Assyaukanie.com

Islam Needs Reformation, Not Restatement

By Luthfi Assyaukanie

In its special coverage of 2006 Issues, Newsweek published a one-page column by Abdullah bin Hussein, King of Jordan. The column, titled Islamic Reaffirmation, stated that modern Muslims do not need religious reformation, nor reconstruction. What they need, instead, religious reaffirmation or religious restatement. King Abdullah’s argument is that, Islam is already a good religion whose tradition is rich with examples of modern values such as democracy, freedom, and tolerance. Meanwhile, reformation is a misleading endeavor attempted by the Muslim fundamentalists to ridicule the Islamic tradition. Islamic reformation, the King concluded, is an agenda of Islamic fundamentalism.

King Abdullah’s column basically wants to say that the current phenomenon of radical Islam is a direct result of the religious reform movement. Muslim radicals have become radicals, the king argues, is because they undergo religious reforms. If they follow the original teaching of Islam, the teachings that were practiced by the Prophet and his early followers, they would not have become radicals.

I am a bit puzzled and confused in following the king’s argument and thinking of the problem. Not only he has a weird perspective on the long-standing term of “Islamic reform,” but also of his serious ignorance of the tradition and history of Islam.

There are at least two flaws in the king’s arguments. First, his objection to the Islamic reform clearly reflects his attitude as a ruler, a king, and a descendent of the Hashemite, who tends to be accomodationist to the status-quo of Islam. The original Islam, that is Islam practiced by the Prophet, the king’s ancestor, and the traditionalists, is the rightest Islam, while the Islam that has been developed and reformed is not Islam, or at best not a true Islam. This reminds me to the famous words of Lord Cromer, “Islam reformed is Islam no longer.”

Second, the king imagines of the existence of the complete Islam in the past. This is the true and original Islam, while Islam that has been reformed has changed and is not in line with the basic foundation of Islam. If the Muslims wanted to return to their religion, they had to go back to that complete Islam, and not reformed Islam. The keyword is not “reformation,” but “restatement.”

What the king imagines in his argument is ironically what has been imagined by the radical and the puritanist Muslims in viewing Islam. The radical Muslims are not doing any reformation, but restatement and reviving the old values that they believe to have a strong root in Islam.

Thus, King Abdullah’s designation of Muslim radicals and puritans as “reformists” is weird and certainly alien to the common literatures of modern Islam. Scholars of modern Islam such as John Esposito, John Voll, and Robert Hefner, do not call them “Muslim reformists,” but rather “Muslim revivalists,” that is to say, Muslims who want to revive the old Islamic tradition.

King Abdullah’s proposal to employ “restatement” rather than “reformation” could be easily accepted by the revivalists than the reformists. The reformists would certainly reject Abdullah’s idea to keep old traditions which are no longer compatible with the spirit of the age, simply because those traditions are not universally good. There are many Islamic traditions which are no longer relevant and thus they need reformation.

Hence it lays King Abdullah’s other slip. Instead of fighting fundamentalism and radicalism, he is helping the radicalists (whom he calls wrongly “reformists”) in developing their illiberal arguments. Restatement (and not reformation) is the weapon of the radicalists upon which all their arguments are grounded.

Islam needs reformation and not restatement. The regression of Islam is very much due to the domination of the traditionalists (or better to say the conservatives) and the revivalists in Islamic discourses. Islamic doctrines that are taught in Islamic institutions, be they in pesantrens (Islamic boarding school) or in advanced level of study, centre around the classical issues that are not capable to answer the challenge of the age.

Doctrines such as jihad, discrimination against woman, and the negative attitude towards non-Muslims, have still been taught in traditional learning centres as well as in Islamic universities. From Indonesia to Jordan, the dominant discourse of Islamic learning centres are those of traditional and conservative issues. I am a graduate of a pesantren and I have studied Islam in Jordan, so I know exactly what kind of Islam taught in this kind of institutions.

I am pretty sure that the revivalists are not reformists, as the king tries to label. The revivalists are the enthusiastic agents in disseminating conservative ideas that grew in traditional Islamic institutions. So enthusiastic they are that it often makes them in conflict with their traditionalist fellows.

What should modern Muslims do, I firmly believe, is not restatement, but reformation. Restatement is an agenda of the radicals and the revivalists, and not the agenda of the reformists. The radicals such as Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11 event, or Imam Samudera, the mastermind of the Bali bombing, are those Muslims who claimed to restate the original teachings of Islam. They consider our world has been far deviated and therefore it must be dragged back to the origin of Islam.

17 January 2009, 23:00