1. NECF Malaysia (www.necf.org.my)
WHAT PRINCIPAL OF FAIRNESS?, 18 January 2008
A Muslim will not “subordinate justice to the creation of infinite wealth and defend it in the name of economic growth… He will not abdicate the principle of fairness in managing ethnic relations even if it makes him somewhat unpopular within his own ethnic community. This is the approach adopted by the government in Malaysia and we call it Islam Hadhari,” said the Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi while addressing the world leaders and foreign ministers at the First Alliance of Civilisations Forum in Madrid (Star, 16/1/08).
Indeed the Prime Minister has spoken a lot on the subject matter while more and more religious intolerant cases are springing up. Looking at the few incidents that have happened in the recent months, one wonders whether one is living in a Malaysia that is different from what the Prime Minister talked about in Madrid.
At the 2007 Christmas Tea Party organized by Christian Federation Malaysia, the Prime Minister publicly spoke out against religious extremism, calling people to uphold the spirit of tolerance and mutual respect for one another in order to maintain a peaceful and harmonious society.
At the same time, within the Christian Community alone, we have among others, Christian Children books being confiscated for no apparent reason, the banning of using the word “Allah” in Christian materials, the demolition of an Orang Asli Church in Gua Musang, and state government’s refusal to supply water and electricity to an Orang Asli village in Kampung Pasu, Temerloh. If one still recalls, the OA church in Kampung Pasu was torn down by the local authorities in 2003 and was rebuilt in 2005 at federal intervention. All these incidents involve the government authorities, at both federal and state levels, one way or the other.
2. “Common Ground News”(http://www.commongroundnews.org.)
The lost jihad: love in Islam
by G. WillWilson
Cairo - "At the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow," wrote Egyptian author Adhaf Soueif in her novel, The Map of Love. She was indulging in a very beautifully written digression about Arabic grammar, comparing words derived from the same root: in this case, qalb, "heart"; and enqilab, "overthrow". At this level, where the interplay of meaning and construction is visible, Arabic becomes an extraordinary language, forcing into cooperation concepts and ideas that are entirely unrelated in English.
Despite the tremendous conceptual range and utility provided by the root-and-pattern system of the language, there is a common assumption among non-speakers that Arabic – and thus, Islam – lacks an equivalent of agapé, a Greek term used by Christians to mean the boundary-less, self-sacrificing love between believers, or between a believer and God. More passionate than filia, less explicit than eros, agapé is love stripped of expectation, in which the lover is humbled and disciplined before the beloved. A Google search for “agapé” and “Islam” yields literally hundreds of sites claiming there is no such term in Arabic, and painting Islam as a cold, dispassionate religion in its absence.
Over the years, Sufi Muslims have co-opted many of the romantic Arabic words for love and made them serve an ideal very much like agapé. The poetry of 10th and 11th-century Sufis helped inspire the troubadour culture and ideals of courtly love that flourished in the medieval kingdoms of southern France, Navarre and Aragonne; one of the positive artistic developments to arise from contact between Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East during the Crusades. But many of the greatest Sufi thinkers, including al Ghazali, were themselves influenced by Platonic, Neoplatonic and Gnostic Christian ideals of love, kept alive in the medieval Middle East by the translation of Greek, Roman and Byzantine texts into Arabic and Persian. The question remains: we know the Prophet Muhammad meant Muslims to love and serve God, but did he mean them to be in love with God – and to reflect this love and service among each other?
The answer is, simply, yes. Though it has classically been overlooked by Islam's detractors, there is a word for agapé in Arabic. It carries the same non-specific “boundary-less” connotation as the Greek word, and is used contextually in the same way. Better yet, it is entirely original; not borrowed, adapted, or modelled on a word from another language. The Arabic word for agapé is mahubba, and it is fascinating for two reasons: one, because it comes from hub – in its feminine form – meaning, love. Two, because of the prefix ‘ma’. Adding the letter mim to the beginning of a word in Arabic means "one who is/does", "that which is/does", or "is in a state of" the word that follows it. Junun is mad, and majnun is "one who is mad" or "in a state of madness"; baraka is a blessing, and mubarak is "one who is blessed" or "in a state of blessedness".
Thus, mahubba means quite literally “in love”, but it is rarely used in an erotic sense. It can describe either love among people or love for the divine, and is used most commonly in a spiritual context in both cases. Implicit in mahubba is service; the lover puts the beloved at the centre of the discourse, and submits to his/her demands. Author Fethullah Gulen describes mahubba as "obedience, devotion and unconditional submission" to the beloved, quoting Sufi saint Rabi'a al-Adawiya's couplet, "If you were truthful in your love, you would obey Him/for a lover obeys whom he loves."
While it is, again, primarily Sufis who have propagated the ideal of mahubba over the centuries, the word and the concept have roots in mainstream Islamic tradition: verse 3:31 of the Qur'an is sometimes called 'ayat ul'mahubba', and reads "Say: if you do love Allah, follow me, and Allah will love you." A hadith qudsi (God’s words as repeated by the Prophet Muhammad) included in the collection of hadith compiled by Imam Malik is even more explicit: "God said, 'My love [mahubbati] necessarily belongs to those who love one another [mutahubinna] for My sake, sit together for My sake, visit one another for My sake, and give generously to one another for My sake'."
Mahubba differs from agapé in one crucial respect: because serving and approaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle, mahubba is a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and indiscriminate "small jihad" preached by militants, mahubba is a form of the greater jihad, or jihad against one's own ego. But Adhaf Soueif is right: at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow. The struggle to serve God, and one another, out of love, is the jihad of human potential against the jihad of violent ideology. If resurrected, it has the power to change the world.
・G. Willow Wilson is a Muslim author and essayist. Her articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. Her graphic novel CAIRO, with artist MK Perker, is now available from Vertigo Comics. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.
・Source: Islamica Magazine, Issue 20 (www.islamicamagazine.com) Copyright permission is granted for publication.
3. “Common Ground News”(http://www.commongroundnews.org.)
Indonesian educators balance democracy and shari’a
by Robert W. Hefner
Boston, Massachusetts – The October 2002 terrorist bombings of a beachfront pub in south Bali pushed concerns about Indonesia’s Islamic schools to a new high as students from an Islamic boarding school in Lamongan, East Java were eventually convicted of the crime. For some Indonesian observers, facts like these confirm that at least some of Indonesia’s Islamic schools had been turned into training camps for terrorist militants.
However, Islamic education in Indonesia is nothing if not varied, and its central streams look little like the radical fringe. With some 11,000 Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and 36,000 Islamic day schools (madrasas), Indonesia has one of the largest Islamic educational sectors in the world. A full 13% of the country’s elementary school population receives their primary education in Muslim day schools. More than twice that number take evening or weekend religious classes at Islamic schools. About one percent of Indonesia’s Islamic schools might be described as socially radical, and the number that seems inclined to support militant violence is no more than a few dozen.
Far more representative of the educational mainstream, then, is Indonesia’s system of State Islamic Universities (UIN, IAIN). Today, every student admitted to the state Islamic university system fulfils divisional studies requirements that begin with courses in Islamic history and contextualising methodologies for the study of Islam. With their undogmatic emphasis on alternative interpretations of key historical events, these courses use methods similar to those in comparative religion programs in the West, but are rarely used in higher education in other Muslim countries.
Since the year 2000, seven of the state Islamic universities have begun far-reaching restructuring that includes establishing new faculties in non-religious fields like medicine, psychology, general education and business. No less surprising, since 2004 all students entering the state Islamic system have been required to take a civics course which introduces students to the ideals of democracy, civil society and human rights. Nowhere else in the Muslim world do Muslim colleges provide comparable instruction on democratic values.
In an effort to examine Muslim educators’ views on Islam and democracy, in early 2006 I worked with staff at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta to carry out a survey of 940 Muslim educators in 100 madrasas and Islamic boarding schools in eight provinces in Indonesia. A summary overview of the educators’ views is revealing.
Indonesian Muslim educators’ ideas on democracy are neither formalistic nor crudely majoritarian; they also extend to subtle civil rights.
These rights include support for the idea of equality before the law (94.2% of educators agree); freedom to join political organisations (82.5%); protections for the media from arbitrary government action (92.8%); and the notion that party competition improves government performance (80%). These figures are as high as comparable data collected by the World Values Survey for Western Europe and the United States.
If this was all there was to educators’ attitudes on Islam and democracy, the results would be brightly optimistic indeed. However, educators’ views on democracy are not stand-alone. They co-exist with an almost equally strong commitment to shari’a. For example, notwithstanding the strength of their commitment to democracy, 72.2% of educators believe the state should be based on the Qur’an and sunnah (traditions of the Prophet Mohammed) and guided by religious experts.
On matters of women and non-Muslim religious minorities, we see a tension between educators’ enthusiasm for democracy and their commitment to shari’a. Some 93.5% of the educators believe that a non-Muslim should not be allowed to serve as president. A full 55.8% feel that women should not be allowed to run for the office. About 20% would bar non-Muslims from teaching in public schools. In short, on three matters – gender, non-Muslims, and the place of Islamic law in government itself – educators do not appear to be particularly tolerant.
We see in the survey data, then, that Muslim educators’ stated commitments to democracy, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press are about as strong as anywhere in the democratic world. However, on religious matters, Indonesian Muslims are not secularist liberals. Where a democratic principle runs up against an issue on which shari’a is seen as having something to say, most educators feel that they must defer to shari’a. At times this deference results in judgments that many observers, including most Muslim theorists who write on democracy, would regard as undemocratic.
Inasmuch as attitudes like those of the educators are widespread in Indonesian society (and other surveys indicate that they are), these findings suggest that Muslim Indonesians are likely to continue to grapple for some time to come with the question of how to balance the ideals of shari’a with those of democracy. What is certain is that the results of this ongoing debate will have serious implications for the culture and practice of Indonesian democracy.
・Robert W. Hefner (rhefner@bu.edu) is professor of Anthropology and associate director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org. The full text appeared in edition 90 of Inside Indonesia (www.insideindonesia.org).
・Source: Inside Indonesia, Edition 90 (www.insideindonesia.org) Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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