TEMPO, No. 27/II/March 12 - 18, 2002
"In peace, the children bury their fathers; in war, the fathers bury
their children"
On the streets of the city of Ambon, those living that day, whether Muslim or
Christian, embracing, crying, happy to be making peace, essentially buried something
that had become an integral part of their life stories: a past. They wanted to lay to rest
memory cloyed with blood and revenge of the previous three years: memory of three
years of civil war, three years that wiped out 8,000 people, destroyed countless
buildings, and made daily life a misery. In short: three years that killed hope and
buried the seed of the future. As the saying goes, it is peace, not war, that knows
how important the future is.
However one looks at it, the Moluccan peace of late February 2002 bears big stories.
It is probably the most important good news in the world at the beginning of this
millennium. It is a tale that boosts the spirit, a moving story about people who quietly
built a bridge between two camps that were murdering each other, in order for
weapons to be finally laid down. It is also a story of how, at a time when this state is
currently weak through corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, its citizens can
show a more effective force for making history.
The peace in the Moluccas, marked by the accord in Malino in far South Sulawesi,
also makes us better understand: when religion becomes a sign of group identity,
when people murder each other because of this, something communal is needed so
that life is not completely crushed: we need a state that does not take sides. In other
words, a state whose position is accepted as something without any religious identity
at all.
A state whose position is accepted as something without any religious identity, a
state considered impartial, is a secular state.
The word "secular" is of course a word that easily causes anger. It indeed emerges
from tension in Europe in times past. Since the terrifying 1789 revolution, French
history, to quote the words of the historian Pierre Birnbaum, has been a "gigantic
confrontation between a nation of citizens governed by the goddess of Reason and a
Christian people anxious to recover the divine protection it had lost." This
confrontation has now subsided, but it has not completely disappeared. In Germany,
a similar clash was reflected in the Kulturkampf: the dispute that went on for more
than a decade from 1871 between the Catholic church and Bismarck's government,
when both sides wanted to determine who actually held power, over, schooling and
civil marriage for example.
But now "secular" is no longer closely tied to any history anywhere. Kulturkampf
ended up becoming a word inseparable from the large movement of modernization,
when interpretation of the world was no longer governed by religious teaching, or
superstition, and when the world was no longer a place full of mystery, no longer
bewitching and enchanting. At that moment, science, not the Holy Book, took on a
greater role in elucidating man and his position. The sacredness of what was initially
considered sacred started to become eroded, and what used to be untouchable or
forbidden ended up as part of life that could be debated, analyzed, even ignored.
When Nurcholish Madjid in 1970 advocated the need for "secularization", this is what
he meant: there are some things, for example what is meant by "Islamic State",
which should not be considered holy and thus beyond dissent. Around two decades
later, Abdolkarim Soroush from Iran formulated this further in its relation with
democracy: secularism is a system or social pattern that considers there to be no
rules, nor values, existing above man to judge and test him. Everything is open for
debate: statements of heads of state, legislation, court edicts, expert opinions, the
voice of the people's representatives, the interpretations of religious teachers.
When everything is open to examination and criticism, society will be in contact with
power that is linked to The All Truthful in only a limited way. And from this is born a
state that cannot possibly consider murder a Divine order, or a person's blood a
religiously sanctioned punishment, or that a feud of destruction is a Way of the Cross.
There is a profane morality—in Indonesian these days we call it "Pancasila"—that
must become our communal basis, a morality that respects humanity and yet also
admits its fragility, and through this, we can extend a hand to one another.
Formulated or not, it is this simple morality that was operating on the streets of
Ambon that day. In that euphoria and joy, God was certainly not forgotten. But the
hating and killing in His name had become the past—like a cruel father, buried—for
peace had become a common wish, and because peace is a dream that children can
rise once more and run to greet the unthreatening waves: the Moluccan sea, the
future.
Goenawan Mohamad
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