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Let me begin with the story of a young man who got hit, and killed, by a passing motorbike, and left 17 books of dairies in his rented room. His name is Ahmad Wahib. He died in a Jakarta street in 1973.
He was a Tempo new recruit. As the editor of the magazine, I was among those who arranged his funeral, etc. When we went to his place, to collect and take care of the meagre belongings he left behind, we found the thick diary-books, neatly packed on his table – as if Wahib had prepared a consoling gift for us, in the wake of the tragedy. As things go, it was truly a gift, and not only for his friends. His private notes, all written in long hand, were not just another record of a private life.
Born in 1942 in the island of Madura, east of Java, where traditional Islam found a strong root, Wahib, thanks to his independent-minded father, was the first member of his family sent to the public school of his hometown. In 1961, he left Madura and moved to Central Java, and enrolled in the Department of Physics and Sciences of the Gajah Mada University, in the old town of Yogyakarta. In 1970, he went to Jakarta, for the first time in his life. Months before he died, he worked, unhappily, as a Tempo journalist.
As early as 1963, Wahid shone through among his peers. As a university student from a pious Muslim family, he joined HMI (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam, or Muslim Students Association, established in 1947), which was politically one of the most active and most influential student organizations in the 1960s. In no time, Wahib was involved in various, often intense, in-house ideological debates. Ideological and political discussions were then a normal routine among Indonesian students, both on and off-campus. It was the time when Indonesia, under Soekarno’s ‘Guided Democracy,’ was made to follow the road Sukarno chose, which was the Indonesian brand of nationalism-cum-Marxism.
It was a very different Indonesia. With a refreshed revolu- tionary fervour, an all-embracing doctrine of ‘Indonesian socialism’, an intense political life somewhat similar to Orwellian depiction of ‘continuous frenzy’, and a state machinery that organized regular sessions of ‘indoctrination’, Sukarno’s Indonesia looked a little bit like Mao’s China – just a little bit, since it was arguably much milder and more erratic. All the same, it purged any kind of ‘dangerous’ thinking. The idea of promoting Islam as an “ideology” was a taboo. The aspiration to create an Islamic state – a long- standing agenda among political Muslims – was illegal. Soekarno and the military banned Masyumi, the biggest Muslim party and the No. 2 winner of the free election of 1955. He put the party’s leaders in jail, and the ‘modernist’ Islam it represented became a political stigma. The regime labelled Masyumi-kind of people “counter-revolutionary” and “rightist”. Naturally, HMI, closely associated with Masyumi and the ‘modernist’, had to suffer the tag. Constantly harassed and threatened by the politically powerful left-wing student organizations, it had to do a lot of negotiation, and of rethinking — which required a sustained and rigorous theoretical argument.
Wahib, always a thinker, was all prepared to help HMI in the rethinking process. Gradually, with a few other HMI cadres, he discovered serious flaws in the idea of Islam as a totalising ideology and as a complete guide to establish a 20 century Islamic state. What made Wahib special was that he allowed himself to grow into, as it were, a “dissident”—or someone who dared to question the inner layers of Islamic system of belief. He was increasingly known as a brilliant, albeit controversial, young intellectual in HMI circle. He was no longer a non-entity. I re- member that it was a time when ideas were absolutely important, indeed crucial, and often painful.
During this period Wahib – a short, frail, unassuming, sensitive, young man who always spoke with a polite smile –scribbled down his pain, his doubts and his ideas in diaries. Djohan Effendi, his close friend and ally who was one of the earliest persons who dared to debunk the basic tenets of HMI’s political thinking, knew about the existence of the diaries; he knew that they would make a rich and important text documenting a young Muslim’s mind struggling to overcome the embarrassing inertia of Islamic thinking after decades of ‘modernist’ discourse. He wanted to make them accessible to the public.
After discussing the plan with Wahib’s family, he sent the dairies to an editor and a publisher. It took eight years to get them published in a book form, but apparently the delay did not really matter.
Heffner, who, in his Civil Islam, gives a good summary of Wahib’s behind-the-scene role in the new ‘Reform’ (Pembaharuan) movement, informs us that the dairies remain ‘a best seller to this day in Indonesia.’
Maybe they do, though I am not to sure. The book certainly had provoked all kinds of response. In mid-1980s, there was reportedly an attempt, by the Department of Religious Affairs, to pressure the publisher not to reprint it; I have not seen it in bookstores since its third print in 1983. But while there was an influential group portraying Wahib as a heretic, the book has obviously reached a significant number of interested readers. Two leading members of the new generation of liberal Muslims, who were not even in their teens when Wahib died, told me that Wahib’s book was among their earliest introduction to a wider world of literature.
As a record of diverse thoughts and notes, it covers a wide variety of topics. However, it has one underlying élan: it is an expression of an intensely questioning mind that breaks every taboo, and by doing so, breaks a new ground for further debates on the idea of ‘Islam.’ Wahib was not without inner turmoil. In an entry dated May 18, 1969 he wrote: “Lord, I come to Thee not only in moments when I love Thee, but also in moments I am not faithful to Thee and misunderstand Thee, in moments I seem to rebel against Thy Power. In doing so, Lord, I wish my love for Thee return as it was before.”
However, Wahib’s dairies are by and large not poetic paragraphs conveying his private struggle with the faith. What is most fascinating about the book is that it is a first-hand account of how an idea so novel gained a foothold and won new supporters through basic organizational politics. Despite Wahib’s later dis-illusion with HMI, he and his friends, especially Djohan Effendi, succeeded in disseminating their ideas by lobbying for support, making use of available HMI cadre training sessions, taking the lead in in-house discussions, and competing for strategic positions.
In September 1969, exhausted and disillusioned, Wahib and Djohan quitted the organization; but the agenda they championed was adopted as HMI’s new platform. It was basically an agenda based on seeing Islam not as an “ideology”, meaning an immutable, totalising vision distinctly different from other, opposing “ideology(ies),” but as an inspiring source of conduct. Starting from this platform, freed from the political stigma, the Manichean myth and the stiff precepts of the past, HMI grew progressively into becoming a breeding ground for Indonesian new political elites; today, they are the ones who practically run the country.
To be sure, Wahib’s ideas did not always find a receptive audience. In fact, he was under persistent attacks by HMI’s old guards, who defended the old Masyumi’s idea of ‘Islam’ and the quest for an Islamic state; so exhausting was the infighting that ultimately Wahib left HMI, explaining that he did it to free the organization from his “constantly dissenting voice”, and to give himself a “wider inner space” to think.
However, by 1970, his ideas won new converts, the most important one being Nurcholish Madjid, who, in a sudden move, eloquently promoted the thing Wahib had been talking about in close circles. It was the imperative of “secularising” today’s Muslim society.
By all accounts, what Nurcholish Madjid did was a major, if not historic, event in the development of liberal ideas in Islam in Indonesia. The role of Nurcholish Madjid was doubtless highly strategic. At the age of twenty-seven, he was already a rising star. He was elected Chairman of HMI for two consecutive periods (1966-1971), when Indonesia was undergoing a cataclysmic political and social change; when Sukarno’s ‘guided democracy’ and his socialist economy collapsed, when Suharto’s New Order rose to power through a terrible bloodbath exterminating thousands of suspected communists, and with the help of the students, most of them were HMI members, who took the street in thousands, toppling Sukarno, changing the country. It was a time of HMI’s euphoria. After almost a decade living the life of a political pariah, many Muslims, especially the ‘modernists’, the bulk of Masyumi’s constituency, saw in Nurcholish Madjid an intellectual and political leader of the future.
He had all the necessary credentials. He was born in Jombang, East Java, a stronghold of traditionalist Islam, and raised by a father who was a kyai (an ullema, a religious teacher) who chose Masyumi as his party. Nurcholish was a graduate of a pesantren, or Islamic boarding school, although it was a pesantren with difference: it taught Nurcholish not only Arabic, but also English and French. Even as a young student activist, he was known as a man of erudition and personal integrity. The ‘modernist’ admiringly called him “the new Natsir” – Natsir being the revered leader of Masyumi, who was also a man of erudition and personal integrity, although with much more intransigent disposition.
Initially, Nurcholish was comfortable with the ideas Natsir and the old “modernists” stood for. In 1965, he published a book, Islamisme, soon to be a required reading for HMI members all over the country. His argument was based on the prevailing ideology of the ‘modernist’, valorising the finality and the integrality of Islam. Using typically essentialist proposition in books like Vera Michels Dean’s The Nature of the Non-Western World, Nurcholish saw in Islam an all-in-one praxis, comprising religion, political system, way of life and interpretation of history.
In line with such a panoptic view of Islam, Nurcholish wrote another article to be distributed, like his Islamisme, to HMI chapters all over Indonesia; it pointed out that “modernisation” is not equal to “westernisation,” implying a strict dichotomy of perfectly coherent and all encompassing entities, perpetually classified as “West” and “non-West.”
Such temptation of totality was probably irresistible given the predominance of Marxism (and to large degree, of Marxism-Leninism) in Indonesian political thinking in the 1960s. Nurcholish, like many others, naturally would insist that: Islam had to give an adequate response to it. However, his view gradually changed.
In his dairies, Wahib wrote that it began shortly after Nurcholish’s visit to the US, which was his first foreign trip, in October 1968. In his diaries, Wahib described Nurcholish’s momentous meeting with Soedjatmoko, the Indonesian ambassador to the US, a widely respected Indonesian intellectual, and how it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and of Nurcholish’s transformation.
But whatever the reason, (and there should not be a single cause of this kind of thing), the quest for a liberal Islam in Indonesia was ripe for a new impetus, and 1970 saw Nurcholish moving to the centre stage of the new Islamic reform movement.
He delivered the controversial speech on January 3, 1970, in front of a large gathering of Muslim students and other young activists. This may be a usual pattern in the battles of ideas among Muslims in Indonesia: deadly serious, often profound, intellectual arguments take the platform of organizational politics. The speech, titled Keharusan Pembahauan Pemikiran Islam dan Masaalah Integrasi Umat (The Necessity of Renewing Islamic Thought and the Problem of the Integration of the Umma), wrapped in a lucid, if not rather bland, prose, was intended to generate a rational, judicious, review of the complexity Indonesian Muslims had to deal with. Nurcholish, like Wahib before him, appealed for an effort to “secularise” Moslem’s life. By “to secularise” what he actually meant was “to desacralise” things profane but made sacral – like the idea of an Islamic state. In other words, Moslems should “secularise” the political while preserving what is truly sacred in Islam.
The word was shocking (it was a “tactical blunder”, Nurcholish himself later conceded), the issue was decidedly thorny, so the reaction to the speech was predictably vehement. As Heffner puts it, “one could hardly think of a more provocative point from which to launch a career as a Muslim intellectual.” His Civil Islam gives an excellent description and analysis of the controversy over Nurcholish’s 1970 speech, as well as the social setting of the growing polarity between the new generation of Muslim intellectuals and the old “modernists”.
I am not going to repeat Heffner’s description here.
For the purpose of today’s talk, a quote from Heffner, paraphrasing Natsir, the leading thinker of the old “modernist”, will suffice to remind us of what I believe to be the leitmotif of Indonesian quest for a liberal Islam. “Islam is a ‘total’ system”, Natsir wrote in 1953, “intended to regulate the whole of human life. To concede the idea that Islam cannot control all social spheres implies a renunciation of Islam’s holism.”
It is precisely against such ‘holism’ a new generation of Muslim intellectuals, many of them under 40, raise their voices.
***
Before I tell you more about these new players on the field, allow me to review what are the issues on the table, after we follow the stories of Ahmad Wahib and Nurcholish Madjid.
One important emphasis that Wahib put in his pioneering probe into the problems of Islamic ‘inertia’ (kemandegan) in Indonesia is the imperative of historicizing the faith. To be sure, this is not something unusual in contemporary Islamic thought. All the same, it was Wahib, in his youthful and unsystematic way, back in 1969, who called upon the notion “essence”, “unity”, and “immutability” to be re-examined.
Let’s remember that in the beginning, Wahib did not abandon the notion of “essence” entirely. The Divine guidance is given to all mankind, regardless of particular space and time. “It is singular, eternal and universal,” he wrote in November 7, 1970. However, human is space- and time-bound, and more importantly, he/she grows, develops, changes. He/she is being-in-history.
On that account, the status of the Prophet is like “a conditional case”. The Prophet’s life history is a “copy”, or a “snapshot”, of the teaching of Islam, and not the teaching itself. Therefore, he says, the relation between a Muslim and the Prophet is necessarily a creative one. “One does not have to emulate every word-and-act of the Prophet.” Thus, it is not exactly correct to see Islam “limits” or “outlines” directing the works of humankind, and Allah as Being directing all human activities. “To me,” Wahid says, “Allah is central authority of the ethical and Islam a source of the moral (spiritual).” As a consequence, Islam, for Wahib, is a “a private/personal religion” (agama pribadi).
In an entry dated September 15, 1970, Wahib went further into questioning the position of the Qur’an: “By saying that the Qur’an is not God’s revelation, I exalt Him glorify Him even more. By identifying the Qur ’an as Allah’s words, we slight Him, insult Him and His Wills, seeing them as mere objects explainable to human language. …God is “the unverbalizable”. He is the owner of eternal messages. He and His Word are hidden, unreachable by our reason and our expression…. With faith we try to receive God. But Faith itself is not equal to God. Faith is only a medium of an encounter. Therefore the notion of Faith is changeable according to the level of experience of the human who uses it.”
Wahib died at 31, and did not have the time to continue his probing and develop his thinking. But what he wrote in the above-quoted entry is tantamount to deconstructing the notion of “the essence” to which dispersed Moslems should return. In fact, Wahib’s argument is a celebration of dispersal.
His thesis is more like the ideas developed in the so-called “negative theology,” but more interestingly, a parallel thesis is discernable in Nurcholish’s later theological thinking. Nurcholish is of course, more equipped than Wahib in running a close reading of the Qur-anic text, and writing to a large public, he is more lucid in his prose, with a touch of serenity. But what he expresses is fundamentally a radical break from the notion of Islamic “holism”, the idea of trans-historical precepts, and the myth of the singular ummah. His more popular writings, collected in a book aptly titled, Pintu-Pintu Menuju Tuhan (Doors Towards God), is a defence of difference against the suppression of identity.
One of Nurcholish’s most interesting arguments is his interpretation of syariah. Syariah, according to Nurcholish, is equal to the word “way”. In other words, something that does not imply “inertia”. It implies “process”, which is by definition a continuing event – not a closure. The key notion is “towards”, (menuju), and we all are always on the way towards God, the unreachable (or, in Wahib’s word, “the unverbalizable”), because He is absolute, and we are not.
Even the meaning of “Islam” itself requires a redefinition. For Nurcholish, islam means “a complete submission to God.” Therefore all true religions are “islam”, and even the religion brought by Prophet Mohammed is not unique. It is not an isolated and separate entity. When some one says of the “triumph of Islam”, Nurcholish says, “it should be the triumph of an idea, regardless who does the good work. The triumph of Islam should be a happiness for all.”
Nurcholish’s inclusive theology is doubtless a very appealing alternative to today’s sound and fury of, to use Karen Armstrong’s metaphor, “the battles for God”. It has the positive sense of making universality not only desirable, but also possible. However, it is the very issue of universality that today’s ‘liberal Islam” has to address to. Both in Wahib’s deconstruction of the notion of “essence”, and in Nurcholish’s argument to liberate difference from identity, the emphasis is on the historically contingent character of Islam. From this perspective, what holds the notion of universality in their ideas?
***
To the current thinking in Indonesia’s brand of liberal Islam, the notion of universality is problematic. One way or another, the “modernist” of the previous generation of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, insisting on the purification of the faith, viewed sediments of local history (or histories) as un-Islamic. “Modern”, in this sense, is devoid of memories – or of a claim of particularity. But it is a moot question whether, while negating the notion of historical contingency, the purifying modernists accept the inclusive sentiment implied in the notion of universality. An Islam beyond history is a pristine perfection; it is final, like a closed space – and it cannot possible be open to otherness. It claims the Text as monolithic, and its their political imagining of it.
Probably for this reason, the new generation of liberal Islam includes a large number of intellectuals with a more traditionalist background. They come from strong families of NU, or the Nahdhatul Ulama, a socio-political group led by a confederation of ullemas, whose social and political bases are pesantren’s (Islamic boarding schools). Increasingly, NU defines its identity by asserting a critical stance towards the push and pull of “modernity”, insisting the legitimacy of cultural legacies that shape “customary Islam”. On that account, not all of the young intellectuals, while arguing for the historicity of the Faith, like Wahib and Nurcholish (whose intellectual genealogy is more on the side of the ‘modernist’) do, are happy with the word “liberal” as an adjective.
An article in the recent issue of LKiS Website, written by A.Djadul Maulana, one of the leading figure of the LKiS group, a Muslim NGO known for its open opposition to the “fundamentalists” street histrionics, argues that the current discourse on “liberal Islam” maybe only a replay of the previous “modernist” temper, since its bias remains for Islam’s universality.
It is not certain whether the new generation of young liberal Muslims who run the Islamlib Website would satisfactorily answer the challenge. However, like the LKiS people, they put themselves squarely against the very “modernist” temper Maulana speaks about. Like Maulana, the leading figure of this group, Ulil Abshar Abdallah is a solid NU intellectual. Ulil, as he is commonly called, was the son of an NU ulemma in Jepara (Central Java), finished his traditional schooling and acquired his Arabic in a private college in Jakarta. Well-versed in the long history of Quranic exegesis (from which he learned the dynamics of “internal dissension” in interpreting the Faith) he is familiar with contemporary European philosophy, among others by reading his Heidegger in Arabic.
At 31, Ulil has established himself as a brilliant writer and speaker, and also an activist promoting dialogue between different religions. His argument for “liberal Islam” is precisely against the idea of a pristine Islam or “Islam an sich”, or, by implication, Islam as transcendental presence. As he says it, Islam has always an adjective attached to it. Hence the word “liberal” in “liberal Islam” is not simply one qualifier among others, but an inauguration of the legitimacy of qualifiers. Hence while the word “liberal” implies a belief in the individual right, especially in religious matters – in the other words, the recognition of dispersion, it also carries a notion of “liberating”.
In his recent e-mail he goes further by arguing for a post- Nurcholish interpretation of Islam. “We are aiming the very heart of the doctrine,” he says. His group, he says, is planning to publish a new edition of the Qur ’an (he and his friends call it “a critical edition”) that can serve as a wealth of different alternatives of interpretation.
It may be not an idle talk. Quite recently, a young scholar from Makassar, Taufik Adnan Amal, published a study on the history of the Qur ’an, describing, among others, the repression of heterogeneity in the way the Qur’an. This took place after Uthman, the third Caliph, unified and standardized the writing and the reading of the text in mid-7 century. His book, Rekonstruksi Sejarah al-Qur’an (the Reconstruction of the History of the Qur’an), is definitely the first of its kind, and may open the way of further “liberation”.
To be sure, the drive for the liberating feature of Islam, will generate resistance from the more “scriptualist” Muslims. But to suppress it would require a less democratic, and more Islamist kind of regime in Indonesia. After all, if an Ahmad Wahib could write down his endless list of questions about God and other small things, other restless minds will be as capable as the rebellious young man who died in the street of Jakarta in 1973.
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