The Meccan Fatwas and The Globalized Discourse of Exclusion: The Case of Anti-Ahmadiyah Movements In Indonesia

Dadi Darmadi

Abstract

This article explains the historical and global contextualization of intolerance towards religious minority group such as Ahmadiyah and it analyzes the recent increased animosity towards them in Indonesia. This paper argues that to understand the current persecution of Ahmadiyah one must begin with an examination of the early transnational efforts to marginalize Ahmadiyah and their effects on Muslim Commnunities. The Meccan fatwas in focus and their reproduction –provide an example of the ways in which such globalized discourses of exclusion regarding a particular religious group were strategically framed and mobilized in i.e. Lahore, Mecca and few other places, and how these historical and theological factors at play could provide more insight into the rising political intolerance and the criminalization of religious views in Indonesia.

Keywords

Ahmadiyah, minority groups, tolerance, fatwa, transnational Islam, Mecca, Indonesia

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References

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From Egypt to Indonesia, all Islamic nations must learn from Pakistan’s mistakes

Written by
Farahnaz Ispahani
February 22, 2016 Quartz india 

When Pakistan was founded in 1947, its secular founding fathers did not speak of an Islamic state.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, recognized as Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), clearly declared that non-Muslims would be equal citizens in the new country. Reflecting his secular views, Jinnah—himself a Shia—nominated a Hindu, several Shias and an Ahmadi to Pakistan’s first cabinet. Now, non-Muslim representation at the Cabinet level is limited to symbolic appointments, while Shias face smear campaigns from Sunni Muslims that declare them non-Muslims. And the Ahmadis—who were some of Jinnah’s most ardent supporters in his quest for a Muslim homeland on the subcontinent—are completely unrepresented; they live as virtual outcasts in modern Pakistan.

In his famous speech of 11 August 1947, Jinnah had stated that, in order to make Pakistan ‘happy and prosperous’, every person living in the country, ‘no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, [should be] first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations’. His speech advanced the case for a secular, albeit Muslim-majority, Pakistan: ‘I cannot emphasize it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community … will vanish.’

Jinnah also declared,

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State … Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.

The vision outlined by Pakistan’s founder remains unfulfilled. Indeed, it appears further from realization than at any time since this hopeful declaration of religious pluralism was made. At the time of partition in 1947, almost 23% of Pakistan’s population (which then included Bangladesh) comprised non-Muslim citizens. The proportion of non-Muslims has since fallen to approximately 3%.

 Pakistan has descended to its current state of religious intolerance through a series of political decisions by Jinnah’s successors. 

Furthermore, the distinctions among Muslim denominations have become far more accentuated over the years. Muslim groups such as the Shias, which account for approximately 20-25% of Pakistan’s Muslim population, are often targeted by violent extremists. Ahmadis, barely 1% of the Muslim population, have been declared non-Muslim by the writ of the state. Non-Muslim minorities such as Christians, Hindus and Sikhs have been the victims of suicide bomb attacks on their neighbourhoods, and their community members have been converted to Islam against their will. Houses of worship of non-Muslims as well as of Muslim minority sects have been attacked and bombed while filled with worshippers.

Pakistan has descended to its current state of religious intolerance through a series of political decisions by Jinnah’s successors. The descent began in 1949 with the Constituent Assembly declaring the objective of Pakistan’s Constitution to be the creation of an Islamic state. It reached a nadir with the ‘Islamization’ drive under General Zia during the 1980s. Now, the country is dealing with armed militias and terrorist groups—many of which were sponsored by the state under the Zia regime and in the civil and military governments since—each intent on imposing its version of Islam by violent means.

Pakistan’s most prominent human rights activist, Asma Jahangir, warns that the worst is yet to come. ‘Past experience has shown that the Islamists gain space when civilian authority weakens,’ she pointed out in an article a few years ago. ‘The proliferation of arms and official sanction for jihad have made militant groups a frightening challenge for the government. Pakistan’s future remains uncertain and its will to fight against rising religious intolerance is waning.’ The purpose of examining Pakistan’s embrace of religious extremism is not revealed merely in the recognition of the country’s ill treatment of its religious minorities.

In the context of a Muslim world comprising a youthful population of somewhere in the order of 1.4 billion people, it is equally critical to note the actions of state-sponsored organizations or extremist groups against religious minorities in all Muslim countries. Attacks on religious minorities occur in several Muslim-majority nations, from Egypt to Indonesia, just as they do in Pakistan. But as Pakistan is the first country to declare itself an Islamic republic in modern times, the study of Pakistan’s handling of its minorities can be a helpful guide in understanding and anticipating the threats that would arise wherever Islamist militancy is on the ascendant.

Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins India from the book, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities, by Farahnaz Ispahani. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

http://qz.com/621778/from-egypt-to-indonesia-all-islamic-nations-must-learn-from-pakistans-mistakes/

Negara Tak Lagi Netral Ketika Terbitkan SKB Tentang Ahmadiyah

Ahmad Najib Burhani (di podium), pada konferensi tentang Kajian Indonesia di Universitas California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Penulis: Melki Pangaribuan
Senin, 12 Agustus 2013

JAKARTA, SATUHARAPAN.COM - Ahmad Najib Burhani, tanggal 5 Juni 2013, memperoleh penghargaan The Professor Charles Wadell Memorial Award 2012-2013 dari Universitas California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Penghargaan ini diberikan kepada pakar comparative religions within a single religious tradition (Islam) dan kajian tentang “konsep, teori, dan praktek heresy”,  atas prestasinya dalam pengembangan Studi Islam dan Kajian Timur Tengah di Amerika Serikat, secara khusus mengkaji tentang Ahmadiyah dengan judul When Muslims are not Muslims: The Ahmadiyya Community and the Discourse on Heresy in Indonesia.

Dalam wawancara satuharapan.com dengan Ahmad Najib Burhani melalui surat elektronik, dan dijawab pada Minggu (4/8),  dijelaskannya alasan dia tertarik mengkaji tentang kelompok minoritas keagamaan dalam Islam atau pecahan dari Islam.

Menurut peneliti Maarif Institute for Culture and Humanity dan Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia  (LIPI)  yang saat ini masih berada di Amerika Serikat, ada beberapa kriteria yang dijadikan acuan ketika menentukan kepakaran yang dia pilih dan juga tema dalam penulisan disertasinya.

Pertama, disertasi yang dia tulis harus menjadi batu pijakan yang kokoh untuk “positioning” dalam masyarakat akademik di dunia dan Indonesia, terutama dalam bidang humanities. Maksud dia, di Indonesia telah ada beberapa sejarawan agama seperti Azyumardi Azra, ada filosof agama seperti Amin Abdullah, ada filolog agama seperti Oman Fathurrahman, ada scholar tentang radikalisme seperti Noorhaidi Hasan. Saya harus punya kepakaran dan spesialisasi yang orang lain tidak punya. Dengan studinya di Amerika Serikat dalam bidang Religious Studies (Kajian Agama), dia akhirnya memilih untuk menjadi ahli dalam bidang “Minority Religions & Religious Sects,” lebih spesifik lagi kepakaran yang dia ambil adalah ahli comparative religions within a single religious tradition (Islam) dan kajian tentang “konsep, teori, dan praktek heresy”. Bidang ini meliputi (1) sekte-sekte sempalan dari Islam dan kemudian membentuk agama baru seperti Baha’i Faith; (2) Sekte-sekte yang masih dalam Islam seperti Ismaili; (3) Sekte yang berada antara Islam dan agama sendiri seperti Ahmadiyah dan Druze. Di Indonesia banyak sekali sekte/aliran keagamaan yang bisa dimasukkan dalam tiga kategori itu, seperti Lia Eden, Satrio Piningit, Wetu Telu, dan berbagai aliran kebatian.

“Beruntung saya mendapat pendidikan yang menekankan teori dan metodologi yang kuat dalam bidang ini dari kuliah-kuliah saya selama ini, terutama dari Dept. of Religious Studies Univ California – Santa Barbara. Nah, disertasi saya harus memiliki pijakan yang kuat dalam area/kepakaran yang saya pilih itu,” kata Ahmad Najib.

Level Internasional

Kriteria kedua dalam penentuan disertasinya adalah bahwa kajian yang dia ambil harus mampu mengangkat dirinya dari sekadar pengakuan akademik tingkat nasional menuju level internasional atau keluar dari boundaries of Indonesian studies. Maksudnya, kontribusi yang dia berikan dalam penulisan disertasi harus memberikan dampak yang lebih luas dari lingkup Indonesia. Ia harus memberi manfaat secara global atau bisa dipakai sebagai acuan pada kajian yang serupa di negara lain. Ia pernah membuat prospektus atau proposal disertasi tentang Muhammadiyah, tapi proposal ini dibatalkannya karena tidak memenuhi kriteria ini. Kemudian, ia membuat lagi proposal tentang construction of Islamic authenticity dengan membandingkan antara kelompok traditionalist, modernist, neo-modernist, dan post-traditionalist. Kembali, tema ini dibatalkannya dengan alasan yang agak sama. Najib lantas membuat prospektus tentangIndonesian Islam dengan harapan bisa menemukan pattern tentang Islam khas Indonesia/Asia Tenggara yang berbeda dari Islam di tempat lain. Meski kriteria ini mendekati kriteria yang bisa membawanya ke kancah internasional, tapi ia tidak memenuhi kriteria pertama. Ini lebih merupakan area studies, bukan religious studies.

“Saya sebetulnya tidak membatalkan sama sekali minat saya pada tema Indonesian Islam, saya hanya menunda. Saya rasa tema ini jauh lebih besar dari waktu yang tersedia untuk menulis disertasi. Tema ini juga membutuhkan landasan teori yang lebih rumit. Untuk saat ini tema ini juga saya batalkan, tapi suatu saat pasti saya akan kembali lagi ke penelitian ini,” paparnya.

Kriteria ketiga adalah sumbangan teori. Ia selalu teringat dengan Clifford Geertz yang menjadikan disertasinya sebagai pijakan membangun teori-teori setelah usai pendidikan doktoralnya. Disertasi Geertz memang khusus tentang Indonesia, tapi teori yang dibangun setelah selesai disertasi adalah untuk wacana internasional. Disertasi bukanlah akhir atau puncak karya, tapi awal dari karya-karya dan karir akademik yang lebih serius. Dengan disertasi yang kuat dan bagus, maka kemungkinan akan menjadi intelektual yang benar. Geertz kemudian terkenal dengan teorinya “religion as symbolic system” berkat studinya di Morocco dan Indonesia.

“Saya tahu diri dengan kapasitas saya, tapi tidak ada salahnya saya bermimpi akan menjadi orang seperti Clifford Geertz dalam bidang religious studies (bukan teologi). Selama mimpi, harapan, idealisme, dan semangat masih ada, saya kira akan sangat baik jika saya mengikuti dan memupuknya. Saya khawatir, pada suatu saat nanti, semangat/mimpi seperti ini akan mati dan diganti dengan semangat yang pragmatis. Untuk lebih tepatnya, saya ingin menyumbangkan teori tentang persoalan sektarianisme, kelompok agama minoritas, perpecahan dalam agama dan sejenisnya,” ungkap Ahmad Najib.

Berdasarkan tiga kriteria itu, dia akhirnya memilih mengkaji tentang Ahmadiyah dengan judul When Muslims are not Muslims: The Ahmadiyya Community and the Discourse on Heresy in Indonesia. Tema ini memenuhi kriteria pertama, sebagai pijakan menjadi ahliminority religions & religious sects. Untuk menjadi ahli bidang itu, tentunya tidak mungkin baginya untuk mengkaji seluruh kelompok keagamaan minoritas untuk disertasi. Pembatasan waktu penelitian dan scope of study membuat dia harus memilih satu topik yang terjangkau dan menarik.

“Saya punya waktu tiga tahun untuk menulis disertasi. Karena itu saya harus memilih satu dari beberapa kelompok agama minoritas di Indonesia. Dan pilihan saya jatuh ke Ahmadiyah,” jelasnya.

Tema ini juga memenuhi kriteria kedua, yaitu memperkenalkan dirinya ke kancah masyarakat internasional dan membawanya ke beberapa negara. Meski dia memfokuskan diri mengkaji Ahmadiyah di Indonesia, tapi Ahmadiyah ada di lebih dari 100 negara. “Disertasi yang saya tulis memungkinkan dikaji atau dibaca oleh peneliti dari berbagai negara. Atau, tulisan ini memungkinkan untuk dikembangkan, diadaptasi, dan sebagainya di banyak Negara,” kata dia.

Pendeknya, orang yang mungkin tertarik pada kajiannya bukan hanya mereka yang mengenal/mengkaji Islam di Indonesia, tapi juga orang yang mengkaji agama secara umum, termasuk pejabat pemerintah yang menghadapi masalah tentang pengungsi dan pencari suaka dari anggota Ahmadiyah dan juga lawyers dalam bidang imigrasi.

Teori Homo Sacer

Tema Ahmadiyah juga memenuhi kriteria ketiga. Tulisan-tulisan tentang Ahmadiyah di Indonesia didominasi oleh pendekatan sejarah, teologi, komunikasi, politik, dan HAM. “Nah, saya akan mengisi dengan perspektif yang berbeda yang saya ambilkan dari kajian religious studies, di antaranya kajian tentang persekusi dengan teori homo sacer dari Giorgio Agamben,” kata Ahmad Najib.

Di antara kesimpulan dari disertasinya itu adalah: Pertama, permusuhan terhadap Ahmadiyah itu bukan fenomena baru di Indonesia. Permusuhan itu sudah terjadi sejak Ahmadiyah datang tahun 1920-an. Namun demikian, ada perbedaan penting antara permusuhan terhadap Ahmadiyah pada masa lalu dan sekarang. Dulu, permusuhan itu terbatas bersifat diskursif, wacana. Sementara sekarang permusuhan itu mengarah terhadap penyerangan fisik, penghancuran rumah ibadah, pengusiran dan sejenisnya. Mengapa ini terjadi? Di antaranya adalah karena lemahnya negara menegakkan hukum dan memberi perlindingan terhadap minoritas. Dengan retorika demokrasi dan suara mayoritas, kelompok Islam garis keras memaksakan kehendaknya hingga pada titik-titik yang melanggar hukum. Tragisnya, ketika mereka melanggar hukum,  mereka tak mendapat hukuman yang setimpal, bahkan sering dibebaskan. Akibatnya, mereka semakin berani menyerang kelompok lemah seperti Ahmadiyah.

Kedua, fatwa sering dituduh sebagai penyebab penyerangan terhadap Ahmadiyah. Bagi saya, fatwa hanyalah satu faktor. Fatwa terhadap Ahmadiyah telah dikeluarkan organisasi Islam sejak tahun 1929. MUI pun telah mengeluarkan fatwa pada tahun 1980. Namun tidak ada penyerangan terhadap Ahmadiyah seperti sekarang. Bahkan pada tahun 1989, Ahmadiyah menang di pengadilan pada kasus pelecehan terhadap gambar Mirza Ghulam Ahmad yang dimuat oleh Serial Media Dakwah. Fatwa memberikan aura sakral atau ideological persuasion dalam penyerangan terhadap Ahmadiyah. Kalaulah pemerintah tegas menindak pelanggaran, maka fatwa ini tidak akan mampu membuat orang berbuat anarkis dan brutal.

Ketiga, posisi Ahmadiyah yang berada dalam posisi antara menjadi salah satu faktor yang dijadikan pembenaran oleh kelompok radikal untuk membenci Ahmadiyah dan memperlakukan mereka lebih buruk dari non-Muslim. Bahasa yang sering dipakai adalah: musuh dalam selimut, bisul, kanker, menusuk dari belakang, tumor, dan sejenisnya. Ahmadiyah pernah dianggap bagian dari Islam tapi kemudian dianggap membawa Islam ke arah dan tujuan berbeda dari Islam. Secara sosiologis, inilah menyebabkan banyak sekali kelompok yang dituduh heretik sering mengalami lebih buruk dari orang dengan agama yang sama sekali berbeda. Tentu saja secara normatif ini tak bisa dibenarkan. Dalam kondisi ketika kelompok konservatif dan gerakan radikal keagamaan meningkat, kelompok seperti ini sering menjadi korban paling mengenaskan.

Keempat, kolaborasi antara agama dan negara dalam menentukan ortodoksi atau pemahaman agama yang dianggap benar atau sah adalah faktor yang paling berpengaruh terhadap persekusi Ahmadiyah yang beberapa tahun lalu tejadi di Indonesia. Posisi negara yang sekular adalah menganggap semua keyakinan sebagai ortodok atau benar. SKB tentang Ahmadiyah tahun 2008 menunjukkan bahwa negara telah mengambil posisi tertentu dalam keyakinan keagamaan, bukan lagi pada posisi netral.

Editor : Windrarto

http://www.satuharapan.com/read-detail/read/negara-tak-lagi-netral-ketika-terbitkan-skb-tentang-ahmadiyah/

Nabi Muhammad SAW Ajarkan Prinsip Demokrasi yang Menghindari Tirani Mayoritas

Ahmad Najib Burhani, di depan Universitas California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Amerika Serikat. (Foto-foto: dok. Maarif Institute)

Penulis: Melki Pangaribuan | Selasa, 06 Agustus 2013

JAKARTA, SATUHARAPAN.COM - Pakar comparative religions within a single religious tradition (Islam) dan kajian tentang “konsep, teori, dan praktek heresy”, Ahmad Najib Burhani, mengatakan bahwa negara telah mengambil posisi tertentu dalam keyakinan keagamaan, bukan lagi pada posisi netral. Hal ini bertolak belakang dengan kehidupan berdemokrasi, yang saat ini tengah dibangun di Indonesia.

“Demokrasi diciptakan antara lain agar tak terjadi apa yang disebut dengan tirani mayoritas,” kata Najib kepada Satuharapan.com melalui surat elektronik yang dikirimnya pada hari Minggu (4/8), langsung dari Amerika Serikat.

Ada sejumlah pertanyaan yang diajukan kepadanya terkait dengan studi tentang kelompok minoritas keagamaan dalam Islam atau pecahan dari Islam. Berikut ini petikan wawancara dengan salah satu peneliti Maarif Institute for Culture and Humanity dan Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia  (LIPI) ini.

Siapakah yang dimaksud kelompok minoritas dalam penelitian Anda?

Mengenai definisi minoritas ini, umumnya para sarjana sepakat dengan definisi yang diberikan oleh Francesco Capotorti, mantan pakar di the UN Sub Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Memisoglu 2007, 4; Ghanea 2012, 4). Menurut Capotorti, yang disebut minoritas adalah, “a group, numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members – being nationals of the State – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language” (Ghanea 2012, 4-5).

Mengikuti definisi dari Capotorti tersebut, maka dalam konteks Indonesia, yang disebut dengan agama minoritas tidak hanya merujuk kepada institusi yang menyatakan dirinya sebagai agama dengan jumlah pemeluk yang kecil seperti Madraisme, Permalim, Tolotang, Petuntung, Perbegu, Aluk To Dolo, dan Kaharingan, namun juga merujuk kepada komunitas-komunitas keagamaan kecil dalam agama besar seperti Shi‘ah dan Ahmadiyah di tengah komunitas Sunni Islam. Tentu saja untuk konteks Indonesia, agama selain Islam juga masuk dalam kategori minoritas.

Nasib kelompok minoritas keagamaan ini belakangan ini cukup menyedihkan. Karena itu butuh perhatian dan kepedulian khusus. Dalam konteks politik, kelompok minoritas tak terlalu berpengaruh dalam pemenangan calon gubernur atau presiden. Tapi esensi dari demokrasi sesungguhnya terletak, di antaranya, pada bagaimana seorang pemimpin yang terpilih dengan suara terbanyak itu melindungi kelompok minoritas. Demokrasi diciptakan antara lain agar tak terjadi apa yang disebut dengan tirani mayoritas. Karena itu, tes apakah demokrasi di suatu negara telah berjalan baik adalah bagaimana perlindungan terhadap minoritas di negara itu. Dalam konteks Islam, tes keislaman yang benar juga bagaimana seorang Muslim itu memperlakukan minoritas. Dalam sebuah sabdanya, Nabi Muhammad berkata, “Bukanlah bagian dari umatku jika ada kelompok mayoritas atau kuat tapi tak menyayangi minoritas atau lemah. Dan juga bukan bagian dari umatku jika ada kelompok minoritas tapi tak hormat kepada mayoritas.”  Sabda ini sangat relevan dengan prinsip demokrasi yang menghindari tirani mayoritas.

Bagaimana nasib kelompok minoritas itu?

Dalam kasus Ahmadiyah, misalnya, keyakinan Ahmadiyah bahwa Mirza Ghulam Ahmad adalah nabi dianggap menodai Islam yang meyakini tiadanya nabi setelah Nabi Muhammad. Untuk melindungi ‘kesucian’ agama Islam, Menteri Agama, Jaksa Agung, dan Menteri Dalam Negeri lantas mengeluarkan lantas mengeluarkan Keputusan Bersama (SKB) tahun 2008 tentang Peringantan dan Perintah kepada Penganut, Anggota, dan/atau Anggota Pengurus Jemaat Ahmadiyah Indonesia (JAI) dan Warga Masyarakat. Intinya, SKB ini melarang warga Ahmadiyah menjalankan dan menyebarkan ajaran agama yang mereka anut.

SKB di atas justru menyulut munculnya beragama tindak intoleransi terhadap pengikut Ahmadiyah. Berdasarkan catatan Setara Institute, Ahmadiyah menjadi korban tindakan intoleransi lebih besar dari kelompok minoritas lain pada tahun 2008 dan tahun-tahun setelah itu. Dari 265 peristiwa pelanggaran kebebasan beragama/berkeyakinan di Indonesia pada 2008, 193 peristiwa menimpa Ahmadiyah (Hasani dan Naipospos 2011, 1). Beberapa tokoh Islam meminta kepada pengikut Ahmadiyah untuk memilih antara kembali ke Islam versi mereka atau mendirikan agama baru. Dua pilihan yang mustahil dilakukan oleh pengikut Ahmadiyah yang taat. Ini adalah perpindahan agama secara paksa yang dilakukan oleh tokoh-tokoh Islam. Perpindahannya bukan dari luar Islam ke Islam, tapi dari Islam ke luar Islam oleh tokoh-tokoh Islam sendiri.

Nasib yang plaing menyedihkan tentu saja terjadi di Asrama Transito, Mataram dan Cikeusik, Banten. Di Asrama Transito, sekitar 140 warga Ahmadiyah harus hidup sepertistateless people sejak tahun 2006 ketika mereka diserang, rumahnya dihancurkan, harta-bendanya dijarah, dan kemudian mereka diusir dari desanya. Mereka telah mengalami pengusiran berkali-kali dan setiap kali ingin kembali ke desa asalnya, mereka selalu diusir kembali. Di desa Umbulan, Cikeusik tiga warga Ahmadiyah dibunuh secara sadis ketika terjadi penyerangan terhadap rumah misi di sana pada awal 2011. Pembunuhan ini sangat sadis karena korban ditelanjangi, dipukuli dengan benda tumpul hingga meninggal. Dan bahkan, ketika korban sudah terlihat tak bernyawa pun, para penyerang masih mengekspresikan kebenciannya dengan terus melempari dengan batu dan menginjak-injak tubuh korban.

Mengapa kelompok seperti Ahmadiyah, Ismai’ili, Baha’i, Druze sering mengalami perlakukan lebih buruk dari non-Muslim di negara seperti Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, dan Mesir?

Karena mereka dianggap tidak memiliki posisi keagamaan yang jelas. Mereka tidak bisa dikategorikan sebagai ahlul kitab yang memiliki tempat tertentu dalam teologi Islam dan harus dilindungi dalam pemahaman Islam lama. Mereka juga tidak bisa dikategorikan sama dengan mainstream umat Islam. Posisi mereka sering dianggap berada diantara Muslim dan non-Muslim. Konsekuensinya, hak-hak mereka sebagai orang Islam tidak diberikan dan hak-hak mereka sebagai non-Muslim masih ditahan hingga mereka mengakui sebagai non-Muslim. Kondisi ini menyebabkan tidak adanya perlindungan hukum dalam pemahaman kelompok Islam garis keras. Sosiologi tentang heresi dengan jelas menjelaskan tentang posisi kelompok yang sering dituduh sebagai heretik. Contoh yang sering saya pakai adalah tentang perceraian suami istri. Ketika terjadi perceraian yang tidak baik, maka suami atau istri itu sering melampiaskan kebeciannnya kepada bekas suami atau istrinya secara berlebihan. Kebenciannya kepada bekas suami atau istrinya itu jauh melebihi orang asing.

Apa yang saya tulis dalam disertasi saya yang berjudul When Muslims are not Muslims: The Ahmadiyya Community and the Discourse on Heresy in Indonesiaadalah berusaha menganalisa tentang mereka yang identitas keagamaanya sering dianggap berada dalam posisi antara (liminal status) dengan menjadikan Ahmadiyah sebagai contoh utama. Ada tiga pendekatan utama yang saya pakai dalam disertasi ini. Pertama, saya melihat Ahmadiyah secara teologis: Bagaimana atau dimana posisi Ahmadiyah dalam pemahaman fiqh Islam klasik dan juga fatwa-fatwa kontemporer. Kedua, saya melihat secara sosiologis tentang posisi kelompok yang disebut heretik pada masyarakat beragama di Indonesia. Terakhir, saya melihat Ahmadiyah dengan pendekatan political-theology dengan terutama memakai perspektif dari Giorgio Agamben tentang homo sacer. Yang dimaksud dengan homo sacer disini bukanlah orang suci yang seperti umumnya dipahami. Konsep ini mengacu kepada mereka yang berada dalam posisi antara bisa dibunuh oleh siapapun dan pelakukan tak akan dihukum. Dalam konteks Ahmadiyah, posisi mereka itu sering dianggap antara orang suci dan orang yang ditabukan; mereka dianggap sebagai kelompok yang dekat dengan Tuhan dalam kelompoknya sendiri, tapi dianggap menjijikan oleh kelompok Muslim di luar mereka.

Sejauh mana Anda melihat fenomena keagamana bagi umat Islam (secara khusus) dan relasinya dalam umat beragama lain (Kristiani, misalnya), atau bagaimana relasi kelompok keagamaan-keagamaan di Amerika pasca 12 tahun tragedi WTC? Dan juga pasca wafatnya Osama bin Laden?

Bisa dikatakan bahwa meningkatnya kebencian kepada mereka yang berbeda, meningkatnya konservatisme keagamaan adalah fenomena global. Ini tidak hanya terjadi di negara Muslim, tapi juga di negara Kristen, Hindu, Buddha, dan negara sekuler. Peristiwa 11 September 2001 hanya satu simbol semakin meningkatnya konservatisme dan radikalisme ini. Banyak orang mengatakan bahwa apa yang terjadi sekarang ini adalah “the last breath of religion before its permanent death” atau nafas terakhir dari agama sebelum ia mengalami kematian total. Namun banyak juga yang menyebut ini sebagai perlawanan terhadap sekularsime yang ternyata tak bisa memenuhi janji-janjinya untuk menenteramkan dan mensejahterakan umat manusia. Namun saya melihat fenomena ini sebagai kebingunan dan kebimbangan umat manusia menghadapi perubahan yang cepat, dunia yang semakin plural, dan kaburnya hampir seluruh batas-batas norma tradisional yang sering dipegangi orang. Meningkatnya imigrasi, pernikahan sejenis, perubahan iklim, dan sejenisnya membuat manusia bingung mencari pegangan yang pasti.

Editor : Windrarto

http://www.satuharapan.com/read-detail/read/nabi-muhammad-saw-ajarkan-prinsip-demokrasi-yang-menghindari-tirani-mayoritas/

Membela Ahmadiyah yang Dizalimi

Imam Ghazali Said *

Satu jam setelah Forum Lintas Agama (FLA) memilih saya menjadi jubir dalam konferensi pers 24 April 2008, telepon dan ponsel saya terus berdering; mempertanyakan mengapa saya membela aliran sesat? Karena itu, perkenankan saya memberikan penjelasan berikut.

Pertama, Ahmadiyah, baik aliran Lahore, di Indonesia populer dengan Gerakan Ahmadiyah Indonesia (GAI) maupun aliran Qodiyan, yang populer dengan Jamaah Ahmadiyah Indonesia (JAI), telah berkiprah dan berinteraksi dengan tokoh nasionalis Indonesia, baik yang muslim maupun yang sekuler sejak 1920-an sampai 1980-an.

Dalam rentang waktu itu GAI dan JAI telah berkiprah dalam perjuangan kemerdekaan Indonesia dan ikut serta dalam mencerdaskan bangsa. Sayid Syah M. Muballig (ketua panitia pemulihan Pemerintahan RI dan penyusun program bahasa Urdu RRI Jakarta, 1950), Erfan Dahlan (putra pendiri Muhammadiyah, KH A. Dahlan), Abu Bakar Ayub, Abd. Wahid, dan masih banyak lagi, adalah tokoh-tokoh GAI dan JAI yang punya jasa besar dalam perjuangan dan mengisi kemerdekaan RI dengan cara bergabung dalam BKR, TKR, Kowani, dan KNI.

Dalam rentang waktu tersebut, mereka intens berinteraksi, baik sosial, politik, ekonomi, dan teologis dengan tokoh-tokoh dan organisasi Islam terpopuler di Indonesia, Muhammadiyah dan NU. Bahkan, dialog teologis pernah terjadi antara wakil GAI-JAI dengan A. Hassan (Persis) dan KH A. Wahid Hasyim (NU). Hasilnya? GAI dan JAI adalah saudara kita sesama muslim yang tinggal di negara tercinta Indonesia.

Lebih dari itu, tokoh GAI R. Sudewo Parto Kusumo (1905-1970) sangat berjasa secara intelektual dan spritual dalam mengader kaum muda muslim terpelajar yang tergabung dalam Jong Islamitenbond (JIB). Juga masih banyak tokoh GAI dan JAI yang kemudian berjuang dalam organisasi Syarikat Islam (SI) dan Masyumi. Beranikah kita menilai mereka itu "aliran sesat" dan "bukan muslim" hanya karena mereka punya teologi yang sedikit berbeda dengan mayoritas muslim Indonesia?

Kedua, setelah melakukan kajian mendalam, membaca dan memahami kitab-kitab tentang aliran-aliran dalam Islam, di antaranya al-Farq Baina al-Firaq (al-Baghdadi), al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Syahrastani), al- Fishal Baina al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Ibn Hazm), al-Iqtishad fi al-I’tiqad (al-Ghazali), Maqalat al-Islamiyyin wa Ikhtilaf al-Mushallin (al-Asy’ari), dan lain-lain, bersama kiai pesantren yang mewakili seluruh provinsi di Indonesia yang difasilitasi Komunitas Mata Air pimpinan Gus Mus dan Wahid Institute pimpinan Gus Dur, pada 22-25 Maret 2008 di Jakarta menyimpulkan, "bahwa manusia yang berucap dua kalimah syahadat, melaksanakan rukun Islam dan rukun iman, sekaligus tidak menentang satu pun dari dua rukun iman dan Islam itu, wajib dianggap dan dinilai sebagai saudara kita sesama muslim, yang hak-hak sipilnya harus kita lindungi".

GAI dan JAI, setelah saya melakukan studi terhadap kitab Tadzkirah, testimoni, interogasi, dan dialog dengan para tokoh dan kaum awam pengikut JAI, ternyata mereka tidak keluar dari kriteria muslim dan mukmin di atas. Karena itu, saya konsisten mengikuti nurani dan kajian ilmiah untuk "Membela JAI" tanpa mempertimbangkan akan dibenci kelompok muslim yang menyesatkan Ahmadiyah atau tidak.

Ketiga, fatwa penyesatan dan penilaian di luar Islam oleh MUI terhadap Ahmadiyah Qodiyan, 1 Juni 1980, dan diperkuat fatwa MUI 15 Juli 2005, itu muncul setelah aliran tertentu yang mengaku paling Islam, menyerang kantor pusat JAI di Parung, Bogor.

Selanjutnya, tindak kekerasan menyebar ke berbagai daerah, kantor-kantor JAI diserang, sehingga menimbulkan korban. Saya menilai fatwa MUI tersebut telah memberi legitimasi diperkenankannya tindak kekerasan terhadap JAI yang tak pernah mengganggu secara fisik -apalagi menyerang- kelompok Islam lain yang berbeda.

Realita ini menggugah nurani saya untuk menyatakan bahwa JAI telah dizalimi dan hak-hak sipilnya digangu. Ini jelas bertentangan dengan konstitusi kita UUD ’45 pasal 29, ayat 1 dan 2, di samping mengabaikan bahkan melanggar hak asasi manusia (HAM).

Keempat, status ormas JAI yang sudah berbadan hukum dengan SK Menkeh RI No JA 5/23, tanggal 13-3-1953 tidak dengan mudah akan dibatalkan melalui SKB Menag, Mendagri, dan Jaksa Agung, hanya berdasarkan tekanan kelompok yang merasa "paling Islam" dan rekomendasi fatwa MUI dan Bakorpakem. Sebab, eksistensi MUI dan JAI itu sejajar dan keberadaan Bakorpakem tidak punya landasan hukum dan konstitusi yang kuat.

Kelima, MUI mestinya mengeluarkan fatwa bagi penyerang (pelaku pidana), bukan menyesatkan pihak yang diserang (korban pidana). Hemat penulis, MUI tidak adil dalam klarifikasi data. Yang menjadi pedoman MUI banyak berdasarkan yang dikemukakan Amin Jamaluddin (LPII) dalam bukunya: Ahmadiyah Membajak Alquran, dan buku Hartono Ahmad Jaiz berjudul Ahmadiyah Punya Nabi dan Kitab Suci Baru.

Mengapa MUI -sebelum mengeluarkan fatwa- tidak mengklarifikasi tentang isi dan substansi dua judul buku tersebut pada PB JAI?

Keenam, MUI dan organisasi-organisasi Islam yang lain mestinya menyadari bahwa vonis "luar Islam" akan berakibat tindak kekerasan dan mengurangi secara drastis persentase umat Islam Indonesia.

Menurut data JAI, jumlah pengikutnya secara nasional antara 2-3 juta jamaah, yang di sensus KTP tertulis Islam. Itu selain umat Konghucu yang dalam KTP-nya juga mencantumkan Islam. MUI-lah yang paling bertanggung jawab atas penurunan persentase umat Islam Indonesia.

Ketujuh, pembatalan badan hukum JAI hanya bisa diterima lewat keputusan pengadilan. Karena itu, jika SKB pembubaran JAI terbit, saya menganjurkan agar JAI menempuh jalur hukum. Menggugat SKB tersebut ke pengadilan. Dengan demikian, SKB itu belum punya kekuatan hukum tetap.

Kasus JAI ini akan menjadi tolok ukur tahannya konstitusi kita menghadapi gelombang makin menguatnya kelompok muslim "Kanan" yang menginginkan formalisme syariah dalam kehidupan negara. Menurut saya hal itu menjadi ancaman serius bagi eksistensi NKRI dengan semua perangkat konstitusinya.

*. Imam Ghazali Said, pengasuh Pesantren Mahasiswa (Pesma) "An-Nur" dan ketua FKUB Surabaya.


Catatan:
Tulisan ini semula dimuat di Jawa Pos, 28 April 2008. Sedikit suntingan dilakukan atas ejaan judul sejumlah buku yang dikutip di sana. (Ruzbihan Hamazani)

Discursive Construction of Religious Minority: Minoritization of Ahmadiyya in Indonesia

Aulia Nastiti

German Asia Research Center

July 5, 2014

Deutsches Asienforschungszentrum Asian Series Commentaries, Vol. 19, 2014

Abstract:     

For many years, Indonesia has been widely regarded as a model wellspring of moderate and peaceful Islam. However, these democratic pluralism images appear inconsistent with the many religious-inspired violent conflicts that have taken place continuously in Indonesia up until the present day (2014). Taking the perspective of historicity, the minoritization of certain religious communities in Indonesia is not a historical condition, but is rather constructed through specific historical processes, involving several actors that have an interest in power and representation. The Ahmadiyya case has remained a polemic until now and is an example to illustrate how the majority discourses are produced to create the identity of a minority group as “the other.”

This paper will address the question within the historical perspective of why and how Ahmadiyya became an antagonized minority. To answer this question, the discourses from several parties that address the Ahmadiyya issue will be identified, as well as how these discourses identify Ahmadis as the “antagonist minority.” Furthermore, discursive construction will be linked with the shifting landscape of the Indonesian political and cultural context to explain why there has been growing agitation against the Ahmadiyya, particularly since the reformation era, while previously the Ahmadiyya coexisted peacefully with other Islamic organizations in Indonesia.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 16
Keywords: Minorities, Discursive Construction, Ahmadiyya, Indonesia, Religious Conflict

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2472294

 How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?

A new book by the late scholar Shahab Ahmed reveals the capaciousness, complexity, and contradictions of Islam.

By Elias Muhann

 The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of Islam as the result of a clever hoax. Muhammad, it asserted, was a former Christian who had made a failed attempt to become pope and then set off for Syria to mislead the innocents. He tamed a turtledove and taught it to eat grains of wheat placed in his ear. In a scene reminiscent of the enchantment of Melampus, the Greek oracle who was granted the ability to understand animal speech when his ears were licked by snakes, Piers’s Muhammad mesmerized audiences by having the bird fly down during the course of his preaching and appear to whisper in his ear. Staging a moment of revelation from God, the false prophet led men to misbelief by “wiles of his wit and a whit dowve.”

In the centuries following Muhammad’s death in 632, many Christians like William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, sought to make sense of Islam in the terms and symbols of their own faith. Was it just another schismatic sect led by a great here­siarch, as Dante portrayed it in his Divine Comedy? Or was it an ancient form of chivalry, a Saracen code of ethics? Did Muhammad’s followers think him a god? The figure of the prophet-as-trickster found in Piers Plowman was not the most outlandish attempt to explain the origins of Islam. Medieval French chansons de gestes attributed a welter of fantastical qualities to the cult of “Mahom,” including a pantheon of minor deities superimposed from Roman mythology.

University chairs in Oriental studies began proliferating in Europe in the 17th century and were soon followed by the establishment of scholarly associations and academic journals. By the late 19th century, European knowledge of the languages, histories, and customs of Muslim societies had advanced significantly beyond the scope of medieval apologetics, but the interpretation of Islam through the lens of Christianity remained a central current of Orientalist scholarship. As Shahab Ahmed writes in a major new study, the consequences of this approach and its legacy have made it difficult for moderns—­scholars and laypeople, Muslims and non-Muslims alike—to grasp the “historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning.” Coming to terms with Islam—“saying Islam meaningfully,” as he puts it—requires making ourselves sensitive to the “capaciousness, complexity, and, often, outright contradiction” that inheres within the broadest possible range of practices, beliefs, representational forms, metaphors, and objects associated with Islam.

Ahmed, a scholar of Islamic studies at Harvard, died this autumn at the tragically young age of 48. His book is a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of a logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto. It is, in a way, all of these things. For those who knew him, the peculiar ambition of What Is Islam? will not come as a surprise, because Ahmed had been at work for years on a much-anticipated and controversial study about the formation of Islamic orthodoxy. The surprise is that What Is Islam? is not that book.

* * *

Shahab Ahmed arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor in 2005. I was a doctoral student at the time and had heard most of the hagiographical accounts of his life that flowed through graduate-student circles. Fluent in many languages, Ahmed had lived in Singapore, England, Malaysia, and Egypt before coming to America for graduate school. After completing a doctorate at Princeton, he was admitted to Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows, where he spent three years before joining the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Mutual acquaintances spoke of his terrifying erudition and wit, sharpened by an unrepentantly refined British accent.

At Princeton, Ahmed had been a student of Michael Cook, the eminent historian. During his first year, he became interested in the “Satanic Verses” incident, an episode from early Islamic history in which the Prophet Muhammad was said to have mistaken some verses suggested by Satan as being part of the divinely revealed Koran. The topic intrigued him. Reading through the earliest sources, Ahmed found a widespread and untroubled consensus on the historical authenticity of the event, which stood in contrast to the doctrinal rejection that emerged centuries later. As he would argue in an award-winning dissertation, the early view of Muhammad as a man “subject to error and Divine correction” represented an outlook at odds with the later theories of prophetic infallibility. At the Society of Fellows, Ahmed began to expand his project into a larger study that would trace Muslim attitudes toward the figure of Muhammad through time and space, using the Satanic Verses problem as a way to explore the development of orthodoxy across the centuries. He assembled an enormous archive of legal, theological, literary, and historical sources on the subject in more than a dozen languages, drawn from manuscript libraries all over the world.

A faculty position interrupted the reverie of research. At Harvard, Ahmed swiftly established a reputation for teaching demanding graduate seminars. The first session of each course seemed designed to turn away as many curious students as possible. A fearsome syllabus front-loaded with hundreds of pages of reading each week, mainly in primary sources, was his deterrent of choice—and an effective one. While at Princeton, Ahmed had taken almost no courses, devoting all of his time to his own research. Michael Cook told me, “In those days, we had no rules obliging students to take courses—they were just expected to do so. Now, thanks to Shahab, we do have rules.”

Those who braved Ahmed’s courses were frequently stunned by the audacity of his expectations. He could be prickly, arrogant, contemptuous of poor preparation, and imperious. Despite this, I was enthralled by him. During my second year, I responded to an advertisement he placed for a research assistant. The job paid a pittance; about this, he was honest, but I convinced him to let me sign on. In his office were shelves filled with hundreds of identical orange file folders, each devoted to a different historical figure. This was the great collection he had put together on the Satanic Verses, an archive of everything ever said and written about the incident. Many of the folders contained transcriptions, in Ahmed’s impeccable Arabic cursive, of excerpts from manuscripts he had consulted in Istanbul’s great libraries and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

My task was to locate whatever information existed about the historical individuals in the archive, drawing on the extensive corpus of premodern biographical dictionaries and chronicles. For the rest of the year, I lived in a world of medieval authorities and onomastic wild-goose chases through the classical tradition. No figure in Ahmed’s archive was too obscure to escape his attention. We hunted for Transoxanian jurists, North African mystics, Andalusian grammarians, Iraqi logicians. Every scrap of opinion about the controversy buried in the great wall of orange files was somehow significant to Ahmed, and the most minor figures were often the most interesting. For months, I had no sense of what I was doing and how it fit into the larger project. Over time, however, things began to fall into place.

The story Ahmed was telling comprehended a tremendous braid of narratives, a pageant of contradiction and diversity in an intellectual tradition that spanned over a millennium. By historicizing the transformation in attitudes toward Muhammad’s prophetic mission, Ahmed hoped that his study might provoke an engagement with the tremendous resources of the past in confronting the questions of the present. How has Islamic orthodoxy been formulated over time, and how might it be reformulated today? As ambitious a thinker as he was, however, Ahmed also seemed to recognize that developing the full implications of his argument was a delicate business. This was the reason for the immensity of the book’s dimensions. As he confided to me one afternoon while we sifted through the mountains of references I had flagged, he was erecting a scholarly edifice so formidable that no one could challenge it.

Ahmed never fully completed the Satanic Verses project. The book grew larger in his mind, with the work accomplished occupying a correspondingly smaller portion of it. At some point, he entered a limbo between research positions and fellowships, during which time he embarked on a different project, co-authoring a book on heresy trials in the Ottoman Empire. When I saw him a year after I’d completed my degree, he seemed strangely happy, even accepting of the foregone conclusion that his chances of receiving tenure at Harvard looked impossibly slim. The new book was nearly finished; all that was left to write was an introduction.

Like the first project, however, that introduction grew larger and larger, absorbing all of its author’s attention and time. Eventually, it would become a 600-page tome with over a thousand footnotes. What Is Islam? is that book.

* * *

When discussing the modern discipline of Islamic studies, Ahmed liked to complain that it was possible to earn a doctorate in this field from an Ivy League university without ever reading the Divan of Hafiz, the great 14th-century Persian poet. He describes that work in What Is Islam? as “the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-­read, widely-memorized, widely-­recited, widely-invoked, and widely-­proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history.” This was not merely a work of belles lettres, but a book that exemplified “ideals of self-conception…in the largest part of the Islamic world for half-a-millennium.” How could a modern student of Islamic civilization formulate an understanding of this subject without taking stock of such a work, and especially its treatment of wine drinking, erotic love, and the hypocrisies of self-righteous moralists? If Hafiz’s work is not Islamic, then what is?

This might as well be the central question of What Is Islam? The medieval world in which Hafiz’s Divan was a best seller was also a world suffused with the traditions of Avicennan rationalism, Sufi experiential mysticism, the celebration of figural representation, a taste for literary ambiguity, a distinction between public and private selves, and one between legal discourses and other measures of normativity. It was, in other words, a world crowded with variation and contradiction.

Such variety is everywhere to be found in the textual and material record of what Ahmed calls the “Balkan-to-Bengal complex,” the great belt of Muslim societies that stretched from southeastern Europe and Central Asia into North India between the 15th and late 19th centuries. This vast zone represented “the most geographically, demographically, and temporally extensive instance of a highly-articulated shared paradigm of life and thought in the history of Muslims—it is, demographically, spatially, and temporally, an (if not the) historically major paradigm of Islam.” To answer the question of what Islam is, Ahmed suggests, one must at least come to terms with what Islam was in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, “as a matter of human fact.”

Among that region’s notable characteristics are the significance of rationalist philosophy (both in its purest form and as an epistemological framework for scholastic theology); the omnipresence of Sufi thought and practice; and the tradition of figural representation in painting. The writings of Avicenna, the 11th-century Persian polymath, and the great legacy of commentary he inspired advanced the idea of a superior Truth accessible to the most powerful intellects (belonging, naturally, to philosophers), and “a lesser version of that Truth that communicates itself via Prophets, such as Muhammad.” A prophet was, to Avicenna, a kind of “über-philosopher,” and the prescribed laws promulgated in the Koran were meant “to address the multitude in terms intelligible to them, seeking to bring home to them what transcends their intelligence by means of simile and symbol.”

This understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation prompted some charges of heresy, but the scale of Avicenna’s reception suggests that, in many quarters, he had won the argument, with his philosophical method and conceptual vocabulary becoming part of a standard scholastic curriculum across the Islamic world. In this light, if a modern definition of Islam does not account for the worldview of a figure such as Avicenna—whom Ahmed describes as “the man who effectively defined God for Muslims”—then something is amiss.

Ahmed examines the definition of Islam in a series of similar provocations. Alongside Avicenna, Hafiz, and the great Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi, he also considers the practice of wine drinking, a classical example of something prohibited by Islamic law and yet “positively valued in non-legal discourse.” The most cursory familiarity with premodern Islamic literatures, even beyond the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, attests to it. Poetry and belletristic prose in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu fairly overflow with wine, while historical accounts of famous rulers and their courts portray scenes of literary salons congregating late into the night, fueled by musical performances and great quantities of drink. On the cover of What Is Islam? is one such sovereign, the 17th-century Mughal emperor Jahangir, pictured on the face of a gold coin contemplating a goblet of wine.

How to make sense of these contradictions? Since the beginnings of their academic study of the faith, scholars have grappled with the problem of reconciling the heterogeneity of Muslim beliefs and customs with the uniformity of “Islam.” One long-standing approach makes a distinction between the domains of “religion” and “culture.” Perhaps the most prominent representative of this school, the historian Marshall Hodgson, coined the term “Islamicate” to account for the fullest range of ways of thinking and living found within the cultural sphere of “Islamdom.” Ahmed thinks that Hodgson was motivated by the correct impulse, but came to the wrong conclusions. To separate religion from culture is to make an artificial distinction that becomes untenable in the case of Islam, in which religion and culture are thoroughly interwoven.

Another approach argues that it is senseless to speak of Islam as a monolith; what exists is an array of local islams. If Islam is anything, it is “whatever Muslims say it is.” This has a powerful and pluralistic ring; it accommodates both Avicenna and his great critic, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the 11th-century theologian. But as Ahmed observes, the islams argument is analytically weak, sacrificing explanatory power in the service of rhetorical efficiency. The assertion that Islam is whatever Muslims say it is offers a description, not a concept.

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The solution that Ahmed puts forward is a definition of Islam as an act of interpretation, something no less elemental than the production of meaning. It is not as narrow a practice as interpreting the Koran—the Text of Revelation—but is rather an engagement with the larger reality within which the Koran was revealed, what Ahmed calls the “Pre-Text of Revelation.” The Koran does not contain all truth; about this fact, there can be no disagreement. Where disagreement does exist “is over the question of whether and in what degree and by what mechanism the Truth of the Pre-Text of Revelation may be accessed.” Can one apprehend truth through some other means, such as the rationality of the philosophers or the Sufi “experiential annexation” of the self? Can the truth of the Pre-Text—which is ontologically prior to that of the Text—be accessed “without the Text, or via the Text, or only in the Text?”

For Ahmed, the history of Islam is a history of the many ways that Muslims have answered this question. It comprehends the literalism of “textual-restrictivists,” who give absolute priority to the text of the Koran and the Hadith (the corpus of sayings attributed to Muhammad) in determining a set of norms as exclusively Islamic, while rejecting other forms of interpretation. This history, of course, also embraces the authority of such “expansivist” projects as Islamic philosophy and Sufism, and everything in between.

When viewed as a single body, these different manners of interpretation form what Ahmed calls the “Con-Text of Revelation… the entire accumulated lexicon of means and meanings of Islam that has been historically generated and recorded up to any given moment: it is the full historical vocabulary of Islam at any given moment.” Something may be said to be Islamic—whether it is a law, a painting, an item of clothing, a poem, a joke—insofar as it expresses its meaning in the terms of Con-Text, connecting in some fashion with the whole archive of earlier hermeneutic engagements.

Can the celebration of wine drinking be Islamic? To Ahmed, the answer is: obviously, yes. It is Islamic insofar as this celebration is expressed, for example, in the terms of such classical Sufi metaphors for “the experience of intoxication with the Divine,” as well as the more mundane recognition of wine’s virtues as a social lubricant. The extensive medical literature of the premodern Islamic world attests openly to the latter fact. As the 10th-century physician and philosopher Abu Zayd al-Balkhi put it, “It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation…and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and effectively as does drinking wine together.”

To say that wine drinking is un-Islamic may be akin to saying that the refusal to serve in the military during a period of wartime conscription is un-American. In the view of some citizens, such a refusal may well violate the essence of Americanness, in addition to violating American law; to others, however, this act may rather fulfill and epitomize the requirements of citizenship. By Ahmed’s logic, the refusal to serve in the military is not just American in spite of its opposition to other, contradictory values associated with Americanness, but precisely because of it.

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What is the use of a concept? Does it make any difference whether we conceive of Islam as a religion, a culture, a family of heterogeneous local islams, or a process of meaning-­making? Why and to whom do such distinctions matter? In the academy, concepts count for something, and Ahmed’s book represents the most sustained effort in decades to establish a conceptual basis for Islam. It goes without saying that his vision of Islam is a scholar’s vision; it is scholarly not merely in its style and rhetoric, but in the substance of its argument. If Islam is nothing less than the encyclopedic range of what it has been in history, it is impossible to be alive to that range of possibility without the deliberate study of its previous incarnations. No one could have felt this more deeply than Ahmed, whose shelves of orange file folders contained a millennium’s worth of thought and argument about a single event in Islamic history. While few could share his penchant for comprehensiveness, he believed that every Muslim had his or her own wall of orange file folders, so to speak, with which to make sense of the world.

It often seemed to me that Ahmed had contempt for the academy, even though he was as pure a product of it as could be imagined. He regarded the dominant approaches to conceptualizing Islam as structurally flawed, an assessment he documents at length in his book. Over a third of What Is Islam? is devoted to a tour of Orientalist, classical anthropological, and postcolonial scholarship on the subject. It is a survey that is, at times, hairsplitting, ungenerous, combative, and overwrought. It is also, as he put it resignedly to me before he died, “the bit that graduate students will probably end up quoting.” Unsurprisingly, the scholars whose positions are closest to Ahmed’s come in for the most sustained and sometimes withering evaluations, bringing to mind something that he liked to say about how it was “better to be 100 percent wrong than 50 percent right.”

Is Ahmed right? His definition of Islam as a model of “coherent contradiction”—one whereby a Muslim can simultaneously hold in mind many competing views of Islam’s teachings and values—is compelling; but is it true? There is something Gödelian in this project, an attempt to speak aloud a self-negating paradox. Perhaps an unavoidable consequence is that Ahmed’s arguments sometimes sound circular. If the Islamic is that which is recognizable in terms of what has been previously identified as Islamic, where does the buck stop? And might one not argue that any concept as vast as Islam must also be vastly self-contradictory and yet somehow coherent, especially when surveyed through the encyclopedic prism that Ahmed sets before his subject? What distinguishes Islam from such concepts as Christianity, Judaism, or liberalism in this respect?

A more significant problem concerns the consequences of insisting, as Ahmed does, on the inapplicability of distinctions like “religious vs. cultural” or “sacred vs. secular” when studying Islam. There is something unpleasantly exoticizing about making “Islamic” the only, or even the principal, lens through which to interpret a Hafizian love poem, a historic building, a metaphor, or a wine goblet. This was the sort of thing that got Orientalists into hot water: the assumption that every aspect of quotidian life in the societies of the Orient was somehow a reflection of Islam. The Orientalists, at least, pointed out the practices and artifacts that seemed to contradict the tenets of conservative piety. Ahmed’s “Islam” comprehends these contradictions, and so flirts with another analytical pitfall: the danger that “Islam,” by containing multitudes, means nothing in particular as a concept.

The academy is not the only place where concepts matter. Ahmed’s intended audience, one senses, also lies beyond the gates of Western universities. Looming in the background of the work is the specter of modern Muslim “textual-restrictivism” and “legal-supremacism,” as exemplified by many political Islamists. Here, he detects an ironic agreement between much Western scholarship and modern Islamist thought. Both groups concur that what is central to Islam is the law, which must be accessed through the study of the Koran and the Hadith. Philosophy and Sufism are dismissed by most Islamists as marginal—if not inimical—to the core of Islam, and to Ahmed’s great frustration, Western academics have tended to agree. Like the Islamist, the academic who makes a distinction between the religious essence of Islam on the one hand, and the cultural practices of the “Islamicate” on the other, is favoring one as more authentic than the other. To Ahmed, the modern fundamentalist happily agrees with this formula, insofar as it necessitates a return to “pure and authentic faith…back to the religion, back to Qur’an and [Hadith], back to the law, back to Islam, and not—God forbid!—to Islamicate.”

The challenge facing modern reformers is to circumvent this obstacle by making use of the rich resources of the historical tradition to explore the different modalities of Islam. Ahmed was quite pessimistic about this prospect, as he felt that the connection between Muslims and their medieval philosophical/Sufi heritage had become considerably attenuated in the modern world. Yet if a 14th-century theologian such as Ibn Taymiyyah—­the intellectual godfather of Wahhabism and other ultra-orthodox currents—­can become one of the best-selling authors of the contemporary Middle East, perhaps there is hope yet for Avicenna.

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Ever since he fell ill earlier this year, I have thought of my former teacher nearly every day. The fact of his death is difficult to accept, not merely because of his young age but because Ahmed inhabited, in my mind, a kind of future tense. Many of us—students, colleagues, and his own mentors—related to him in a mode of anticipation. To ask a friend for news of Shahab was to ask about the progress of his magnum opus, his life’s work. Is he finally nearing the end of the great book we’ve been waiting to read? Is he there yet? That there should suddenly be a book in the world with his name on it while the man himself is gone seems a cruel trick of fate.

Shahab Ahmed was buried on a beautiful fall morning in September. As a group of mourners prepared to lower his body into the earth, a quiet discussion arose among them about the lawful burial rituals. The group included Muslims from all over the world; naturally, the opinions varied. The matter was eventually settled, but I imagine that Shahab would have delighted in the knowledge that contradiction and debate accompanied him to the grave.

http://www.thenation.com/article/contradiction-and-diversity/