Religion and Nationalism: Should they stand in opposite poles? by Timotius Wibowo

As some articles in the previous weeks show us, Moslem people had played a quite important role in Indonesia’s revolution of independency. Despite this fact, Islam does not be automatically credited if one talks about Indonesia’s nationalism. In recent political discourse, religion (in this case, Islam) and nationalism are often seen as two opposite poles. Political parties that involves in the elections can be categorized in two groups, the parties with a religious platform and the parties with nationalism platform. This situation indicates that religion and nationalism sit in different chairs.
In the Introduction of his book, The Modernist Muslim Movements in Indonesia 1900-1942, Deliar Noer writes, “It can be said that nationalism in Indonesia started with Muslim nationalism” (p.7). This sentence seems to be a logical conclusion drawn from the fact that most of important revolutionary movements in Indonesia were held by Muslim people. However, in my opinion, such a conclusion needs criticizing since “Muslim nationalism” is in itself a problematic terminology. The Islamic concept of nationality, as Noer explains in his next sentences, is in fact a “multi-ethnicity of Moslem people.” This concept is certainly different with the concept of nationalism in a pluralistic sense.
The history of Islamic movements in Indonesia shows that their leaders fought for their own religious interests. That is why the goal of such movements is in fact a process of Islamization. In other words, they were motivated more by “religion building” than “nation building.” One may argues that the first should be done for the sake of the second. This argument, in my opinion, neglects the context of multi-ethnicity and multi-religiosity of Indonesia people.
Islamic revolts against Dutch and Japanese were certainly anti-colonialism movements. However, the process of Islamization of Indonesia’s archipelago could also be regarded as a “religious-colonialism.” Moreover, since the process of Islamization was often accompanied with the replacement of Indonesian cultures with Arabic cultures, it then could be regarded as a “cultural-colonialism.” This way of thinking is certainly true not only for Islam, but also for any religion that applied the same process in Indonesia’s archipelago. In the pluralistic context of Indonesia, in my opinion, it was the spirit of proselytization that had thrown religions to the opposite pole of nationalism.
Should religions be in the opposite pole against nationalism? No, it should not. On the contrary, religions should play their important roles in the future of Indonesia. To play such important roles, religious people should determine the proper place of their own religion in the pluralistic reality of Indonesia (see Noer, p. 1). This is certainly never an easy process since it might also need a theological renewal as suggested by Bachtiar Effendy (in Islam and the State in Indonesia, p. 66). In short, religious people of Indonesia (especially their religious leaders) need to revisit their basic principles of relating their religious “ideology” with the spirit of nationalism.