Arif Maftuhin

I didn't write because I don't have enough words to write about my beloved city, Yogyakarta. I love this city as much as I love my hometown. Blitar was the place I was born. Jogja, heaven knows, may be the city I will die. Those who have lived in the city must know how Jogja contributed to their lives. Knowledge, friendship, love, career, and destiny. Now, Jogja is mourning... and I can not do but pray: For those who lost their lives, may God places them in the best "house" to rest. For those who survive the earthquake, may God replaces what He took away from them. A message from a friend who lost their house reads, "I am OK, and God never sleeps..."

In understanding a phenomenon of political activism in which Islam is used as a means by Muslims, most scholars tend to consider the phenomenon as a “revival” or “resurgence” and “a return to fundamental Islam” (labelled as “fundamentalism”). For them, Islam is only one, timeless, and the same Islam of the Prophet.[1] As if Islam, seen through such perspective, “resurges” all of sudden from a death in certain period of Muslim’s political history and resurges with “archaic” form. Moreover, Muslims activism is framed as a merely religious respond to the Western challenge rather than a long continuous historical dynamic experienced from the time of the Prophet to nowadays. We can find such reaction-to-the-West idea in the work of prominent Orientalist Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong.[2] It is true that the political activism is partly a response to the Western cultural and political penetration; however, it is inappropriate to see it simply as an answer to the Western challenge rather than...

Asad, Talal, “Reconfiguration of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt”, Formation of the Secular Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press (1994), 205-256 Asad seeks to trace the root of secularism in Muslim country. Asad gives the explanation how the idea of secularism was made thinkable in Muslim country. The proponents of secular Indonesian embrace the modern idea of a secular society that “included a distinctive relation between state law and personal morality, such that religion became essentially a matter of (private) belief.” (205). Like in Egypt, which Asad is talking about, in Indonesia, “The shariah was not abandoned, but it was restricted to matters of personal status and to area where it could be clearly and easily codified”. (227) I think the most relevant point he made is that “…only where there is this public realm can personal ethics become constituted as sovereign and be closely linked to a personally chosen style of life – that is, an aes...

In her book, Moallem argues that, although Iranian modernity and postmodernity have produced specific images of gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies, these images are not produced with any degree of finality, instead a dynamic, historically specific process through which visual imageries of bodies are framed and coded by gender and race against the background of institutional practices across various domains, such as the family, the state, and political and religious organizations. While modern Westernized cultural meanings of Persianness claimed hegemony over the meaning of identity pre-revolution of 1979; the meaning of identity, then, was replaced by Islamic notions of community (Moallem, 2005: 25). In both cases, Iranian modernity and post-modernity are dynamic response to the Western modernity and colonialism. What so called umma (Islamic community), for example, is necessarily product of modernity rather than a return to an idealized archaic community (Moallem, 2005: 25); ...