and this book has indeed given me an awareness of the plurality of Islam.

Edited by Abdullah Saeed, director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam at Australia's University of Melbourne, Approaches to the Qur'an gathers 11 essays by 13 different writers, 11 of who are from Indonesia.

Saeed explains that until the 1960s, Islamic thoughts used to be classified as traditional or modernist in Indonesia. However, by the end of the '60s, a new idea known as neo-modernism started to emerge.

The 11 Indonesian contributors are mostly either lecturers or graduates of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN), formerly known as IAIN. However, they introduce different approaches as well as perspectives in their articles.

Two of the articles, written by Lies Marcoes Natsir and Ro'fah Mudzakir, concentrate on women's issues. Natsir discusses issues relating to abortion, comparing the perspectives of four schools of law (the Hanafi, Maliki, Hambali and Shafi'i), Lies Marcoes demonstrates that abortion is a debatable issue in Islam.

According to the Hanafis, abortion is permitted before the fetus reaches 5 months old. The Maliki school prohibits abortion totally, while the Hambali school permits abortion if the pregnancy endangers the mother's life, as this school of law believes that the life of the mother is more important than the fetus.

The Shafi'i school permits abortion for mothers who have experienced less than 40 days of pregnancy. However, within the Shafi'i school there are also some who think that abortion should be prohibited completely.

Ro'fah Mudzakir discusses the issue of polygamy in relation to the Indonesian Muslim women's movement, Aisyiyah. While it has been widely known that Aisyiyah supported polygamy during the first Indonesian women's congress on Dec. 22, 1928, her article reveals how members of Aisyiyah had argued differently regarding this issue.

Ro'fah also explains that the dependency of Aisyiyah on Muhammadiyah (the country's second largest Muslim group) may have made the women's organization hesitant in abolishing polygamy.

Another article by Milhan Yusuf entitled Hamka's Method in Interpreting Legal Verses of the Qur'an also explores the complexities of Islam. Yusuf explains how Hamka strives for the Koran's interpretation based on independent reasoning (ijtihad) rather than on adherence to predecessors (taqlid). Hamka even considers taqlid to be worse than slavery because it does not allow any freedom of thought. For this reason, Hamka's idea is often considered to be modernist.

Nevertheless, this does not place him in agreement with other modernists, demonstrating that different and various spectrums of interpretations exist among the modernists themselves, which make the study of Islam very rich.

Thus, not only do the essayists in Approaches to the Qur'an differ in their interpretations as well as approaches, but in discussing a certain school of thought or movement, each article also shows further complexities and range of arguments.

Tragic incidents such as the Sept. 11, 2001 attack in New York, the Bali bombing in 2002, the Madrid train bombings in 2004, and the London bombing in 2005 have indeed caused tension between Muslims and non-Muslims in the UK and other ""Western"" countries.

These incidents, plus the foreign policies of several leaders such as George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, have often incited an impression of Islam as monolithic: aggressive, irrational and fundamentalist.

Approaches to the Qur'an in Contemporary Indonesia shows that freedom of thought, tolerance and intellectual discourse are also encouraged in Islam.

Indeed, the late Muslim scholar Nurcholish Madjid states in this book that the Koran acknowledges plurality and tolerance. Religion, according to Madjid, is the way to become closer to the absolute. For this reason, belief in all prophets -- no matter from which religion they may hail -- is fundamental in Islam.

There is a plan to translate this book into Bahasa Indonesia, so that non-English speaking people in Indonesia might have access to this excellent scholarship as well.

The reviewer is a staff member of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

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