Ahmad Munjid’s article “Thick Islam and Deep Islam” (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 16, 2009) was responded to by Hilman Latief’s “Cosmopolitan Muslims: Urban vs. Rural Phenomenon” (the Post Aug. 29, 2009).
Although both Munjid and Hilman shared their ideas on the more obvious prevalence of Islamic identity among Indonesian Muslims, they differed in terms of categorization between urban and rural as well as “thick” and “deep” Islam.
Munjid noted that “Thick Islam” was an urban phenomenon, and that “Deep Islam” was a rural one, whereas Hilman argued that the thick and the deep could not be generalized based on urban and rural categories.
Although neither intended to stimulate classical binary opposition between the Muhammadiyah as an urban Muslim organization and the NU as a rural one, the “polemic” is nevertheless interesting if we reckon their backgrounds. Munjid, who is currently the president of the Nahdlatul Ulama Community in North America, would say that the rural tradition of the NU is better than the urban.
Hilman, meanwhile, as a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University’s School of Islamic Studies, in Yogyakarta, would answer that the urban Muslim of the Muhammadiyah are not identical with “Thick Islam”.
This discussion will not pretend to support either of them, but to emphasize the fact of religious change and its various trajectories in late modern era.
“Dan segeralah mencari ampunan dari Tuhanmu dan mendapatkan surga yang luasnya seluas langit dan bumi, yang disediakan bagi orangg-orang bertakwa. Yaitu mereka: 1) yang berinfak di waktu lapang atau sempit, 2) yang menahan amarahnya, 3) yang memaafkan kesalahan orang lain. Allah mencintai orang yang berbuat kebaikan” (Q,s. 3:133-134).
Persidangan dengan “terdakwa” seorang ayah dari dua anak digelar Jum’at, 4 September 2009 pukul 3 sore waktu Brisbane. Dihadapan 3 professor dan beberapa mahasiswa program doktor terdakwa diminta mepertanggungjawaban atas semua yang telah ia tulis. Bahkan, yang baru saja ia omongkan dihadapan pengunjung sore itu juga mereka pertanyakan.
Dia terpilih dengan suara 100 persen. Meskipun ketika itu ada juga propaganda supaya dia jangan terpilih, rupanya ia berhasil.
Many people assume local culture is the symbol of backward, barriers for development and in contrast to modern culture. To be a modern (rational, engaged in secular institutions, and disenchanted of the world) one should drop all that connected to the local. Through their purified wings, world religions in fact involved in negating –or even destroying– local cultures, blaming them as unauthentic and source of heresy.
