Muslim intellectuals and the Making of Indonesian Ideology

MUCHA Q ARQUIZA
ICRS-2009

Intellectuals and social change
It will be stating the obvious to emphasize how important and crucial the role of the intellectual sector of society is. Intellectuals are a barometer of the vibrancy of a society. That freedm of speech and thought are important yardsticks of democracy while the quantitative as well as qualitative indicators on the existence of intellectual community are perhap vital signs of economic and social health of a society. Intellectuals bridge politics and the people thus they make up the bulk of what we call the civil society.

In tight and difficult timess of despotism and oppression, the intellectuals are the first to be shackled and banished as they are not only potent forces of political opposition (i.e. in actually running as political opponents in electoral politics) but more significantly in their role as conscientizing agents and formentor of dissent and agitators for political action and subversion.

In times of transtition to change and develpment, the intellectuals are indispensable. The experiences of nation-states around East Asia's Mekong river basin is instructive as to how important this sector has been esp in charting the nation's direction while in the threshhold of developing.Memories of the difficulties of Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime is still vivid, and how when the Kampuchean intellectuals were annihilated and masseliminated, consequently also buried the entire nation back into the dark ages. Democratic Republic of Lao today is still reeling in its own problem of underdevelopment, grappling with solutions to its poverty problem and food sustainability. Lao is in search of political miracle to fasttrack its development, a challenge made even doubly difficult in the face of its very young bureaucracy (i.e. literally and chronologically young people are running the government & bureaucracy). The same is true with Vietnam, except that, Vietnam's youthful socialist democracy is compounded by the fact of an intellectual community having lost memory of its past and, with it, deleted any national ideology it had, hence, today its youth are not only alienated from its history but perennially looking up on Western models and ideals for direction and as its proverbial 'green pasture'. Even countries known to have weathered the winds and with 'more mature' democracy like the Philippines can not undermine the role of its intellectual community. The Philippine mass media is touted to be the freest in Asia and freedom of speech and thought is kicking healthy and strong, yet, the country's biggest problem ever since the 1970s has always been the 'brain-drain'. Playing a close second to the domestic workers and skilled labor, the country's intellectuals have been its biggest export of human resource to Europe and America leaving a highly literate nation (95-98% literacy) with more than half of its population wallowing below poverty line, a rabidly corrupt bureaucracy, low GDP, big foreign debt, a long-running insurgency and a national politics in shambles. And the chicken-and-egg principle operates in that all these compound into a stormy scenario - a climate of insecurity - that pushes its intellectuals to migrate and look for stability outside the country, and the cycle goes on and on.

Yet unlike in revolutionary movements where bulk of the consistency is the poor masses of peasantry and toiling sector, the intellectual movement is a product of and reflects the biases of its class base, where majority of its consistency come primarily from vested interest groups including the elite and economic oligarchs and politically disenfranchised whose power base has been eroded due to the recent shifts in politics. The intellectuals is a segment of society coming from the bourgeoisie with the petty-bourgeoisie (i.e.middle class) comprising the bulk. If we are to follow the theory of class analysis, the bourgeoisie has a reputation for being highly vacillating and having ambiguous political stance because of their class interest. Yet they are also strategic in that they are the cultural forces. Hence, unlike the bottom-rung masses, the intellectuals has low political threshhold and got shorter wick when it comes to its passion and perseverance for pursuing social change. It can easily be persuaded to co-opt and has not very strong endurance for pain and suffering as the nature of any radical change is wont. Hence, at certain point in time the intellectual fervor is likely to wane, cool off and die a natural death i.e.extinction. At first glance, this cooling off of intellectualism may be taken as a positive signal that society might have achieved a certain level of political equilibrium and economic stability where much of its citizens can now be satisfied and live comfortably hence warranting little or no opposition (i.e. examples may be capitalist states such as Hong Kong and Singapore) but more dangerously the intellectuals' luckluster could also mean a certain kind of laxity, liberalism and callouseness, the indifferent tolerance having ensued as a result of the triumph of virulent effects of authoritarianism, despotism and corruption, where the country is generally demoralized (i.e. moral crisis) and its citizens can choose to turn a blind eye instead of struggling for change, sort of a 'negative peace' scenario.

Such may have been the stage that Indonesia went through during the long reign of Soeharto military-backed administration, where active and open dissent from any opposition was muffled and silenced. The same symptom that seem to prevail in the present.

Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals
Theoretically, in political thoughts, the sector of intellectuals are always distinguished and differentiated from that of the religious, although the two might intersect in the sense that both are 'paradigmatic sectors' setting society's collective framework, guidance and direction, by helping establish the yardsticks for society's operationalization of morality and rationality. The intellectuals and the religious are also important cultural foundations that mediates political and government agenda and disseminates and popularizes it to the culture-consuming public. Yet, in most societies, the intellectual community is conventionally beheld as distinct if not different from the religious, in some cases,sometimes on loggerhead contradicitions with each other.

It may seem providential that the health of a nation's intellectual community is at its peak in time of Indoensia's reconstruction after 1965. After getting rid of Soekarno, the New Order republic is faced with the challenge of making the Five Principles operative and to do so it must call upon its intellectual sector not only to provide theoretical framework as well as operational guidance but also to communicate its programs to the masses and to 'negotiate' with various parties and gain concessions in favor of status quo. At this stage the intellectual community is indeed very crucial as the government's 'surveillance' technology.

What is interesting with the Indonesian case is that the intellectual and the religious seem not only complimentary but are infact intetwinned and have merged. While Islamic religious values permeates intellectual life in a manner that it is a unifying force that sets the moral standard and is the ultimate ideal, the intellectual culture on the other hand serves as a moderating and regulatory mechanism for the varied and appropriate interpretation of Islamic precepts to suit the needs of the moment. What makes Indonesia's civil society politics even doubly interesting is that it completely defies conventional political theorization in the fact that not only intellectual and religious an intermarried segment, but also that religion is closely linked, if not inseparable, with State and politics. Conversely, what has become known to be Indonesian intellectual sector could in fact also refer to religious and moral sector; and it appears to be a co-opted sector - wittingly or unwittingly - serving the political agenda of any Muslim leader seated in current government. In this manner, the oppositional role (i.e. devil's advocate) of intellectual is untenable, if even possible, and the Intellectual class' potential for being catalyst for social change is muted and nulled. To stretch this logic further, one might infer that to be truly free intellectual culture, even if intermarried to a religious twin, it must thrive healthy within a secular state and a plural society.

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References:
Howard M. Federspiel. Muslim Intellectuals and Indonesia's National Development. Asian Surveywell, Vol. 31, No.3. (Mar.1991), pp.232-246.
Kenneth M. George. Designs on Indonesia's Muslim Communities. The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.57,No.3.(Aug.1998),pp.693-713.