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.
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.
Feeling Threatened: Muslim-Christian Relations in Indonesia’s New Order (2006), itulah judul disertasi doktoral dosen IAIN Antasari di ISIM/Leiden, Belanda. Ia mengkaji hubungan Muslim-Kristen Indonesia pada masa Orde Baru, menggambarkan ketidaknyamanan hubungan keduanya karena dipenuhi kecurigaan dan rasa saling terancam yang bermuara pada problem politik. Secara tidak langsung, disertasi tersebut “menguatkan” dua thesis master saya, Wacana Kristenisasi di Indonesia dan Implikasinya pada Hubungan-Muslim Kristen (2002) di Program Pascasarjana IAIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, dan Christianization and Islamization Discourses in Modern Indonesia: A Struggle for Representing Power (2005) di Florida International University, Mimai, USA (2005). 
Enampuluh empat tahun usia republik-ku, namun kemerdekaannya hingga kini masih kusangsikan. Setiap bulan Agustus tanda tanya itu selalu muncul. Bukan hanya aku, kamu dan mereka kukira juga akan mempertanyakan status kemerdekaan ini; mengapa asing masih menguasai sumber daya mineral, bisnis strategis, arus informasi, bahkan juga makanan yang kita konsumsi.
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).
Di beberapa kesempatan, professor saya selalu bilang Sufisme tidak bakal mati. Meski puritanisme yang berkongsi dengan modernisme selalu berusaha memarginalkannya, ia selalu bisa hadir menerobos celah-celah kepenatan duniawi maupun ritual keagamaan yang terlalu formal dan “kering”. Kelenturannya beradaptasi dengan berbagai kondisi dan daya tahannya melintasi sekat-sekat aliran, kelompok, kelas sosial bahkan juga zaman merupakan nilai lebih mystical experience dalam Islam itu.
