Arif Maftuhin

My "World Politics" class is really a "world class". With a hundred students in the class, we have students from almost all major countries in the world. For example, today we screened a movie about Bosnian conflicts, No Man's Land (about the movie, click here), whose story is about two Bosnian Muslims and one Serbian soldier trapped in a tranch, a land between enemy lines. They don't kill each other because they are simply not a bad guy in the both sides and wounded. The Serb has no idea abut using the gun, doesn't know his own friend, and, ironically, he knows well a girl the Muslim Bosnian once was in love with. The movie is, I think, just a comedy about the war to mock ironies to show that war is not worth fighting. Anyway, what I like is than whenever we discuss one part of the world, we always have somebody from that part. Today, two students from Sarajevo and Mostart (spelling?) share their experience about the war and comment the movie. Last week...

I just checked on liputan6.com to see when Indonesia would end their Ramadan. The news is classic: two different eids. The ministry of religious affairs (MORA) decided that Ramadan will end tomorrow and Eid Fitri will be on Tuesday. Muhammadiyah, second largest Muslim organization, decided instead to end Ramadan today and will have Eid tomorrow. It is always the case. When the minister of MORA is a Muhammadiyah, NU would have different eid. And when the minister of MORA is NU, like Pak Maftuh Basuni, Muhammadiyah decide their own different Eid. Do we need to repeat the same question on how to find an agreement? I doubt that such an agreement is possible. There is seemingly a mix between religious interpretation and politics. According to hisab, the high of crescent will be less than 2 degree. Scholars disagree whether in such degree we can decide the new month or not. It is a matter of empirical truth. In most cases, when crescent is less than 2 degree, it cannot be captured by naked-...

Published on REPUBLIKA, October 8th 2006 Dalam Resonansi 5 Oktober lalu, Azyumardi Azra menyepakati dan, karena itu, 'meresonansikan' sepenuhnya tesis 'gejala kebangkitan teokrasi Amerika'. Tesis ini diajukan oleh Kevin Phillips dalam bukunya American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century . Philip memang mengajukan tesis menarik atas negara yang kini mengklaim diri sebagai paling demokratis itu. Hanya, terlebih dahulu, untuk mengikuti alur argumen buku itu maupun kesetujuan Azyumardi, kita perlu sepakat bahwa teokrasi dalam konteks pembicaraan ini adalah bukan teokrasi dalam arti sesungguhnya. Teokrasi di sini sekadar metafor tentang pengaruh agama yang sedemikian kuat dalam kehidupan 'demokrasi' Amerika, bukan persenyawaan antara teokrasi dan demokrasi dalam konsep teodemokrasi yang diusung oleh Abu Al Maududi. Nah, benarkah teokrasi, dalam pengertian di atas, adalah gejala b...

Arguing about the differences between republic and democracy, Immanuel Kant once said that democracy, in the proper sense of the term, is necessarily a despotism, because it sets up an executive power in which all citizens make decisions about and, if need be, against one (who therefore does not agree). Such a reminder to a politics 101 class is of important as we witness the ongoing debate on how to accommodate what so called aspiration of Muslim "majority", a debate also appeared recently in the polemic between Aguswandi (who wrote Say No to Conservative Islam, The Jakarta Post, Aug. 30) and Zulkifliansyah (who responded with his Islam, Muslims and democracy in Indonesia, The Jakarta Post, Sept 12). The problematic claim "Muslim as a majority" is typical within the arguments of Indonesian Islamists like Zulkifliansyah. To them, the demographical data recording religious affiliation is a fair justification to claim the right of Muslims as a majority to make way for...