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.
Although Marx, Freud, and Weber had predicted religions would progressively disappear from society for the expansion of modern institutions, we watch not only religions that reject to away from society but also see the emergence of novel sensibility of religions and spirituality in late modernity. ‘Why should this be?’ ask Giddens who then finds Durkheim’s affirmation that religion has ‘some thing eternal’ namely ‘symbol of collective unity’ (Giddens, 1992: 207).
