Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

2 1 2Islam i n World Cult u r e sman Wahid, who declined to join the organization, and Amien Rais, who hadsplit from the group some years earlier. Between them, these two figures representedthe country ’s two largest Muslim organizations, those of the traditionalistsand the modernists, respectively.Amien Rais, who earned his doctoral degree in the United States, led theMuhammadiyya Muslim modernist organization beginning in 1993. Rais wasreceived as a Muslim advocate of social justice and at times garnered significantsupport in a political coalition with Megawati Sukarnoputri. Previous anti-Christian and anti-Chinese remarks and calls for the establishment of an Islamicstate by Amien Rais, however, had caused considerable concern amonghis potential constituents, many Muslims among them. After the 1999 parliame n t a ry session, some might have expected Amien Rais to become president,since he was at the forefront of the political opposition to Suharto at the endof the New Order. Similarly, many at that juncture would have predicted thatthe presidency would go straight to Megawati. Instead, however, it went to athird major player at the forefront of the broad-based movement for “re f o r-m a s i ,” Abdurrahman Wa h i d .Wahid is the grandson of the founder of the NU and had chaired that organizationsince 1984. He was educated in Javanese p e s a n t re n as well as in the MiddleEast. While there in the 1960s, he left the prestigious center of Islamic educationin Egypt, al-Azhar University, in order to take up a more secular programof study at the University of Baghdad (Barton 2002). Ever since, Wahid hasbeen a prominent public voice against what he has termed “Islamic formalism,”which includes some calls to establish Islamic legal ideals as a “basis of thestate,” in favor of interpretations that take more extensive account of contextualizedissues. In this vein, he has been known both as a strong advocate for theinterpretation of Islam in Indonesia according to localized or indigenized modelsand as a supporter of the official ideology of the Indonesian state, P a n c a s i l a .Since the end of the Suharto era, calls for the implementation of the s h a r i ’ ahave been increasingly pronounced in Indonesian public discussions. Wa h i d ’spositions were thus unpopular with some segments of the Muslim communityon this point. Islamist groups that emphasized more legal-formalist approachesto Islam were especially quick to criticize Wa h i d ’s presidency. Suchgroups proclaim the ultimate solution to Indonesia’s moral and social crises tobe in the formal implementation of Islamic law. Some of these same groupshad been encouraged and supported by the Indonesian government duringthe final years of Suharto’s New Order. For example, in 2000, Islamist activistspressed the government for the implementation of a new economic systembased on the s h a r i ’ a , and in January 2002, the Internal Affairs minister, HariSabarno, seemed not to completely rule out the issue, stating in response onlythat any aspirations for the Islamization of Indonesian law must be pursuedthrough the official political processes of the National Assembly (DPRD).