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Ramadan thoughts

STRAIGHT TALK ---- The country deserves an honest, thoughtful, and sophisticated discussion on Islamic identity and what it means and how it is constructed. As with all other matters of importance, it is a discussion we have never had in this country beyond simplistic, unserious, and cynical calumnies, accusations, and counter-accusations. Let us talk seriously about Islam and identity, and let us create space for progressive Islamic voices and thinking.
LAST week I wrote about my recent trip to Indonesia, and how intrigued and impressed I was to learn about the diversity and visibility of progressive Islamic voices in that country. I'll be honest; before I went to Jakarta, I was under the impression, from newspa-per/magazine articles and television news over the past few years, that Indonesia was a country heading in the direction of fundamentalism.
After all, it was not so very long ago that terrorism in Indonesia was international news, with the deadly Bali bombing of 2002, and since then there has been a steady clip of beheadings and other atrocities against nonMuslims in various parts of the archipelago. The most recent indication of fanaticism was the rise of a virulent campaign against the Ahmadia community that mirrored campaigns in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The conservative PKS party won 45 seats in the 550-seat national parliament in 2004.
Conventional wisdom had it that Indonesia had taken a very hard right turn and that it was well on the way to becoming a stultifying and intolerant theocracy. I imagined that I would find a country, in terms of religion, consider- ably to the right of Bangladesh. What I found, instead, was a country that, to my eyes, seems to be navigating the waters of Islamic identity in the 21st century in a much more sophisticated manner than we are.
Indonesia has certainly experienced a revival of Islam in terms of how people construct their identity. The head-scarf is more or less ubiquitous. Religious organisations and universities have certainly seen an increase in enrollment. And Islam and Islamic identity is a subject that receives a great deal of thought, air-time, and column inches among the media, intellectuals, and common people alike.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that this means that Indonesian Muslims are necessarily conservative or traditional in their outlook.
In addition to my visit to Madinah magazine, that I wrote about last week, while in Jakarta I also had the opportunity to visit an Islamic NGO, an Islamic university, and a pesantran (Islamic boarding school). None were what 1 expected and all left me with much to think about.
Nahdlatul Ulama is possibly the largest independent Islamic organisation in the world, with
membership anywhere between .30 and 40 million. In many ways, it is best understood as Indonesia's biggest NGO and civil society organisation. It funds schools and hospitals and organises communities to fight poverty and create conscious and active citzcnship.
1 went to the offices of Lakpesdam, an institute for human resource study and development, that operates under the NU umbrella, and whose most recent project had been an archipelago-wide voter awareness program. There is no Islamic social welfare organisation in Bangladesh that approaches the scale of NU, but, even more interesting, was the progressive outlook of the officials and members of a self-identified religiously-oriented institution. The women present spoke about feminist Islam and scholars and writers such as Fatima Mernissi, Nawal el-Saadawi, and Amina Wadud who had influenced their thinking.
Next up was a visit to the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University for a challenging and inspiring question-and-answer session with a cross-section of the students. Again, I found
myself impressed with both the sophistication of thinking on display -- this was clearly a group of students knowledgeable about Islam and thoughtful about what it means to be Muslim -- and the fact that these self-identified religious scholars (most were studying either Islamic law or philosophy) were so expansive and progressive in their outlook.
My final outing was to a pesantran (Islamic boarding school). Noticeable immediately was the fact that unlike madrassahs here in Bangladesh, pesantrans attract students from middle-class and elite backgrounds as well, which means that in Indonesia the societal divides we have in Bangladesh between people of different educational systems is far less pronounced.
In Bangladesh there is very little contact between English medium, Bengali medium and madrassah students, and a pretty noticeable class divide, but in Indonesia the ubiquity of the pesantrans and fact that children of all backgrounds attend them, means that there is a more cohesive society. In addition, the pesantran I visited took pains to teach a modern, integrated curriculum together with religious instruction. Most of the graduates of the pesantran 1 visited will go on to study in mainstream, non-rcllgious universities.
If Indonesians, as it seems, are a people comfortable with Islam but at the same time progressive in their outlook, perhaps some of the credit can go to the towering figure of Abdurrahman Wahid, known affectionately as Gus Dur, one-time head of Nahdlatul Ulama and former president of the country.
He is the most revered religious leader in the country and the example of his progressive and tolerant outlook gives courage and inspiration is to other moderate and liberal Muslims. It saddens me to think that in Bangladesh we have no comparable figure of equal stature to champion progressive Islam.
In fact, we do not even have any kind of thoughtful or sophisticated discourse on Islam. On the one hand, you have the conservatives who too often are intolerant and backward in their thinking. On the other hand, you have the secularists who wish to avoid any discussion of religion and society at all.
There is nothing in the middle, no space for progressive Islamic voices. My bet is that most Muslims in Bangladesh belong squarely in this category of liberal or moderate or progressive Islam. But there is no one to speak for them, either at the political or the societal level, and no real platform for them to make their voices heard.
The self-identified religious political parties and organisations are almost to a man conser-vative, traditional, narrowminded, and intolerant. Their stance against women’s rights, education, and employment,
their intolerance of minorities and the Ahmadia community their distaste for Bangladesh's non-Islamic cultural heritage their denunciation of our syn-erotic tradition of Indigenous Islam -- all of these ensure that they do not speak for the vast majority of observant Muslims in the country.
Indonesia has a similar tradition of syncretic Islam and a similarly rich pre-Islamic cultural heritage that is part and parcel of the national identity, but there the average person seems more schooled in Islamic thought, and. at the same time, much more diverse in their views and ways of being a practicing Muslim.
There is a lesson here for Bangladeshi Muslims, perhaps. We can be Muslims but don't have to be conservative or narrow-minded in our thinking. Being a good Muslim does not mean voting for a religious party It does not necessitate dressing a certain way (but, by the same token, dressing a certain way should not mean that the person in question is conservative or rigid in his or her thinking). It does not mean disparaging the pre-Islamic or non-Islamic aspects of our identity.
The country deserves an honest, thoughtful, and sophisticated discussion on Islamic identity and what it means and how it is constructed. As with all other matters of importance, it is a discussion we have never had in this country beyond simplistic, unserious, and cynical calumnies, accusations, and counteraccusations. Let us talk seriously about Islam and identity, and let us create space for progressive Islamic voices and thinking.
Zafar Sobhan is Assistant E d tor. The Daty Star