At 13:25 -0700 16/5/05, Chris Doss wrote:
> > But in instances where, because of the powers of the oppression, all
> > other voices are stilled or assimilated to that which we all love to
> > hate, then sanity suggests that "we" might just sit it out.
>
>I can't (and I suspect you can't) just "sit it out."
>Islamism affects us both, right? You probably more
>than me -- you live in an overwhelmingly Muslim
>country, whereas over here only 15% of the population
>is Muslim. I would be really interested in hearing
>your thoughts on Islamism -- how strong is it there?
>What does it mean to the general population?
If by Islamism one means a turn towards religiosity, with or without a demand for Sharia law, then it affects wide swathes of the Muslim population. I've previously mentioned that the current process dates back to the 1970s, at least partly attributable to a "strategy" worked by between Washington and Riyadh, and took wing with the Iranian revolution and then the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan -- paradoxical, but perhaps not altogether so, since even if the US was the great godless, the Soviet Union was, despite Iqbal, the much greater godless, and I've heard Islamists in the early 1990s telling audiences that they had a friend in the American right wing, indeed, amongst Americans who, they said, are the most religious westerners. There's now no way to turn this back; it's got to run its course, with different places being at different points of the trajectory or trajectories -- which does not mean silence and acceptance; if you will, it's not all that different from the huge rightward shift in Euro-America, with consequent implications for how the Euro-American left can operate.
That said, there are different strands within this turn to religiosity. The most visible -- because the most noticed by the "west"-dominated media -- is the militant strand. But in SE Asia, this is much a minority strand; don't get taken in by the reporting on the southern Philippines or southern Thailand -- these cases require more specific and localised analysis. The larger strands are represented by the likes of Nahdatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah in Indonesia, strands seeking to maintain the specific forms of Islam in Indonesia within this larger shift, and to seek ways of being Muslim in the contemporary world, some of which are indeed interesting and promising.
But Indonesia is a stand-out in the wider world of SE Asian Islam. Malaysia is different, where the contest is between the ruling party and its brand of state-directed/controlled Islam and the main opposition party and its brand of conservative ulama (religious scholars)-controlled Islam, with others chaffing at the bit, but a majority in broad agreement on the role of sharia and current understanding of Muslim edicts in social and public life. The, for lack of a better term, "liberal" opposition, from amongst Muslims who are not simultaneously supporters of the ruling party, to this conservative strain has very little social basis, being largely an urban, "westernised" middle and professional class thing. This is unlike Indonesia, where the opposition to the conservatives, while articulated by the urban middle and professional classes, has its counterpart in the mass movements represented by NU and Muhammadiyah. Non-Muslims can rant for all they want, but that's not going to make much of a dent. This is something that Muslims will have to work out themselves, with sympathetic non-Muslims helping out when and where they can.
So, yes, uncomfortable as it may be, I do "sit it out" except over specific matters where it's useful to add one's voice to the chorus. In more private circumstances, one tries to hold discussions with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, seeking both to understand their points of view and to communicate one's own. What's relatively comfortable is that militant extremism is a small faction, and one that makes the majority uncomfortable, and finds little resonance amongst them, whatever the sense of schadenfreude over Sep 11.
What's important to avoid is to try to understand what's happening by a sort of history by analogy -- or what Dipesh Chakrabarty characterised as "the not yet" -- and assimilating it to a european history of middle ages, enlightenment and modernisation, with puritanism and calvanism somewhere in between. What's happening may have started as a move in the Cold War, but it also connects back to the colonial era, and to the shapes and fortunes of the contemporary world and the sense of Muslims within it. It is thoroughly modern, even if in some places and times it impacts upon populations that might, with some justice, be considered pre- or non-modern. If one wanted any pointer to this, one need look no further than to notice that the present wave started out very much in the towns and, indeed, in the international centres where international students gather, and went from there to the villages; initially, villagers took great offence at being told by their urban-educated young that they were not sufficiently Muslim!
kj khoo