Teaching Aristotle in Indonesia
Fraenkel, Carlos
GErriNG FROM Montreal to Makassar is not a picnic. During the thirty-six hours my partner and I spend in transit, we debate whether it is more important to teach public health or philosophy in...
...To quote from Clifford Geertz's description of abangan, the religious syncretism prevailing in Javanese villages: "Hindu goddesses rub elbows with Islamic prophets and both of these with local danjangs" (that is, guardian spirits, such as DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 31 POLITICS ABROAD Nini Tawek, the angel of the Javanese kitchen...
...Health, of course, is a universal good...
...3. See the interview with Bashir by Farish A. Noor on Aljazeera International, August 21, 2006...
...The result is not the religious pluralism advocated in the West...
...What Plato mainly means is that if one does not have knowledge of the common good, one cannot attain it...
...Rashidi, who obtained a doctorate in Islamic studies from the Sorbonne in Paris, had been Indonesia's first minister of religious affairs when the country declared independence in 1945...
...What is distinctive about the Mutazilite school of Kalam is its commitment to reason...
...These are tough questions at a State Islamic University in Indonesia, and they leave the students fairly perplexed...
...I press them again and again to explain to me why they reject the religion of the Baha'i as "merely human...
...It is here that the tools of philosophy may prove useful...
...And some more philosophical reflection seems to be needed if the students want to turn their fundamental commitments into a coherent and defensible position...
...1. See Richard C. Martin and Mark Woodward, Defenders of Reason in Islam—Mutazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol (Oxford: One World, 1998...
...But whatever its causes, I am interested in why fundamentalism does not fit with the way Islam is understood by most Indonesian Muslims...
...Basnang's explanation reflects quite accurately Indonesia's official stance on religious pluralism, institutionalized in the principles that make up Pancasila, the five foundational doctrines of the Indonesian Constitution...
...In fact, philosophy can play an important role in the world's largest Muslim country (of the 240 million inhabitants about 88 percent are Muslim, equaling the number of Muslims in the entire Middle East...
...Harun Nasution's two-volume work Islam Considered from Different Perspectives, published in 1974 while he was rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta, articulated the new scholarly agenda in a programmatic way...
...Suharto managed to channel more state money into the pockets of his family and friends than any other corrupt political leader...
...I protest strongly...
...Thus according to Pancasila, being a Muslim is not a requirement for being an Indonesian citizen, but being a monotheist is...
...But whereas the doctor aims only at the health of the body, the statesman aims at the citizens' well-being as a whole—which depends most on moral virtues and scientific knowledge...
...student in Islamic education, mentions an Indonesian woman who recently was put in jail for claiming that she received divine revelation...
...Aristotle takes the best life to be one devoted to contemplation...
...is from McGill...
...most of their work is available only in Indonesian...
...0 N THE OTHER HAND, the democratic victories of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria and of Hamas in Palestine show the turn experiments with democracy can take in the Muslim world...
...In the upcoming elections for governor in Sulawesi," Hamdan Juhannis tells me, "one of the three candidates is the son of a former leader of the Muslim rebellion in Sulawesi...
...Remaking Muslim Politics (Princeton, 2005...
...The wealthy are also to be found on the route from the hotel to the university, in a neighborhood of lavish villas commonly known as Jakarta's "Beverly Hills...
...His goal is to turn Sulawesi into a province governed by sharia law similar to Aceh where sharia law was formally implemented in 2003...
...1998), who was one of the country's most influential theologians and public intellectuals, conceived his project of bringing together Islam, rationalism, and modernity in Indonesia as a revival of Mutazilite Kalam.' Kalam literally means "speech" in Arabic and refers to the tradition of debating the fundamental principles of religion, for example, the existence and nature of God, the origin of the universe, and the question of whether human will is free or determined...
...Others are more amenable to the idea...
...But the regime prescribed by the doctor will vary according to the specific conditions of the patient...
...Needless to say, the regime, thanks to its business-friendly economic policies and violent anticommunism, enjoyed wide support among Western countries.' We get to see some of Indonesia's wealthy in Jakarta at a luxurious shopping mall (complete with Starbucks café), located next to our hotel, where the elite come to buy Chanel's newest perfume, Sony's PlayStation3, or the dernier cri of Western fashion...
...Of course, my own experience is limited to the academic setting...
...From this point of view, teaching Maimonides (d...
...From a religious point of view, the first principle is the most important: it prescribes the belief in the one and only God...
...On the one hand, the wide range of historical manifestations of Islam is taken to reflect different interpretations of the Koran and the Sunna, which are equally valid within their specific contexts...
...Not everyone in the audience is persuaded...
...But no matter how sophisticated their discussions are, they go by and large unnoticed in the West (Indonesian intellectuals like Harun Nasution, for example, are virtually unknown here...
...If Plato is DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 27 POLITICS ABROAD right (and I think he is), it follows that a good democratic state must turn all citizens into philosophers...
...The first duty prescribed to you by God," 28 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 writes Abd al-Jabbar, a tenth-century Mutazilite thinker, is "speculative reasoning," for without that, knowledge of God cannot be attained...
...And since in practice the corruption of the Imam seemed to be the rule rather than the exception, many Mutazilites thought it would be better to get rid of political leaders altogether...
...But," objects Ahmad Mujahid, a doctoral student in Islamic education, "if practical reason can do all this, what role is left for religion, in particular for shara, God's revealed law...
...34 n DISSENT / Summer 2008...
...True, certain views of the Mutazilites were imposed as state doctrine by the Abbasid caliphs, and Nasution, whose academic career unfolded under Suharto's "New Order," was mainly interested in promoting modernization...
...But the paradox is that only Western universities provide the intellectual freedom to study the immensely rich and dynamic Islamic tradition in all its manifestations...
...What they all have in common is that they originate in God and lead the members of the community to God, guided by divine revelation...
...Most of the current problems are the legacy of the Suharto regime, combined with the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, of which Indonesia was one of the principal victims...
...7. See Faisal Ismail, Islam and Pancasila (Jakarta: Departemen Agama, 2001...
...student in usul al-din, even suggests that I recommend to the rector including such sources in the curriculum for the future...
...Some of the books sport cover quotations and pictures from Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself the hero of various monographs...
...A similar question, I reply, can be put to the Mutazilites, who argued for objective moral standards accessible to reason...
...We both teach at McGill University: my partner is a medical doctor, specializing in public health...
...Other monographs are devoted to Hassan Nasrallah, celebrated as the victor of the most recent Israel–Lebanon war...
...Abangan is one of three main forms of Javanese religiosity that Geertz distinguishes in his highly controversial The Religion of Java (1960...
...Introduced by Muslim traders from India and elsewhere, it began to spread in a mostly peaceful manner from the thirteenth century onward...
...Al-Farabi explains this by drawing on a comparison that Aristotle makes between the statesman and the medical doctor...
...Whereas in Egypt (where I studied Arabic for three months in 2000), I found anti-Judaism to be pervasive—from the street to the university to the media to the museums— I encounter nothing of the kind in academic circles in Indonesia...
...This shows that the almost Gnostic view that identifies a Jewish world conspiracy as the source of universal evil along with other unpleasant components of contemporary Islamist rhetoric have found their way from the Middle East to Indonesia...
...But the result bears witness to the striking hermeneutical flexibility of Islam and the industriousness of Indonesians in working out solutions that here at least secure the generally peaceful coexistence of a wide range of religious communities...
...Much less do they feel the need to understand or resolve them...
...According to al-Farabi, Plato argues for the existence of multiple divine laws...
...The McGill-Indonesia connection dates back to the 1950s, when Muhammad Rashidi became a visiting professor at McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies, one of the most renowned centers for the study of Islam in the West...
...Adapting Hinduism and Buddhism to a monotheistic framework certainly demands a good deal of force...
...This recognition had already been extended to the Manicheans in the early Islamic period...
...On the other hand, the boundaries of the solution show that making pluralism work in a nonsecular Muslim country like Indonesia may well require an additional intellectual effort...
...They accuse us of being Orientalists...
...Dr...
...Although for al-Farabi moral standards and scientific doctrines are universal, he thinks that the ways of conveying them to citizens through laws and education differ...
...In itself it's not a pressing issue, given that an IndonesianJewish community does not exist and that the Arab-Israeli conflict is far away...
...CARLOS FRAENKEL teaches in the departments of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at McGill University, Montreal, where he also developed an interdisciplinary program that looks at how Greek philosophy interacted with the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions...
...On my last day in Makassar, Hamdan Juhannis tells me that one of the students, who happens to be his neighbor, did not sleep for two nights because he couldn't stop thinking about the issues we raised in class...
...The particular instantiations of the universal in turn function as multiple religious traditions...
...The West's secularization—both the separation of religion and state and the large-scale rejection of traditional religion—is certainly not consistent or complete, and this is not the place to discuss its complex reasons (some of which are peculiar to Christianity and to European history...
...But the real concern on everyone's mind is the problem of religious pluralism...
...As a result, forms of Islam developed that not only differed significantly from each other, but also from mainstream Islam in the Middle East...
...He pushed economic privatization and other measures on the advice of the so-called "Berkeley mafia" (Indonesian economists trained at Berkeley) that led to the temporary growth of the economy but mostly benefited foreign investors and a few local helpers...
...The Divine Message itself, not in its essence, but in its response to the demands of times and places, is historical and, therefore, subject to change," writes Madjid...
...I am told by Fuad Jabali, the vice director of graduate studies at the State Islamic University in Jakarta (whose Ph.D...
...What, then, sets Indonesian Islam apart from the Islam of other regions in the Muslim world...
...To begin with, Western democracies are not grounded on philosophical deliberation...
...On the contrary: when, for example, I mention in class that Jewish thinkers in the Middle Ages made important contributions to all major Muslim intellectual currents, several students express surprise that they were never exposed to Jewish sources...
...In this sense, Maimonides's interpretation of Judaism against the background of al-Farabi's conception of a plurality of equally valid religions agrees much more with Indonesia's commitment to religious pluralism than does the anti-Jewish discourse recently imported from the Middle East (where in turn it had earlier been imported from Europe...
...This means three things for Aristotle: determining what is best for you, determining the means to attain it, and acquiring the moral dispositions (for example, self-control and courage) that permit you to carry it out...
...Another student asks whether what I am proposing is not a "Western concept" that must remain alien to Indonesia...
...the problem lies in the commentaries, not in the sources...
...The greatest current challenge to Indonesia's liberal Muslims, such as the professors and students I meet in Makassar and Jakarta, is to reconcile Islam and religious pluralism...
...And if democracy could function only in the country that originally invented the concept, no country could be democratic except for some parts of Greece...
...THE MAIN GROUP competing with the scholars in the State Islamic Universities are Indonesia's ulama—scholars of Islam usually trained in traditional Middle Eastern centers of learning, such as al-Azhar University in Cairo...
...For me, at any rate, discussions with Indonesian colleagues and students are an intriguing opportunity to think again about the solutions on which we settled in the West—their historical background and the extent to which they depend on a secular framework...
...At the same time, it provided a foundation for the concept of pluralism, both within Islam and of Islam in relation to other religions, the most important being those of Indonesia's religious minorities: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity...
...Many McGill graduates went on to play important roles in Indonesia's intellectual and political circles...
...Has the world not changed since then...
...If Indonesia were to achieve this, it would, in my opinion, become significantly superior to any democracy in the West...
...It took the Hindu and Buddhist communities in Indonesia several years to persuade the authorities that their religions are monotheistic and that they reDISSENT / Summer 2008 3 3 POLITICS ABROAD ceived a divine revelation...
...Wahyuddin Halim, a young lecturer in the Department of Islamic Theology and Philosophy, asks what textbook I would recommend for an introductory class...
...At least some of them are up to the challenge...
...But on the whole I find it difficult to imagine that Islam will be fundamentally challenged anytime soon, either as a political factor or as the religious commitment of the great majority of Muslims...
...6. "Islamic Roots of Modern Pluralism" in Studia Islamika 1,1 (1994...
...During the thirty-six hours my partner and I spend in transit, we debate whether it is more important to teach public health or philosophy in Indonesia, because this is the reason for our three-week trip to the capital of the Indonesian province of Sulawesi...
...Indonesia is not Canada...
...Just as popular are big shopping malls, sporting the same assortment of boutiques, restaurants, and cinemas as those back home...
...One student remarks that his friend, after studying philosophy, began to behave in a rather peculiar manner: "He would walk around in two different shoes, for example, or put tea into the coffee machine...
...Moreover, philosophical debate in many ways is an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition...
...And why is Muhammad taken to be the "seal of the prophets...
...But whether we agree or not with his proposal, more interesting is that he conceives practical philosophy as the art of making the right decisions about how to live...
...2005), by far the most influential contemporary Muslim thinker in Indonesia ("What people write now," says Wahyuddin Halim, "are just footnotes to Madjid...
...The Imam's office, moreover, should be elective and filled by the person of greatest merit...
...Was the concept not imported by members of the Indonesian elite who had studied in Europe...
...Leaving aside the issue of philosophy, several students question why Indonesians should support democracy at all...
...Are not nondemocratic Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia prospering in contrast to Indonesia...
...Democracy, however, is not the only import from the West...
...At the same time many Indonesian Muslims interpret Pancasila's first principle as a minimalist definition of Islam.' In this broad sense, then, all Indonesians can be seen as Muslims and as living under Islam's rule...
...Y FIRST ENCOUNTER with non-Muslim religions in Indonesia is somewhat disconcerting...
...IT'S NO accident that the most interesting discussion I have with the students about religious pluralism occurs when we look at the notion of a plurality of valid religions proposed by the great medieval Muslim philosopher al-Farabi (d...
...For the students recognize that Maimonides's interpretation of Mosaic Law can be seen as applying al-Farabi's theory to Judaism, making Judaism one such instantiation that can exist alongside Islam as another...
...Coping peacefully with the tensions that this process generates will require a good deal of creative thinking...
...Aristotle, we find out at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, thinks that laws can play a crucial pedagogical role in shaping the character of the citizens: by prescribing what is right and wrong before practical reason is able to discern it...
...I reply that it is by no means obvious that economic prosperity is the same as the common good...
...student in Islamic law...
...Most important among these is the indigenous Animism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism, each of which had been Indonesia's state religion in earlier periods...
...Since Rashidi, dozens of Indonesians have graduated with M.A.s or Ph.D.s from McGill, a substantial number of McGill professors have taught in Indonesia, and bilateral research projects exist on a wide range of academic subjects...
...Harun Nasution (d...
...They include ethnoreligious conflicts, widespread corruption, economic stagnation, and growing poverty...
...The obsession with terrorists and fundamentalists (incidentally, only about 10 percent of Indonesians support fundamentalist Islam, and fewer than 1 percent support groups that use terror to achieve their goals), as well as with the stalled Israeli–Palestinian conflict, leave little room for philosophical debate...
...Academics spend much time debating the question of "Orientalism," made prominent by Edward Said: did the scholarly study of the Muslim world lead to an objective representation or to an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialist projects...
...5. See the evidence quoted by Robert Hefner showing that 60 percent of Indonesian Muslims voted for non-Islamic or secular parties in the 1999 elections...
...But next to the problem of inclusiveness, there is also the problem of conceptual coherence...
...Are we forbidden to make mistakes...
...The space it spread into was anything but homogeneous: an archipelago of some seventeen thousand islands, populated by more than three hundred ethnic and linguistic groups that never came together to form a centrally administered Islamic state (indeed, for most of the Islamic period Indonesia was under Dutch colonial rule...
...But even more interesting are the similarities that the students point out between the view set forth by al-Farabi and the understanding of religious pluralism proposed by Indonesian intellectuals, in particular Nurcholish Madjid...
...On this occasion, official boards throughout Jakarta display congratulatory messages to the Buddhist community...
...If the Imam acts against the divine law, he must be deposed...
...Many would say that the opposite is the case...
...Whereas before it was modeled on the curriculum of al-Azhar University in Cairo, the foremost center of Islamic scholarship in the Middle East, they rewrote it along the lines of the curriculum at McGill...
...For one thing, Islam arrived here quite late and not as the consequence of military conquest...
...For one thing, it allowed students to understand Indonesia's Muslim practice as one of many legitimate expressions of Islam rather than as a deviation from the alleged orthodoxy of the Middle East...
...On the assumption shared by the students that God adapts his message to varying historical circumstances—why should he have stopped doing so after getting to seventhcentury Arabia...
...The candidate in question was not elected, and, in general, since democracy was restored in 1998, parties advocating the establishment of an Islamic state have never gotten more than 20 percent of the vote...
...For the way various contemporary Muslim intellectuals like Nurcholish Madjid combine the universal and the relative in their conception of religion has interesting affinities as well as indirect historical links with the Platonic tradition represented by al-Farabi...
...The answer they propose illustrates well, I think, the poten30 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 tial and the limitations of the present discussion...
...Together we examine the relationship between ethics, politics, and religion: first in Plato and Aristotle and then in medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers who creatively adapted the Greeks' conceptual framework in order to interpret Islam and Judaism as philosophical religions...
...The attitude informed by this kind of literature is fundamentally inconsistent with what Robert Hefner calls "civil Islam," which the majority of Indonesian Muslims embrace and whose most distinctive trait, according to Hefner, is "its remarkable cultural pluralism...
...The doctor always tries to achieve the same end for his patients, namely to restore their health...
...This is an intriguing attempt to reconcile the commitment to an absolutely valid core of Islam with religious pluralism...
...In addition, they also developed a highly sophisticated culture of debate, not only among themselves, but also with thinkers from competing Muslim intellectual currents and other religious traditions— Jews, Christians, and Manicheans...
...Hamdan Juhannis— a specialist in Indonesian Islam—had already warned me that jokes about philosophers are widespread in Indonesia...
...Mukti Ali's office term overlapped with Harun Nasution's tenure as the rector of Jakarta's State Islamic University and together they managed to implement a radical and controversial reform of the curriculum for the public system of Islamic higher education...
...Nobody denies the usefulness of teaching medicine and public health, especially in a developing country...
...Perplexity, of course, can also be a gate into philosophy...
...There we can acquire the methods for understanding how these manifestations vary according to historical, cultural, socioeconomic and geographic circumstances...
...Since the age of ancient Athens, many countries around the world have successfully naturalized democracy, including countries like Germany, Japan, and India that can hardly lay claim to long-standing democratic traditions...
...In class, when we discuss Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics—of which we read selections in a medieval Arabic translation—the question comes up whether things one can buy contribute to the good life...
...The ulama always looked with suspicion at their colleagues, who mostly graduated from McGill and other universities in the West...
...Is the economic POLITICS ABROAD situation not worse now than it was during the "New Order" of military dictator Suharto...
...This allows, for example, accepting the divergences between Indonesian and Middle Eastern Islam as contextual rather than essential...
...Although I haven't met anyone in Indonesia who accepts his analysis entirely (he's taken to be saying that most Indonesians are not authentic Muslims), the peculiar character of Indonesian Islam is now widely recognized and plays an important role in the academic discussion of religious pluralism...
...With respect to separating religion and state, for example, things vary considerably in Turkey, Indonesia, and Iran...
...Burhanunddin Yusuf, a Ph.D...
...But why does CIDA send a philosopher instead of a second doctor or, for that matter, a social worker, an engineer, or an economist...
...From the point of view of contemporary Indonesia, Mutazilite Kalam, which flourished from the eighth to the eleventh century under the rule of the Abbasid caliphs, is perhaps the most interesting example (though by no means the only one...
...In any case," I suggest at the end of the discussion, "whether democracy is conducive to the common good is ultimately a philosophical question...
...And why shouldn't the intellectual tools developed in Mutazilite Kalam be put into the service of public democratic debate, even if this wasn't their original purpose...
...The classes we give at Alauddin State Islamic University—one of fourteen academic institutions in Indonesia that make up the public system of Islamic higher education under the auspices of the ministry of religious affairs—are part of a McGill-based Indonesia Social Equity Project, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA...
...But the Indonesian model abandons the concept of supersession and extends the recognition to additional religious traditions...
...But there is evidence that a basic commitment to the kind of religious pluralism promoted by the state is shared by about 60 percent of Indonesian Muslims.' During our three-week stay in Indonesia we witnessed two national holidays: one is the day of Christ's ascension, the other Waisak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha...
...This does not mean that by nature Islam excludes any of these...
...Muslim Democrats and Islamist Violence in Post-Soeharto Indonesia," in Hefner (ed...
...They insisted that all humans are able to determine good and evil on the basis of divine law and independent reasoning and that they have the duty to reject anything contradicting their judgment—even if it is commanded by the Imam, the political leader...
...Simplifying a bit, one can say that the Mutazilites did not accept religious doctrines on the authority of revelation alone, but only did so after they found them confirmed through rational examination...
...2. Robert Hefner, Civil Islam—Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, 2000...
...Why, moreover, is it prohibited to follow a false religion...
...Indonesia thus provides a strong argument for the view that although the rise of fundamentalism has many causes, religion, paradoxically, must not be one of them...
...I'm a historian of philosophy, working, among other things, on Muslim and Jewish thought...
...Taking a religious framework of one kind or another as given, the challenges and tensions that Indonesia, and more generally the Islamic world, face today, raise many important philosophical issues ranging from the relation of reason and religion to questions about autonomy and authority in moral action...
...Most of the time, only the servants live here, while the owners are abroad," comments our driver...
...The question of Islam's relation to Judaism in Indonesia is, therefore, part of the broader question of Islam's relation to other religions...
...Why is Muhammad's claim to have received divine revelation true whereas Baha'u'llah's is false...
...This is where I should note the impact that McGill University has had on the character of this discussion...
...Although I only spent three weeks in DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD the country, I doubt that what ultimately comes out of the process will be secular in the manner accepted in the West in the last few decades...
...You cannot avoid philosophy if you want to come to a conclusion on this issue that is supported by good reasons...
...In a public lecture to faculty and students at the State Islamic Universities in Makassar and Jakarta, I suggest that if I were the Indonesian minister of education, I would make introductory philosophy courses obligatory at all Indonesian high schools and universities...
...And the country's corrupt elite in their view are nothing but puppets, ultimately controlled by Jewish puppeteers.' In reality, things look much more prosaic and involve neither God nor the Jews...
...On the other hand, the Mutazilites were so strongly egalitarian that they came close to anarchism...
...The political, economic, and social problems that, especially over the last decade, have played into the hands of fundamentalists are too complex for a detailed analysis here...
...Someone, in other words, whose expertise is of immediate use for improving the living conditions of Indonesians...
...Given the pluralistic character of Indonesian society today, this seems to make Mutazilite Kalam an attractive historical model for conducting contemporary discussions...
...Radical preachers, such as Indonesia's notorious cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, exploit the POLITICS ABROAD situation to further their cause: because Indonesia is not ruled by Islamic law, they claim, it does not enjoy God's favor, which in turn is the reason why so many Indonesians aren't doing well...
...But they do not have a criterion to distinguish between a true religion and one that is false...
...This is the background to the concepts of relativism and POLITICS ABROAD inclusiveness—key concepts that inform the argument for pluralism set forth by Nurcholish Madjid (d...
...One reason is related to Plato's famous thesis in the Republic: a good state can only come into existence if the rulers become philosophers or the philosophers rulers...
...Adherents of religions not recognized by the state, in particular Animism, "have no religion," explains Sabir Maidin, a Ph.D...
...They include Harun Nasution, whose neo-Mutazilite project first took shape at McGill, and Mukti Ali, the minister of religious affairs from 1971 to 1978...
...In a sense, this view just takes one step further the traditional Islamic recognition of Judaism and Christianity as having been at one time valid, but, after the advent of Islam, superseded by revelations...
...Atheists are excluded from the outset...
...1204), the great medieval Jewish Aristotelian, in Makassar becomes very interesting...
...The impact of all these efforts is discernible on three levels: the "official" Islam promoted by the ministry of 32 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 religious affairs, the discourse about Islam shaped by intellectuals like Harun Nasution, and finally the perception of Islam on the grassroots level—because the Islamic universities recruit their students mostly from pious and economically disadvantaged sectors of Indonesian society...
...All are doing graduate work in the different departments of the Faculty of Islamic Studies: in Islamic exegesis, history, and education, for example, and a few also in usul aldin, the philosophical and theological foundations of religion...
...And this is where quite a few young Indonesians would like to take us...
...and—on the same bookshelf—John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's London Review of Books essay on "The Israel Lobby...
...It takes place, immediately upon our arrival, at the bookstore in Makassar's airport (and visits to other bookstores later confirm what we see there): on offer are not only Indonesian translations of Danielle Steele's latest novels and American self-help books about how to get a successful business off the ground, but also a wide range of old and new anti-Jewish texts, including Mein Kampf, a history of the Waffen-SS, an abridged version of Henry Ford's The International Jew (which comes with a free brochure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), a book entitled Holocaust–Fact or Fiction...
...But making the Indonesian configuration work will require a considerable amount of interpreting and persuading...
...A good statesman, who for al-Farabi is both a philosopher and a prophet, proceeds in a similar way...
...Over time the twin pillars of McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies were adopted by the Indonesians: the interdisciplinary study of Islam and the comparative study of religion...
...Fatira Wahida, a Ph.D...
...At its origin, Islam—like Judaism and Christianity (although the case is somewhat different for each)—was neither democratic nor pluralistic nor bound up with a nationstate...
...4. For a good account of modern Indonesian history, see Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge, 2005...
...About twenty students have registered for my class...
...Nor is it right to say that the Muslim world is not secular at all...
...Recognizing and contextualizing the diversity of Islam instead of artificially constructing a monolithic orthodox tradition—the approach of the ulama—has nowhere proved more liberating than in Indonesia...
...student in Islamic education, argues that "the Koran, the Sunna, and their interpretations are one way to implement [this eternal and universal religion...
...Or in the schools of the Dutch colonizers who exploited Indonesia for almost 450 years...
...But this is a phenomenon of recent years...
...Most people—in Indonesia and elsewhere—don't even know that the problems philosophers turn over in their minds exist...
...Present-day Indonesia, at least as it presents itself to me, is a gigantic intellectual and political laboratory, where Islam is not only trying to come to terms with democracy but also with the country's long-standing commitments to religious pluralism, modernization, and the construction of a national identity...
...Thus, after three hours of lecturing on philosophy, democracy, and religion, I find myself savoring Pizza Hut's newest culinary creations, strolling through the hippest mall in town, and sleeping through the better part of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest...
...On the other hand, Islam as a whole is taken as only one historical expression of God's eternal and universal religion, on a par with other historical religions...
...Although the texts are old, the questions they raise often turn out to be very much alive for the students...
...Are their lives any less happy for that reason...
...Whatever the answer, one part of Western culture is well on the way to conquering Indonesia's postcolonial urban soul: KFC (though served with the ubiquitous rice instead of fries) and similar blessings—Pizza Hut, McDonalds, you name it—enjoy immense popularity here...
...6 Basnang Said, a Ph.D...
...Because I don't speak Bahasa Indonesian, the country's national language, class discussions take place in Arabic and English...
...Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity are other ways...
...I suggest turning to Sari Nusseibeh, the president of the Palestinian al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, where I had taught a class in the previous year...
...The son hasn't given up on the father's objectives, but he's using democratic means instead of arms to attain them...
...In addition, Islam blended with a wide range of previously existing religious traditions...
...In this sense, the future of Indonesian democracy is open, but there seems little reason for concern...
...950...
...Nusseibeh—himself a philosopher by training—developed a class entitled "Critical Thinking" that is obligatory for all students at al-Quds...
...Democracy is a hot topic in Indonesia...
...Each way is valid within a particular set of conditions—historical, cultural, socioeconomic, geographic, and so forth...
...Many of the students, moreover, later become teachers in high schools (all of my students, for example, are already teaching...
...Muslim intellectuals have discussed variations of these questions since the middle of the nineteenth century...
...But," objects Wahyuddin Halim, "in which sense can the Mutazilites and Harun Nasution really be described as champions of democracy...
...Time and again historical and contemporary perspectives blur in the discussion...
...The students simply take the truth of the important historical religions up to Islam for granted ("If there are conflicts between religions," says Burhanuddin Yusuf, "they come from false interpretations...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
