Descecularized Nationalism and Minorities:

South Sulawesi and the Minority Politics of Qahhar Mudzakkar
MUCHA Q ARQUIZA

A respite from the Java-centered rendition of Indonesian history, Andi F. Bakti’s piece[1] brings us to the northeastern islands of Indonesia and the less talked about narratives of minor ethnic communities from Sulawesi. The nascent separatist sentiment among the Sulawesi group of ethnic communities is a Damocles sword looming distant from Jakarta but one that the Javanese dominant majority must not take for granted. The Qahhar movement as well as those localized forms of resistance in Southeast and North Sulawesi, Aceh, South Kalimantan, the South Moluccas, West Papua and elsewhere are what is referred to as minority politics and the politics of minority has its own dynamics. Qahhar movement of South Sulawesi is yet another instance of politics and nationalism that is familiar among Southeast Asians - as in the Bangsamoro of southern Philippines and the Pattani in southern Thailand – a desecularized kind of nationalism that mobilizes resistance by appealing to the religious and communal/clan loyalties. Here, the Indonesians’ example is highlighted in Qahhar’s ideology of Islamist separatism and the strong motivation to establish the Sulawesi Islamic Federal State. This is, of course, without side-lining the interesting detail of a distinct flavor of mysticism in Qahhar’s charismatic leadership, whose memory has embedded in his followers a certain deference and loyalty that borders between superstition and dogmatism.

In southern Philippines, we, too, have our own version of these tuan manurong (in Moro language: earth-bound demigods), heaven-sent nationalist heroes who are regarded as ‘just rulers’ with peculiar attributes of transfiguration, invulnerability and capability of being in different places at the same time, who had become a constant bewilderment to the State authorities. To cite a few, in 1800’s, General Vicente Alvarez, a young Spanish mestizo guardia civil was a central figure in the Katipunan movement in Zamboanga, Basilan and Lanao del Norte. Gen Alvarez was involved with the clandestine Philippine anti-Spanish colonialist and nationalist movement and was later adopted by the Sulu’s sultan where he successfully arbitered a royal dispute between the two claimants of the throne in Sulu; he then married to a Lumad princess from northern Mindanao where he was given the title ‘datu’, making Gen. Vicente Alvarez as the epitome of a genuine nationalist and a tri-people Mindanawon (i.e. perhaps the reason why Zamboanga City local government is reluctant to honor him as its local hero). In more recent campaigns, we have the Moro revolutionary personalities like MNLF Kumander Maas Bawang (1970s) the MILF Kumander Ustadz Kiddih (1990s), and many others. Like Qahhar, their mythologized person and political campaigns were transmitted through oral tradition and became effective medium in not only preserving and transmitting the ideology, but also expanding recruitment among the young generation, while consolidating the loyalty of the old membership.

One important lesson in the study of Qahhar movement highlights the fact of how minority history and politics are often sidelined and obscured by dominant discourses of majority-centeredness. This is the same pattern as how the glory of Kalimantan Kutai empire has been obliterated by the grandeur of dominant Madjapahit, for instance; or of Indonesian’s short memory in mooting B.J. Habibie’s contributions as statesman and national intellectual (i.e. present-day ‘SDM’ – semua dari makasar – anak muda of Sulawesi and mahasiswa from UGM told me that Habibie is considered the number one smartest Indonesian where Abdurahman Wahid only placed 5th; Habibie is allegedly 3rd in the world); or in the failure of former Vice President Yusuf Kalla to bring the votes home in the recent elections.

This lesson therefore stresses the significance of reading history as a discontinuity and of rhizomatic multi-rootedness. I would like to linger on this briefly by back-tracking to pick up on the train of thoughts of Kartodirjo (1966)[2] in characterizing the Banten peasant revolt of 1888 as both religion-inspired and nationalistic. The mass insurrection in Banten was a nascent form of Islamic nationalism, he contends, ‘albeit paradoxical’, the modernist in him stutters.

And once again, let me post my previous question, ‘is history of religion necessarily a political account or a cultural history’? My answer to that is of ‘both’ and perhaps even of more - in terms of multiple perspectives and levels.

History of religion to be truly human history is not to be viewed as simply of single-view journal entry or devoted record of singular silsilah or tarsila (i.e. kinship chain or ethno-clan genealogic account) of a particular clan or progeny of great men or account arising out of one particular vertical strand or stream of movement (i.e. social or religious). History is a colloquium of narratives developed from infinitely many origins or genealogic parents and branching out into rhizomatic roots and, at some points, intersecting, at others freely proliferating, defining its own course. History, if it is to be a story of humanity in a particular time and space, must be a multifaceted multi-voiced account of many perspectives consciously accounting the natural folding and unfolding; the discontinuities in time; and the uneven progress of social change in a web of narratives of a ‘thousand different paces’. Fernand Braudel (1976)[3] evoked the notion of a ‘longue duree’ (long span) of history that can be organized into at least three levels of time: the first level is that of the environment (probably the longest most imperceptible change observable as effects of space, climate and technology). The second level is that of social and cultural history, and the third level of time is that of events or the history of individual men, this third category may be the most deceptive as it is prone to manipulation and agenda-setting of vested interest such as what happened in the ‘making’ of Indonesia’s history in Soeharto’s New Order and the ‘unmaking’, by deletion from collective memory, in contemporary Indonesian account of Sukarno-Soharto juncture that unfortunately commenced in the 1965 massacre, a particularly traumatic event rendering this country into its saddest case of historical amnesia.

Indonesia’s history of religion and nationalism is to be studied then as conjunctures and plurality of vantage-points not only of chronological and geographical orientation but also of socio-relational centeredness or peripherality with respect to power structures and ideologies. History is only fully understood if the networks of the various narratives across culture and ethnicities; of majority and minority voices; of stories of the privileged and marginal are all equally accessed and valued. And never has this assertion rung more truth than in this study of supposed ‘coming into fore’ or resurgence of a national consciousness. But Islamic national consciousness? Kartodirjo insisted that the tarekat movement in Banten was some sort of an ‘Islamic nationalism’ and that could have not been farther than the truth. And so is the claim of the Sarekat Islam that their’s had been a form of ‘Islamic Communism’ (again, an anathema, to follow the logic of progressive-is-modernist-therefore-secularist), and now here we read of Qahhar Mudzakkar and his Islamic separatism. Whether one is for secularism or religion, the truth is, religion-based nationalism is not resurgent, it has always been there, but its story has never been fully told in a single-authored, hegemonic and totalitarian historical narrative of the modern elite where the modern state is founded. What is claimed to be purely secular form of nationalism is in fact a parallel stream of the same river with religion-inspired nationalism, only that its story is disrupted and discontinued because of the monopoly of Enlightened and western-oriented political discourses obsessed with the belief that modernity is necessarily secularizing (see Peter Berger’s ‘The Desecularization of the World’) and that any national liberation movement to be progressive is to be necessarily secular and non-religious. [29 March 2010]

----

[1] Andi F. Bakti “Collective Memories of the Qahhar Movement” in Mary Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, pp.123-149.
[2] Sartono Kartodirjo, The Peasant Revolt of Banten in 1888, VKI Vol.50, (s-Gravenage:Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
[3] Fernand Braudel (1976) The Mediterranean and the mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II; trans. by Sian Reynolds. Fontana, Collins.