I

ni mosi tidak percaya, jangan anggap kami tak berdaya. Ini mosi tidak percaya, kami tak mau lagi diperdaya.

(Here is a motion of distrust; don’t assume us unguarded. Here is a motion of distrust; we’ll be defrauded no more.)

Efek Rumah Kaca band Salihara Theater, Nov. 3, 2012.

Attired mostly in black, hundreds of youths had gathered to enjoy the spark of freedom both in ideas and in reality. There were no cliches, as in the soap operas. There was no nonsense, as in the situation comedies. There was no fear of hell or torture nor a senseless hope for paradise the day after. There was no sphere for those with dreadful voices to impose their insensible faith.

Salihara became a place where people were venerated for acting as people, where fearlessness and liberty had a realm of their own and where faith might breed unpretentiously.

Religious freedom, the very idea underlying that night’s commemorations, enabled us to enjoy a dialogue about God more meaningfully. We could understand Him through quality short speeches, jokes, poetry recitals, movies, essays, awards and music.

We therefore did not glorify God with laudations or actions disturbing, panicking or harming the others, since the God we deify is the One with loving eyes, full of grace and with an excellent sense of humor, and the One who also hates discrimination, meanness and bloodshed.

But we did come to fragments of meaningfulness after letting ourselves question and be questioned inexorably.

“We need the empty space above the stairs,” once said Buya Hamka, a respected Indonesian Muslim figure from the past. “Since we can only move up or down with the availability of emptiness.” The emptiness above the stairs is therefore a sphere where questions can be asked, where motions become possible, where ideas flow uninterrupted, where minds are nurtured with hearing, seeing and understanding.

And Ahmad Wahib, the Muslim thinker being commemorated at that night, represents a young Muslim with a resilient wish to win a space for socially “forbidden questions”. As social restraints might not give him enough chances, he welled up himself with the questions, exploring any possible answers and lived with his own definitions of many things.

“Lord, how will I accept Your law without having to considerably comprehend it beforehand?” he asked. “Therefore, Lord, please do understand whenever my hesitation arises against Your law. If you find it objectionable, bestow me with apt comprehensions to make the vagueness disappear.”

“Lord, will you be enraged, if I speak with untamed heart and mind — the two things you have graced me with — as well as the liberating capability? Lord, I really wish to question You in an atmosphere of freedom. I do believe that you not only are repulsed by the hypocritical voices but also find insufferable the duplicitous thoughts [all of which originate from] the mind cowardly deserts from the ideas arising from itself or the mind that pretend to not knowing what is there in itself.”

We know, the availability of space for questions as well as the willingness to express and accept questions makes possible the growth of tolerance. Religious conflict and violence, for example, which are now escalating in Indonesia, have since the beginning originated from the unavailability of that space together with tolerating zest.

The case of the bloody Shiite-Sunni conflict in Sampang, Madura, where Ahmad Wahib was born, would have never taken place if there had been sufficient space to doubt an act before it was executed or to more thoroughly think before a claim was made. And the enraged majority, along with the narrowing space made available for questions, has been tamed in order to make them remove their consciences and consciousness and made to believe that there were only two choices: “us” or “them”.

We too, that night, celebrated toleration with its full meaning and practice. However microscopic it might be, it has been rejuvenating splashes of the socially little by little shrinking religious open-mindedness. A young Christian could elaborate Islamic teaching and enjoy — if not question — certain parts of it. Non-Muslims or minorities at that moment could forget the “scary faces” of maddened Islamists and their teachings.

Our problem is if we can say it that way, the numbers of those kinds of enlightening moments and spheres are not many. The wish, or more precisely the courage, to make such an event happen and the sphere available seems to be in question.

Normally, we expect this from campuses, where freedom of speech and expression should be available. We also hope that quality cultural events financed by the state or bigger NGOs in public centers or stadiums, in schools or giant shopping centers can provide a similar space.

Last, we of course have to talk about the exclusiveness of libertarian communities. “Belum pergi, sudah pulang,” says an old proverb: Going home before leaving. A change is not only determined by a long-awaited historical juncture, but also by the approaches used to persuade the masses to ensure a change desired.

That’s why, after all, the event was really an alternative amid the tendency of most intellectuals who stubbornly speak with heavy language that becomes only one voice amid booming thunder.

The writer is a researcher at the Paramadina Foundation and the Ciputat School for Democratic Islam.