Muslim Intellectuals and the Politics for the Community by Faqihuddin Abdul Kodir

In his article “Muslim Intellectuals and Indonesia's National Development” (1991), Federspiel argued that Muslim intellectuals called as “New Thinkers” joined the agenda of the New Order to lessen political Islam. They did not hesitate to accept the proposal of the regime “to make Islam a dynamic force for modernization and national advancement and, indeed, have not been shy about their role” (p. 237). However, the perspective of Muslim intellectual was different with the government’s approach. They had their own direction from the project of modernization of Islam. It is “that national development must be controlled by a set of absolute standards to guarantee that modernization will be for the real good of the people”. (P. 237). The perspective that later used by Muslim intellectuals to criticize the regime from the perspective of democracy and social justice, not from the perspective political Islam.

In the discourse of women’s rights and Islam, from the early 1990s Islam entered discussions about gender in Indonesia as an alternative framework or perspective for analyzing and transforming gender relations. A number of factors combined to bring about the emergence of this new Islamic feminism discourse. A generation of devout Muslims, female and male, who had benefited from New Order improvements to education, including the state-sponsored system of Islamic higher education institutions, were emerging as intellectuals and activists, and responding to international discourses about women's rights. Muslims intellectuals and activists who came to the fore in 1990s to promote gender justice using religious arguments in Indonesian society, joined NGO’s activists to criticize the regime of Suharto’s in weakening the position of women in the society.

From the early 1980s when Muslim intellectuals started being absent from political Islam to the 1990s when they started to utilize “substantive Islam” to criticize the authoritarian regime, it can be said that Islam in Indonesia has its own dynamics in the life of Indonesian Muslims. Through their social and intellectual activism, Muslim intellectuals adopt, contribute to, resist, appropriate, and reinterpret Islamic discourses on political interests the community. They do this in the perspective of the implementation of “true Islam” in the Indonesian pluralistic society. The history of Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia, in my opinion, shows the centrality and the dynamics of Islam in Indonesia in response to the notion of modernity, democracy, and struggle for social justice, including gender justice.

Readings:
1. Howard M. Federspiel. “Muslim Intellectuals and Indonesia's National Development”. In: Asian Survey, Vol. 31, No. 3. (Mar., 1991), pp. 232-246.