A Plea for Intolerant Politics

Just yesterday there was the sad news of a beating and sexual harassment of Nong Darol Mahmada, an activist of the Religious Freedom Association (AKKBB) and Facebook friend of mine by the Front for the Defense of Islam (FPI) in a courtroom in Jakarta during FPI’s trial for the “Bloody Monas” incident. And I ask myself a question: have we not had enough?

Everybody today talk about how we must teach the “false/militant/anarchist/fascist/terrorist” groups of Islam to have more tolerance, to know how the real cultural politics of the world works, how today we should all be modern and adapt the liberal politically correct stance of freedom and tolerance. Some, like the JIL, etc, choose to engage in verbal criticism of militant Islam. Others take the softer side of flaunting how beneficially peaceful it is to adapt a fashionable Zen-Buddhist style of spirituality in Islam. Both strive for only one thing: to right the wrongs of a militant Islam and bring them towards the romantic dream of a politically- and spiritually-correct tolerant Muslim utopia.

But why is it all conceived as a problem of a lack of tolerance from a perverted religious belief? Do we not dare to say that this is a problem of a severe flaw in our democratic legal system, a very real political problem instead of an abstract, spiritual one? There are very few things that I think are more miserable than the idea of suggesting a spiritual healing and liberal democracy lessons for such actors of violence. One of them is the idea of preserving these minority militant groups in the name of justice: “Let us tolerate their violence because everyone deserves a chance to speak out!” Is such stupidity not the ultimate proof that all these romantic discussions of religious difference and tolerance do nothing but blur and displace of from the real question: that of politics?

What about restoring the dignity of democratic politics without cultural tolerance? Do we not dare to admit that there are certain limits of democracy, of liberal freedom, that can never be crossed? Why are we today very afraid to admit that liberalism, multiculturalism, pluralism, etc. are actually far from benign sunshine-and-daffodils utopias of universal equality, but itself consist of inherently superior attitudes to those of fundamentalist people? The correct lesson to learn from Derrida is not the common one that strives for more equality by means of deconstruction, but instead an honest one in which one is willing to realize the boundaries of deconstruction and celebrate the hierarchic opposition when it is politically not possible to accept the Other.

We have had enough lessons of tolerance and all those stupid spiritual-correctness. What we need today are strict legal codes of discretion and protection of our citizens. I would be personally severely disappointed if no legal action is taken to defend Nong in her courtroom incident this past Monday. If there is a past that I am missing right now, it would be the past in which the authoritarian ex-president of Indonesia, Suharto, can easily ban organizations at his will. Would it not be nice if the same banning happen right now to all of the anarchist Muslims?

Islamization of Indonesia and the Deadlock

I stumbled upon several blog posts today that encouraged me to blog about this myself. This one from Budiawan is of particular interest — it points out how, in fact, Islam is mostly used as a mask, an excuse of economic struggle. Ariel Heryanto has written a great deal on the dynamics of Islamization and non-Islamization of the Indonesian government — a blog post of his can be found here. What I see in today’s so-called post-political era is not that of true post-politics, in which ideologies (in the dualistic Cold War sense) no longer matter as much as civilization/religion/ethnics and so on, but it’s opposite: anti-liberal-capitalist gestures are pervasive throughout the world — only, they do not dare criticize it without using a grand excuse of civilization/religion/ethnics. This is not a conspiracy theory once you look really close at it: the problems that we have and are still trying to solve since the old ages remain the same: that of economic instability and political oppression, as Budiawan so rightly blogged. Raging Muslims are not idiots — they know that a sharia country would not be possible with mere sporadic acts of terrorism. To me, these riots are, fundamentally, civil unrests without so much a religious meaning as a cultural exclamations without real message to protest ideological dominance.

Thus, I think the question we should ask is not why Muslims are doing so many acts of civil unrests, but why so many civil unrests are masked as Muslim religious protests. In response to Huntington’s thesis, I always say, it’s not an actual clash of civilizations — it is dissatisfaction with economic and political injustice masked as a clash of civilizations. Thus, tolerance is not the solution, as many propose, because what we have never is a problem of tolerance, and it never has been — it is, and it has always been, the problem of economic injustice and political oppression.

Why, then, does it need to be presented as a problem of intolerance and fundamentalism rather than social instability at large? Of course, it needs to be presented as such so as to shift the focus of political action, so that the grand framework of capitalism remain untouched, uncriticized. But this is not a conspiracy theory of political manipulation; on the contrary, I think it comes from the bottom up — it is the society who do not want to criticize capitalism. First of all, we have always been brainwashed about how its archenemy — communism, as it were — is the archenemy. We are scared to criticize capitalism intellectually, so much so that we need to take a truistic position and use the grand metaphysical reasons of God to proclaim our dissatisfaction with the grand system of the world. Second, we have no alternatives to capitalism other than a sharia economic model. No wonder Allah becomes the main excuse of civil unrests.

Heryanto’s second post reveals another deadlock: true Islamization in political action will never work. It seems that it has become a silent agreement that an Islamist state is not an ideal one. This has much more cultural significance than to prove how Islam is just an excuse for protesting — it signifies that so many of us somehow silently accept that Islam is only the mode of protest itself. To put it shortly, it seems to me that most of my fellow citizens are now whispering that “Islam is good, but not too much, unless you want to make a demonstration.” The gestures of Islamic parties, the “funky” (“gaul”) language used in every Islamic Youth movements, all testify to such whispers.

Indonesia is not in a state of being Islamized. It is in a state of cultural limbo.