Arif Maftuhin

I live in a apartment spacious enough to host anyone who needs help to stay here for a while. My roomates and I agree that we can host a friend who just moved to Seattle and needs a place for three or five days until he finds his own apartment. That is our deal. During this year, we have hosted many guests, most of them we don't know personally. How can we host them while we don't know them? Usually, a friend of ours contact us that his friend needs help or someone posted in Muslim Student Association's mailing list that he need help. We just trust people, basically, and we all don't have things to worry about. This year we already host friends from Mali to Singapore (so many that even I cannot recall them one by one). I remember we have one from Mali, one from Singapore, one from Saudi Arabia, other two from Saudi Arabia, one from Palestine, one from Arizona, one from Uzbekistan, and another one a Fulbrighter from Palestine. You can guess, surely, they are all Muslims....

The Main Thesis Among three approaches to explain institutional performance,[1] Robert Putnam finds sociocultural approach most appropriate in explaining the question of why some governments succeed and some fail. His thesis states that civic life plays greatest role in the performance of a government.[2] His conclusion is seemingly based on the data he collected in Italy from 1970 to 1986 when Italy established a new system of decentralized politics (regional government). His data shows significant differences in the performances of northern and southern regions. In this context, he shows that two of three approaches in political literature are not able to give satisfying explanation as to why we see variation between the northern and southern. Institutional design theory argues that institutional performance depends on the institutional design: a well written law, constitution, will bring about high performance. In Italian experiment, however, that is not the case. By 1970, all regio...

In making mention of freedom fighters, all of us are privileged to have in our midst tonight one of the brave commanders who lead the Afghan freedom fighters — Abdul Haq. Abdul Haq,we are with you… It was in March 1986, the Republican President Ronald Reagan, in his remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference, warmly welcomed and introduced Abdul Haq with high respect. Abdul Haq and other people fighting for the freedom of their country were, Reagan said, “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.” A couple weeks later, Margaret Thatcher invited Abdul Haq to Downing Street. Again he was special in the sense that Thatcher had never want to meet other freedom fighters, such those in Palestine and South Africa, unless they stopped their violence strategy. In the case of Abdul Haq, such condition was not required. Who was Abdul Haq? Why was he so special in the West? In his heyday, he was effective command...

Considering widespread spectacles of cult in Syria, where the images or monuments devoted to President Hafiz al-Asad were pervasive, the book questions, “Why would a regime spend a bulk of resources on a cult whose content is patently spurious?” What she found in Syria was interesting. In newspapers, television, taxi cab, and elsewhere, the images of President Asad can easily be found. The president was praised as “the father”, “the knight”, and “premier pharmacist”. At the same time, however, most Syrian did not believe in what they themselves talk about. How do we understand the role of those rhetoric and symbols in producing political power in such condition? In political theories, there are three theories on the ways to produce political power: legitimacy, charisma and hegemony.[1] If legitimacy to mean an appeal to higher sanctioning authorities, the spectacle Asad’s regime impose higher authority, then it does not really work for Syrians because the very Asad’s dominance is in fa...

“You must be kidding me. I know no conservative from UIN”, said a Malaysian feminist as I introduced myself, “I am from UIN of Sunan Kalijaga, and I am religiously conservative.” For one familiar with academia of UIN/IAIN/STAIN (State Islamic Universities), it seems easier to him/her to associate UIN with liberalism than conservatism. Donald Rumsfeld may have reasons to suspect Islamic learning (madrasah) in Pakistan; it’s difficult, however, to bring the case into Indonesia. It is true that, seen from the educational, economical, and even ideological background, UIN academia is, say, bloody religious minded. Most of UIN students graduated from madrasah or pesantren. UINs are the only higher education accessible for santri because the education they received in pesantren is not accommodated in secular system of education. Many UIN students come from a family whose philosophy of life finds religious education more important than professional education. “Religion is foundation of life. L...

“I have a relationship to that book as to a daughter who has grown up and run off with a bus driver: I see her occasionally but, really, she has gone her own merry way.”[1] Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is the most read books on nationalism and was written in a different way by his writer, “I am probably the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly” said Benedict Anderson. His path breaking contribution is his definition of nation where he presents concepts “imagined communities”. There are four elements in this concept: Firstly, it is imagined because the members of a nation will never know most of their fellow members;[2] but at the same time they feel recognize each other and share imagined things (culture, belief, and attitude). Secondly, it is imagined as limited.[3] There is no nation imagine themselves would include all the people living on earth. As he said, “To have one nation means there must be another nation ag...

Said and Foucault Let me begin with my uneasiness to read what I would like to call “Foucauldian studies” (studies that relay on theories developed by Michel Foucault). One of the objectives of this study is unpacking the historical a-priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses which represent the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch (episteme). In so doing, a Foucauldian study works on the level of language as a system of representation used to communicate the realities. As a language itself is an arbitrary system, a knowledge produced through its system is inevitably arbitrary. Therefore, it believes that nothing is natural, given, and essential, because everything is made arbitrarily. The main task of such “suspecting” study, then, is to show arbitrariness of knowledge, of discipline. Such insistence, however, allows the concept itself to be vulnerable to its own critiques – the arbitrariness of the study in unpacking the established system of knowledge. Whe...

The Jakarta Post, January 4 2006 I was surprised recently when I was going to downtown Seattle. A friend of mine working there told me, "Here is the place we observe Friday prayers". The fact that he was a pious White American Muslim was pretty surprising; but what made me more surprised was the place he showed me: It was not a mosque, but a church! The church, attended by its congregation mainly on the weekends, provides one of its rooms for Muslims in downtown Seattle to observe Friday prayers. While the Muslim community does rent this room, the fact they can share the church would be unimaginable in the Indonesian context. There are many cases we can learn from. At Boston University, according to Ulil Abshar Abdalla, Muslims observed tarawih last month in a hall called Sacred Place where believers of any faith can observe their prayers and services. During Ramadhan, in the program called Fast-Thon, hundreds non-Muslim Americans joined the Muslim Student Associat...