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Bookreview: Rereading contemporary Indonesia
Religious radicalism, ethnic clashes, racial slurs, a corrupt mentality and state indifference to a multicultural life has become the banal reality of the modern era, especially in Indonesia
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Religious radicalism, ethnic clashes, racial slurs, a corrupt mentality and state indifference to a multicultural life has become the banal reality of the modern era, especially in Indonesia.
For the naysayers, these social ailments are considered the symptoms of a failed state ' a state resembling Thomas Hobbes's 'state of nature' where brutishness always prevails and finds fertile ground.
In the paucity of works that can help reflectively account for the root causes of such social ailments, Chaedar Alwasilah's Islam, Culture, and Education, a selected collection of 78 op-ed articles published in The Jakarta Post, provides an incisive and compelling critique of sociopolitical and sociocultural life embedded in the Indonesian context.
Perusing its contents, one finds that the book is not simply a prosaic portrayal of contemporary Indonesia, but a thought-provoking piece seeking to challenge and to deconstruct the status quo.
Alwasilah's candor in untangling issues, ranging from the terrain of Islam (as the dominant religion in Indonesia) to culture and education, needs to be commended. What's more, his statements on the issues under discussion are rooted in a lack of pretentiousness and are therefore hard to rebut.
More importantly, however, this book should be lauded for its daring attempt to transcend conservative, cursory accounts in viewing sensitive issues including Islam, a religion he himself embraces.
For example, he declares that 'Islam cannot be perceived as monolithic; as its teachings can be interpreted in a number of different ways [...] No individual can claim that his or her understanding of Islam is truer or more authoritative than others'.
While admittedly not many mainstream Muslims concur with this blunt statement, it is evident that Alwasilah is not complacent with regard to anachronistic readings of the notion of Islam, and perhaps tries to free himself from the trap of ideological conservatism in defining Islam.
It is enlightening that his analysis of Islam both as the country's major religion and its teaching in schools is strongly grounded in the social-educational perspective, thanks to his background in education.
For him, efforts to define Islam cannot be divorced from a specific socio-historical context in which it is embraced by its adherents and reduced to a narrow understanding. In essence, Alwasilah seems to argue that to really fathom Islam is tantamount to contextualizing it through both cultural and educational perspectives, hence, the title of this book.
Issues such as primary and tertiary education are given ample space for exploration in the book. As an educator, Alwasilah is cognizant that education, particularly language education serves as the panacea for social ailments. It is also his contention that education serves as the best conduit to achieving a civilized community and ensuring an egalitarian society.
An important insight gained from this book is its critical scrutiny of the lack of moral and intellectual models that the people, especially youngsters, can emulate. Public figures are corrupt; professors are reluctant to teach undergraduates; teachers have no willingness to do research; plagiarism in academic circles prevail; intellectuals lack writing skills. No less important, the book challenges the Indonesian government's policy on education in general and language education in particular and focuses on the sociopolitical aspects of the people's needs in this country.
Amid the mushrooming of the international schools that oblige their students to speak English often at the cost of their native languages, this book does not lose sight of the very fact that a student's ethnic literature and local wisdom provide the crucial impetus for successful learning in this globalized world.
This book is highly accessible for general readers (both Indonesian and foreigners), even for those with no specific background knowledge of Islam, education or culture. Enriched with cases and examples drawn from real-life settings, this book will certainly be a useful reference for understanding contemporary Indonesia in the modern era.
Islam, Culture, and Education:
Essays on Contemporary Indonesia
A. Chaedar Alwasilah
Remaja Rosdakarya, 2014
437 pages
