Prof M Amin Abdullah
Introduction
In the history of mankind, religious traditions have become second nature
and been deeply rooted among people: Christianity to Europe and America, Islam
to people in the Middle East, Confucianism to China, Buddhism to Thailand and
Hinduism to India and other religious traditions. There are still other
religious traditions I cannot mention all. In each area of hightraditions
we have also their accompanying lowtraditions.1
There have been Catholicism and Protestantism traditions in Europe. The
latter tradition has many religious denominations with their own traditions; in
Middle East we have Sunni and Shiite Islam; Buddhism has Mahayana and Hinayana
traditions, Sunni tradition in South Asia has many religious trends, not
traditions, such Islamic organization as Ahmadiyah, Deoband, Barelwis, Jama’ah
Tabligh, Taliban etc2 where people
express their groups’ aspirations. In Indonesia, we have social organizations
like Muhammadiyah, Nahdhatul Ulama, Persis, al-Wasliyyah, al-Khairat, Majlis
Mujahidin Indonesia, Hizbut Tahrir, and Front Pembela Islam. The three latter
organizations have not been classified into traditions. Besides, we can find
Salafism, Wahhabism and the likes. They are more or less still the organizations
for their members trying to build traditions different from the others.
It is really naive to ignore the existing religious traditions in the
world, the West and even the East. They have their own rights to exist, their
own ways to sustain and conserve in their own traditions and identities.
Indeed, education is the most effective media to develop, sustain, maintain and
conserve their traditions from generation to generation and from one century to
the other or the others.
It seems that the most important problem the religion educators and
socio-religious activists have to face in the current plural and multicultural
era is that how each of the religious traditions can conserve, care for,
preserve, transform and inherit their absolutely confessed beliefs and
traditions along with their awareness of the other traditions’ existence with
their same purposes and right. Beside their efforts to strengthen their
identity and groups, what do the socio-religious educators in their traditions
do in keeping togetherness, social cohesion and collective totality? If they
realize them, what are the implications and consequences possibly implemented
to the ways, methods, approaches and selected matters and to the techniques of
teaching and learning applied to the open-plural-society in the present time?
Are there still “rooms” to think at a glance and discuss with the current
groups in the plural and multicultural society? Are there any alternatives to
choose? If none, what are the implications? If any, what are the consequences?
To me, this is the area and new space to solve so collectively that the certain
groups’ rights of living, culture, and of life expectancy will not clash with
the others’.
In the present global-plural-multicultural era, unpredictable and unimaginable
things might happen any time. The New York’s World Trade Center bombing in
September 11, 2001 and Bali high explosion are the clear and undeniable proof
for this statement. The advance of science and technology, on the one hand, may
result ease and comfort for human being. On the other hands, it may cause wider
disparity on economic income level between the rich and the poor countries. The
more advanced and sophisticated means of transportation have an impact on the
loss of distance between one area of certain religious tradition bearers and
the others. Cultural contacts tend to be faster while clashes of culture and
tradition become unavoidable cases and there are nearly no more conventionally
geographical boundaries. Through Internet, e-mail, facsimiles, telephone,
mobile phone, videos and the likes, pupils tend to get knowledge earlier than
their teachers using conventional ways and media.
It is true that the 20th century, mainly the 21st
century have been marked by the emergence of religious revivalism. But now,
everyone can repeatedly ask what kind of religious revivalism it was and is.
Sociologists of Religion have tried hard to understand and explain what is
really going on. What happened to former thesis saying that the more modern and
functional the level of human culture is the more the religions will be left
behind. The fact, unfortunately, says the opposite?3 The recent
undeniable phenomenon was that the phenomena of religious revivalism in the
world were followed by the appearance of primordial-sectarianism-radicalism
aroma. Religious followers, whatever their religions are, have witnessed
violence in the name of religion mushrooming in the rainy season.
Religion educators and socio-religious missionaries and activists are then
surprised by the fact. There arise the following questions then. Why have the
programmes of “transmission” and “conservation” on lofty and valuable religious
values in many religious traditions changed into “intolerance” and
“confrontation”? Why have the scientists in this more modern era tended to
predict the emergence of “clash of civilization”?4 Has not the
“modern” era been claimed as the most civilized one in the history of human
civilization? The prediction could be right. The question is that why
violence in the name of religion have appeared everywhere: in Ireland,
Palestine, Ambon, Poso, Karachi, Chechnya, South Thailand, Madrid, Casablanca,
Nigeria, Riyadh, former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan? Why were, next to the
change of political leadership like in Indonesia in 1996-1998, there riots
frightening religious life?5 Why did “booms”
explode everywhere? In Indonesia the people had witnessed boom explosions in
Bali, in Jakarta (in Mariot and Kuningan), in Poso, Ambon and in other places.
Was the network of violence a national or international one? If it was an
international network, why was it too easy for the actors to contact each other
relatively successful in committing violence with not so expensive cost? Is it
right that modern technology makes human efforts easier, facilitate, accelerate
and multiply in committing violence?
To me, these are the new agenda and programmes to be considered by
religious followers, more especially by the religion educators, religious
callers (da’i), missionaries and the pioneers and activist of
socio-religious movements in general in the West and in the East as well. Why
was religious followers’ individual and mainly collectively communal stamina so
susceptible when socio-economic, socio-political and perhaps military interests
penetrated them? Why was the religious followers’ stamina so weak that they
were easily provoked? Why do powers of elite groups, socio-economic,
socio-political and military interests in a certain level have to use and abuse
“religion” when they want to run their big programmes successfully? We just
wonder why they use religion as their “lackey” and “milk cow” to reach at their
purposes beyond religious mission. Or has it been an undoubted fact since the
past that “religious” entity cannot be separated from “political” one? Does the
statement “addien wad daulah” (religion and state) in the mind of Muslim
politician in the Middle East and elsewhere symbolize it like the one? As a
result, is it easy for the socio-political power to manipulate religions? Had
there been bases and seeds of violence coincidently taught to the
religious followers when the long conservation process of religious values
mentioned above were in progress? The questions will be traced and elaborated
in order to give more knowledge to teachers, lecturers, religious callers, and
religious missionaries (in all levels including socio-religious activists in
the global-plural-multicultural era), social activists, researches,
journalists, and politicians as well.
Violence in the Name of Religion: Origin, Strength, and Spread
The differences between Western (Abrahamic) religions (Judaism,
Christianity, Islam) and Eastern religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism)
lie on the textual strength or revelation. Compared to the others, the strength
of Orthodox Judaism, Protestantism and Islam lie on their holy scriptures. It
does not mean that Catholicism and Judaism in general have no textual basis, as
great religions usually have textual basis. All depend on their different
strong consistency and rigidity.6 In terms of
Anthropological perspective, the phenomena of revelation, Holy Scriptures, and
texts or Nash (authoritative quotation) reflect a fact that the human
culture at that time had been in the era of literate culture, and not in the
era of non-literate any more. Really, it took long enough time for human
culture to create symbols of characters as a means of communication, not only
oral communication that also took time to reach at the level. Even, it also
took time for human beings to change from an oral culture into a literate one.
It was in the time when men knew literate culture considered by the Holy
Scriptures as the use of characters to communicate that human expressions of
ideas, beliefs or faiths appeared to the history.7
For the sake of religious practices, religious adherents -whatever their
religions are- usually ignore the long historical process. When the literate
culture emerged in the world, there happened automatically changes of way of
thinking, interactions and of communication. Flexibility in the oral culture
changed into rigidity in the literate culture in which there happened a more
complicated process involving, among other things, the processes of collecting
information by memorizing or in other ways, recording, editing and spreading
selective information.8 The religious
adherents in general assume that all of them are nonsense. Why? Not only is it
caused by their beliefs that Holy Scripture is a verbatim divine revelation but
also by their practical necessity. What the religious followers, mainly the
elites having ideological interests and purposes and those who have routine
profession (division of labour), need is to have an easily obtained “practical
guide” which is instant and ready for use without having to trace the
historical roots (asbab al-nuzul) of the verses.
The terms “ready for service” and “ready for use” show that there exist
psychological aspects of hastiness, short cut, and of effective time in
understanding the Holy Scriptures. When they look at and read the characters
and sentences in the Holy Scriptures especially when they found verses suitable
to their socio-political interests and subjective tendency, then they directly
(without understanding the essential, substantive and contextual meanings of
the verses) hold the verses as their norms of life, beliefs, faith, life guide,
attitude former and even their social attitude. Hastiness and instant
understanding shape life norms. Unfortunately, because of practical needs, the
readers then make what he read as a codification, and hold it as a guide and
consequently sustain it. After that, in a period of time, which could be one
century or more, there possibly appeared reformers who repeatedly ask the
relevance of the collectively and permanently agreed norms in the society.
- a.
Literal-scriptural understanding and exclusive-apologetic attitude
It is a very easy thing to have a textual-scriptural understanding of the
Holy Scripture. In Ulumul Qur’an (the Qur’anic Science) we can find the
term munasabah al-ayat. This term indicates that a textual-literal-scriptural
understanding of a part of ayat (or hadith) sounds incomplete; as to
have a more complete understanding it is not compared with the other ayats
yet. It is a kind of superficial textual-scriptural understanding because of
lack of deeply comparable elaboration upon the others, which could be more
understandable, different or even contrary, not to mention contradictory. It is
also lack of a contextual elaboration, which needs sufficient historical and
psychological analysis.
The textual-scriptural understanding tends to lead easily to an apologetic
and exclusive social attitude. In the social context it is natural that there
are other social groups having different views with our groups, criticizing,
disagreeing with, and giving some critical notes on certain life style and way
of life internally convinced to be the truest. Our social instinct will
spontaneously refuse and react, or at least be defensive, hold tightly our
ideas, beliefs and notion without any accurate examination and elaboration when
other groups mainly other religious groups raise some criticisms or disagree
with us. It is very often that when we have bad argument and are in a weak and
slightly pressing position, we need a backing of our instantly understood Holy
Book assumed to be ready for service and ready for use to make our position and
argument legitimate and charismatic.
In terms of socio-religious life, two keywords will disappear immediately
if someone and more specifically groups hold on textual-scriptural understanding
strongly. The words are “compromise” and “consensus”. The other disappearing
word is “negotiation”. To use Khaled Abou El-Fadl’s phrase, it seems there is
no “negotiating process” in understanding the Holy Book for those literalist
people.9 The first two
words are the keywords important for social life in the plural, multireligious
and multicultural era. Because of pushing interest to support individual and
collective identities, a textual-scriptural religious understanding easily
tends to play with words its in-depth meaning and accuse their opponent as
“hypocrisy”, inconsistency, and weak faith and even into “unbelief”. How clear
the difference between theological and sociological approach is.
Literal-scriptural theological approach, of course, can help someone
strengthen, emphasize and fortify personal and collective identities tightly,
but at the same time the understanding may indicate how “weak” and “brittle”
that kind of understanding of the others’ existence is.10
Not only can we find such kinds of position and understanding in religious
denomination but also in other non-religious ones. It may be said that
unintended consequences of literal-scriptural understanding of Holy Book shows
someone’s and certain religionists’ viewpoints upon the existence of other
religious denominations or other groups beyond their own groups. They cannot
even think of their coexistence, let alone think of their pre-existence. Such
psychological situation is very sensitive for any interest groups to play with
and to use it.
Literal-scriptural religious understanding causes the seeds, roots, initial
steps and forms of “violence” or religious violence, while exclusive and
apologetic social attitudes11 are the
derivation of the understanding. Then, it is not wrong that “Ilmu al-Kalam”
(Islamic Theology) in the study of classical Islam, which is still known until
now is defined in Islam as the science of divinity intended to “refuse any
other religious system of faith.”12
So far, there is no problem at all. We realize that our social instinct and
need have to strengthen and emphasize individual, mainly collective identities,
and more especially religious denomination identity in a very strong basis no
matter the way is. If necessary, we can use presumably normal way in a socially
responsible rule. All social entities mainly religious ones need defence
mechanism when there are the other groups’ disturbing criticism and attacks
toward their individual and collective identities. If not, the nature of their
individual and collective identities will fade up gradually. When will then the
natural step develop and change into unnaturalness and discomfort and even lead
to a more destructive-endangering thing for the living togetherness of mankind?
b. Mutual distrust among members of social and religious
groups
In a social life, it is normal that three happen discontentment,
disagreement and the likes. Any individual and group have the nature
personality and basic nature character. The growth of their personal nature
will depend on and in accordance with uneasily forgotten social attitudes and
past historical burden they had and still have as the two factors have been
well recorded in their collective memories, literary books and in documentary
films as well.
The historical burdens we have experienced are among others: colonialism
(the past Ottoman occupation in the part of Europe, Dutch’s authority over
Indonesia), regional dispute or autonomy and economic disputes (like in Quebec
of Canada as a past historical heritage of power struggle between England and
French in North America), expulsion from mother land in Palestine,
excommunication or exiles (Soekarno and Hatta were exiled to Digul; Zanana
Gusmao to Jakarta; Nelson Mandela in South Africa), the existence of revenge
against what happened in the unsatisfactory past time (crusades, jihad), areas occupation
(East Timor, annexation of Kuwait by Iraq), regional disputes (Kashmir between
India and Pakistan; Sepadan-Lagitan and the most recent Ambalat areas between
Malaysia and Indonesia). These historical burdens will, more or less, widen,
strengthen, sharpen and aggravate collective mutual relations all the time, not
to mention forever. The unsound relation between two or three quarrelling sides
will create uncontrolled accusation. A certain group, because of merely
different opinion, will consider the others as “spies” and even enemies.
Progressive intellectual groups were considered as agents of CIA (Fazlur Rahman
in Pakistan); a hero of regional and cultural rights (Prince Diponegoro accused
by the Dutch colonial regime); scientific works accused of a disturbing means
of social community (Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Egypt),13 different
epistemology in religious understanding (a case of al-Hallaj in the classical
Islam, Sheikh Siti Jenar in Javanese culture); disputes in domestic
political-economic influence (Mahathir Muhammad versus Anwar
Ibrahim in Malaysia); humiliation against a certain country’s or regime’s
dignity and reputation (Salman Rushdie accused by Imam Khomaini, the leader of
Iranian government) and so on. In Islamic literature quoted from the Holy Book
mainly from the Islamic theology14 there have
been many vocabularies, which can be not only interpreted theologically but
also sociologically. The words are among others: unbelief(kafir),
apostasy (murtad), hypocrisy (munafiq), denial(inkar),
criminal (mujrim), tyrant (bughat) and the likes.
These attitudes finally disagreeing with and ignoring the existence of
someone’s or others’ rights, if they grow rapidly will crowd and then create
intolerant attitudes, hatred, anger, threat and discriminative actions. There
in turns will grow lung illness called prejudice (su’u al-dhan) against
those or other groups who have different ideas, faiths, sects and
organizations. At the end, when all prerequisites are completed then distrust
among individuals, family members, internal groups and of course mutual
distrust will emerge.
When preparing this paper, I wished to check the Encyclopaedia of Religion.
I was sure that the encyclopaedia published after the 1990s should have had the
entry word “violence” in the vocabulary of religious language. If not, the
encyclopaedia then did not follow the contemporary development of the history
of religions. What I assumed was right. We can find a description on “violence”
in religion. Here, I quote its complete description as follows:
Violence: An aspect of human behaviour often bound up with emotion
(especially anger), which religions cannot ignore-and often express. Opinion is
divided as to as where violence should be located along the nature – nurture
spectrum. Those favouring natural process or psychodynamics theory hold that
religious activities reduce violence if they function cathartically, but
increase violence if they result in frustration. Those favouring cultural
processes, hold that religious function as learning systems. It is pointed out
that apparently non-aggressive societies are informed by religions, which
function to instil peace by presenting the adverse consequences of violence. Aggressive
peoples, on the other hand often live with aggressive religious ideologies.15
There are three implicitly concluded keywords:
(1) Religion cannot be separated from, not to mention glued on,
“emotion”, while emotion itself is the root of aggressive behaviour easily
leading to violence.
(2) Religious activities can minimize violence if they can function
well as catharsis, but it can maximize and support violence if they even create
frustration and dissatisfaction for the religious adherents.
(3) The types and models of learning system the politely religious and
social leaders and religious groups usually offered have conditioned
non-aggressive religious denominations. Really, teachers and leaders always
promote and seed values of peace to the social members, while the aggressive
religious denomination are normally formed by models of religious understanding
of their leadership elites (teachers, lecturers, religious scholars, priests,
Catholic priests, monks, religious leaders) unconsciously changing into the
“ideology” of certain interest defenders.
Religious elite leaders including teachers, parents, lecturers, religious
scholars, and the leaders of student movement, politicians, religion-based
social and political organizations constitute decisive factors where and when
they will involve their religions in their lives. They will decide whether they
will bring their religions into comfort and peace, or into opposition, mutual
distrust, conflict and violence. Basically, a religion is ambivalent.16 It can be
comfortable, wild, tame, smooth, rigid, peace and a war. Because of its
ambivalence, the religious elite leaders must be very careful and aware of.
Behaviour, socio-political morality, statements, and religious advice or fatwa17, the elite
leaders have will really shape aggressive and non-aggressive types of behaviour
of their religious adherents. The other things to be wisely treated is that how
they have to provide models of religious system of learning or education
concerning matters, methods, approaches and techniques of teaching in the
public schools, Islamic dormitory schools, religious schools, colleges,
religious sermons, arena and places of religious services, meetings, and in
agitate religious speeches in public forums in open square, mosques, temples,
churches and so on.
c. The even spread of socio-economic and socio-political
injustice
It is unfair to make a religion the scapegoat when there occur religious
violence in society. The seeds of intrinsically given violence in religions
cannot grow and spread out automatically without external factors beyond the
religions. The factors beyond the religious entity that can get a free ride are
the real political, economic and social situations.
The problems of inequality or apparent gap between the have and the have
not clearly touch the public social inequality.18 The
powerfulness of capitalist countries supported by the strength of their
theoretical and mainly applied knowledge is run by their global machine of
trade and economy through trans-national companies, WTO’s and AFTA’s
programmes. If changes in the neoliberalist era go uncontrolled, and will be
even well organized, in the side of super power countries, the process will
then create massive social unrest. The accumulation of the third world’s
national debts of some countries of Latin America, Africa and of Asia, caused
by internal mismanagement – it is much worse if there are conspiracies between
the debtors and the creditors without any proper solution – will consequently
increase the accumulation of the third world’s and Islamic world’s public
frustration.
Commenting on this difficult issue, it is worthy to quote Susan Buck-Morss’
explanation:
“We, as critical theorists, need to make Western audiences aware that
Islamism as a political discourse embraces far more than dogmatic
fundamentalism and terrorist violence that dominate in the Western press. It is
also a powerful source of critical debate in the struggle against the
undemocratic imposition of a new world order by the United States, and against
the economic and ecological violence of neo-liberalism, the fundamentalist
orthodoxies of which fuel the growing divide between rich and poor.”19
Global injustice will lead to a local one. The local injustice will trigger
the emergence of senses of jealousy and spitefulness, dissatisfaction, and
frustration in the society. Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism committed
everywhere make the people powerless and have no proper access to economic
centres, and power sharing in politics and education. The slow law enforcement
upon the corruptors make the people more frustrated. In short, the weak and bad
governance of the government, central to local, in providing public needs and
justice will apparently increase the existing public dissatisfaction.
Injustice caused by the structures (politics, economy and society) of the
government’s responsibility is clearly expressed in the level of social
services such as health, food and clothing, education, information,
transportation, clean water, communication, and law. All of them become the
measuring rod of the structural and political leaders’ awareness, seriousness
and responsibility upon public services.
A stable government can be usually measured and reflected through its
social services. Change of regime through general election is really a problem
unless social services have been perfect. Indeed, social services must be the
first priority of a regime. Sufficient social needs will support the
government’s stability and vice versa; the lower the quality of social service
is, the weaker the government’s governance will be. The weak governance will
decrease the authority and dignity of the government to continue the people’s
expected leadership.
Initiated by the absence of social justice in the community, this
structural injustice will lead to a weak stability of the government, as there
will be intricate, manipulation, conspiracy, oligarchy, and clandestine, while
political opponents start to intrigue to put the legitimate government down.
The opponents can easily offer their ideas when the real political situation is
possible to do so. It is the ideological resistance from the opposing group of
the legitimate government that will become the forefather of open violence.
In the era of democracy and transparency, structural violence can be
derived from the ruling regime, and from the ideological interaction between
executive and legislative in designing and imposing the state economic policy
(tariffs, bill and prices of electricity, fuel, telephone, and of basic
commodity), interactions between the government and non-government
organizations and the other interest-vested groups like political parties,
military groups, bureaucracy, religious scholars, disappointed groups and so
on.
The interaction and combination between the three above-mentioned factors,
those are narrow textual-scriptural understanding of Holy Book,
socio-psychologically feeling of insecure and global injustice mainly local
injustices make the situation more complex and complicated. This situation
is more complicated than the one in the middle age because of the current
sophisticated science and technology of the present generation. If it is
regarded as a symptom of illness, the solution must be then different from the
former ways used in the past human civilization. It is more or less like a
chronicle cancer to which there is no effective medicine to secure yet.
Neither is there still a problem so far. Externally open violence has not
come up in the surface yet though internal violence the people and especially
the elites felt nearly happen everywhere. There appear uncertainty, worry, and
extreme confusion among community members and mainly the elites who wanted to
improve the presumably uncomfortable situation and touched sense of injustice
which all of them are expressed through demonstrations with their varieties of
what the former did through anonymous letters, scholarly discussions, protests,
appealed audiences, threats, boycotts, walk outs, pamphlets, and so on.
So far, as long as the government is still open to communicate and to have
dialogues with all sides, all kinds of ways to express accumulative aspiration
are natural matters, if in addition the government wishes to meet the expected
solution. Unfortunately, social law goes opposite. Beyond the “formal”
medias, there have been “informal” ones often having more fatal impacts than
the constitutional-formal ones. The next point to elaborate is what is
called a “trigger” making a situation uncontrolled. Very often, any
religion educators and socio-religious activists can never touch this step.
d. The trigger: dry grass is easy to burn
The psychosocial situation mentioned above is really very sensitive and
unstable. It is like water on the melting pan above a fireplace; it starts to
be “hot” and “to boil” later. Like dry grass, it only needs a little fuel to
burn its whole surroundings.
The gathering place of the three above factors is like a grass field nearly
having dried. There are no more green spaces able to prevent the spread of
burning. As soon as a sprinkling of fire comes out, the whole field will be
burnt. With no pardons at all, the whole grass field will be burnt since there
is no more power to prevent and muffle the spreading fire.
The strange thing is that it is not difficult to find out the “fuel” to
burn and express emotion, impatience, frustration, social-hatred, and mutual
distrust. It seems that it is not necessary to have galloons and drums of fuel
to burn the grass field. This is the difficult and unpredictable area. Even the
military forces cannot smell the phenomena. It will be worse when there are
also involved intelligent and security apparatus.
If we elaborated how social violence happened in Indonesia 3 years before
the fall of Soeharto, there were social factors categorized as the “triggers”
of social violence reflected in the fighting among villagers and among
students, the burning and the ruining of buildings, churches or mosques, and of
government buildings (the House of Representative, Police and Court), the
burning of certain ethnic groups’ department stores and so on.20
In Pekalongan, a town in Central Java, for an example, someone considered
as a mad man torn a piece of Qur’an. The elites looking for logical reasons to
move and release mass emotion for a certain purpose and interest had used the
incident as the main explosive head to release mass emotion leading to violence
by burning Chinese ethnic groups’ shops and department stores easily.
The establishments of church buildings, which were so luxurious for the
surrounding people like the ones in Situbondo, a town in East Java, could be a
trigger to touch a sense of social injustice and arouses a jealousy. It was
very easy to stimulate the frustrated community to burn the church and school
buildings. The former Military District Commander of Ambon informed me that the
mistakes in writing unintentionally the word “babi”, pig, instead of “nabi”,
prophet (in a computer keyboard, the position of the word n is
next to b) became the trigger of nearly inevitable social violence. This
happened before the 1999 incident.
There have been many other trivial things that the socio-political and
social-communal leaders having no ability to control himself and his group have
used as their arguments to create a chaotic situation and violence by releasing
and stimulating mass weak emotion. The patterns and modes of operation of the
incident may happen in the future with different situation and context and main
actors, of course. It is the social-economic situation and the
conflicts-trigging incidents that the “provocateurs” with their certain target,
purpose and interests, expect.
It is the “standard” and “general” patterns that the provocateurs can play
with that should be introduced to the students in the religious schools,
Islamic dormitory schools, religious sermons, arena and places of religious
services, organizational meetings, and in religious speeches so that the early
warning system has been included in our religious learning systems. It is
necessary to mention, as a religion constitutes the most effective ingredient
to burn and release a situation as emotion and aggressiveness have been deeply
rooted in each religion.
To study a religion in the present time, not only do we need to study its
normative advantages but also its historical “disadvantages”. Very often, it is
very complicated for us to detect the mingledness between religion and politics
or power (al-aql al-lahuty al-siyasy).21 Informing and
explaining the negative aspects of the advantageous aspects of collective
identity and fundamental socio-religious values to the students will at least
help the students and the community in general to be more careful to use
religion for other interests beyond any religious concerns.
e. Power relation and religious radicalism:
classical and modern
The term religious radicalism and religious violence have been known since
the past to anytime in the future. There have been also other terms in our
contemporary era usually considered to be synonymous with religious radicalism:
fundamentalism, hardliners, extremism, militants, and finally terrorism.
Religious sectarianism-based violence we usually have in everywhere in the
West and in the East, continuously bitter conflict and hostility among Muslim Sunni
and Shiite, Catholic and Protestant Christians in Ireland and also in Iraq in
the post Saddam Hussein’s regime as well as in the formerly Yugoslavia remind
everybody to the religious war in the European history of war leading to the
separation between “religion” and “state”, and the emergence of secularism in
France. Basically, the movements of religious radicalism and fundamentalism are
political ones coated and coloured by religious faith.22 The minority
groups felt that the majority ones oppressed and pressed them, and made them
under the latter’s hegemonies. There were no mutual powers sharing among them.
There were no rooms for pluralism and multiculturalism to grow there. Each
group remains in their status. The majority groups sustain their status quo,
without regarding the right of the minority.
The majority tend to occupy everything, from the bottom to the top, while
the minority because of no access in economic, political and social areas they
have, they are willing and determined to reach their goal through the shortest
way by exploding booms in the places where the majority usually perform their
activities. There is also a possibility that the majority groups themselves, to
prevent their power status quo, explode the booms. The power relation
having elements of violence and injustice will not only be valid for the
relations between the West and the East, between the West and Islam but also
for any internal religious faction (clash within civilization) among internal
Muslims, among factions within Islamic parties, in the internal circle of
Protestant denominations, and so on.
Then, there happen endless mutual revenges and the grassroots become the
victims again. The power relation between movements of religious
fanaticism and radicalism, militancy, and even terrorism is very closely
related, not to say identical. Nearly all the violence acts committed in
various countries and religions are closely related to power relation,
since power is the central symbol for economic, social, cultural as well as
military interests.
To me, the differences between the type of religious violence in the
classical and contemporary era lie on the growth of narrow religious
mindedness, feeling of being oppressed by alien culture that aroused the
psychosocial insecurity coupled with global and local injustice and the use of
the semi-military sophisticated modern technology. This ingredient was
used to design, distribute, express, facilitate and to reach at the worldly
socio-political goals. Suicide booms exploded in the conflicting regions in
Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and also in
Indonesia are the accumulative mingledness of the three factors. The most
dramatic incident was the 11 September 2001 terrorism movement having studious
and effectively and well-organized networking and extra ordinary media
coverage. It seems that the tremendous advance of science and technology (in
scientific perspective)23 and swallow or
narrow understanding toward the existence of other cultural religious
communities (in the perspective of cultural and religious understanding) can
cause terrifying danger in the future.
The mingledness of science and technology and narrow religious
understanding on the one hand and the insensitive social sensitivity can
collect and accumulate dreadful power having huge explosive power. Human beings
were surprised and so sad when witnessing the determination of the terrorist
movement in ruining and destroying the symbol of global power and authority of
the modern world manifested in the supremacy of technology, global money and
stock market, computer, aeronautics and media networks.24
In addition, modern men are again reminded by the fact that the advance of
science and technology has not guaranteed anything yet. The West because of
monopoly of natural resources renewed and non-renewed using a high technology
leaves the third world. It is undesirable that some of the disappointed people
in the third world have decided their own ways in counting and calculating the
situation. The calculation could be correct or wrong, moral or immoral, and
like or dislike but it was the fact.
What Albert Einstein said, ”Science without religion is blind, religion
without science is lame” is partly right. My question is: What kind of religion
did Einstein mean? If the ability of science and technology is unified with the
narrow types of religiosity and narrow religious mindedness and coupled with
the nearly unabridged wider gaps between the rich and the poor countries, the
result will be the unstopped spread of feeling of insecure which easily leads
to the act of religious violence and terrorism. In the present global economic
and cultural era, the provincially academic study of religions, and merely
theological studies cannot do much to help the decreasing of spiritual thirst
and subordination more especially of human material ones
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