USIPP #9: When Religion Meets Culture

“Radicalization and Deradicalization of Islamist Movement in Indonesia” was the theme for our lecture today with Pak Muhammad Najib Azca, the founder of Youth Studies Centre (YouSure) and the lecturer in Faculty of Political Sciences UGM. The presentation based on his book, After Jihad. Radicalization or deradicalization means become more/ less committed to radical. Radicalization may take in 3 levels: micro (personal), meso (group/network), and macro (society). He was also explaining that 3 things can be the reasoning of radicalization: moral shocks, cognitive opening, and radical action as an act of identity crysis. Furthermore, radicalism consists of 3 streams as below:

-          Jihadi: focus on armed struggle, usually in order to form an Islamic state. This stream is the one that widely known as terrorist.

-          Pious: focus on Islamic ethics and identity, more concern on their own community. The exemple of this pious stream is Wahabi movement.

-          Political: focus on implementing Shari’a through political process and mechanism. For instance through Islamic politic party or parliamentary group. He took Irshad Manji’s incident as an example of parliamentary group.

Mr. Najib Azca also mentioned that we need to see radicalism in global context because it’s strongly influenced by some events in overseas especially middle east area, such as Iran’s revolution, Afghan’s war, or Osama bin Laden fatwa in February 23th, 1998 which said that “the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians, and military”. Other than that, we might need to analyze a radicalism/deradicalism in a historical context since in the past, radical movement such as Wahabi emerged as the result of oppression from the authoritative party.

Most of radicalists are pious (I mean the one who strongly holds on their beliefs), thus in Islamic case, they will refer to Al-Qur’an and As-Sunah as the guidance of their life for anything they do. My question was what’s the justification for terorism? Because they kill many innocent people, kids, women, elderly,  which is strongly forbid in Islam. What is the justification?

Pak Najib explained that the terorists believe it is a cosmic war between Islam versus non-Islam. Those who do not support the Islamic organization are guilt. Interestingly, he was using “infidels” (orang yang tidak mempunyai kepercayaan) to refer to non-moslem. Then the USIPP participants from US was critisizing that non-moslem is not always infidels. Take Christiant as an example, they are believe in God, they believe in the higher power. So they cannot be called infidels. I was also asking about the role of Islamic Boarding House School (Pesantren) in radicalization/deradicalization in Indonesia. He answered that most of Indonesian’s pesantren are moderate. Even so, he added that there are some pesantrens which are preparing what so called cadres for terrorist/radicalist.

Another interesting part from our discussion was people in Indonesia think that Palestine-Israel’s war as a religion war instead of state war. That’s why many Moslems in Indonesian or another Islamic countries are deliberately supporting the war. The discussion was also highlighted that it might not fully true since there always be political factors involved. Pak Najib also made a response that though Islam is predominantly religion in Islam, the likelihood that Sharia law will be implemented in National level is very low. However, he sees that Sharia law can be implemented in a certain province (local level) such as Aceh.

After having a fruitful discussion, we went to Dalem/Batik Pertiwi to make batik and see the batik making process. It was interesting to know how they made batik actually. Like the first step, you need to make a pattern for batik tulis and then “mbatik” or copy the existing pattern (cap). We use wax for making batik (to make the pattern), so that they won’t get colored in dye-process. The following steps are: dye-process à clean up the wax using hot water à dry them. Well, I guess our batik process was the simplest one cause I saw many batiks that need to be processed further. If we want to make batik with more than one color, then we must do the steps all over again.

We had lunch with Gado-gado in Ganjuran Church. It is a Christiant church which was built a long time ago by a foreign family who owned a sugar factory around the area. They were fond of Javanese culture.  But then since the family went back to their country, the church was organized by people around the area. interestingly, they acculturated some prominent figures in Christiant with Javanese culture. There was a temple inside the church complex and they have Jesus and Maria in Javanese appearance. When we went to Seminari today and asked about this matter, the preist said that it is totally fine to do that because acculturation is needed in order to spread the religion.

Visitation to Jogja Hiphop Foundation made our day’s perfect. It is a merger of 3 rap groups: Kill the DJ, Jahanam, and Rotra (?). They combine hip hop music with Javanese culture by using Javanese language in their songs. They also took some poetries to create it as a song. I like the way they direct their hobby which is hip hop into something that can bring up Javanese culture. It was awesome!

The last activity we did was Wayang (Puppetry) Lesson with Pak Eddy. He is a lecturer in Faculty of Cultural Science in UGM. He gave a brief about what is Wayang, how do they differ from one area to another, etc. He also allowed us to practice our skill to become a puppet master. Haha. Oh ya, I just knew that we have a female puppet master from Surakarta.

Wayang literally means shadow. That's why when we watch wayang, we watch the shadow. The original purpose of puppet show (wayang) is to do ritual (purification/ruwatan) and the main audience is the unvisibles. However, nowadays it has shifted to entertainment purpose. Then who are subject to be purified?
Basically, they are related to Kala (time) such as Gendhana Gendhini (kids who are the time order of birth: Male-Female), Gendhini Gendhana (Female-Male), Sendang Kapit Pancuran (Female-Male-Female), etc.
There was an interesting story behind this purification. A long time ago, Bathara Guru (God Guru) and his wife flied with their vehicle (forget the name). God Guru wanted to make love with his wife while they are flying, but his wife rejected because she believed that sexual action was pure thus could not be done in random places. God Guru got mad and cursed his wife thus made her went to hell that later become the Goddess of Hell. The sperm of God Guru dropped in the ocean and become a giant creature called Kala. He ate everything he passing by causing the death for many innocent people. God Guru heard about it and decided to disguise as a puppet master (Dalang). He told Kala that he is Kala's father. Kala is forbid to eat anyone who can tell the story of himself. That's why some Javanese people still believe that in order to save their children from Kala in the form of Bad Luck, they do purified their children who born in the wrong/bad times.