Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • A Whole Boatload of Awesome

    This is great.  I see commercials on the news here all the time for this album, which are strangely paired with public service announcements that Indonesians should respect intellectual property rights in order to safeguard the national treasures of Indonesian cultural life.  Don’t worry SBY, I won’t be downloading "Good Luck With Your Struggle" illegally.

    To continue our theme from yesterday, two other things I’ve seen on TV that are interesting for discussions of Islam.  First is a television program called Halal? which tries to help Indonesians figure out whether or not certain things are permitted or not under Islamic law.  (Don’t forget, Islamic law is open to interpretation and legal scholarship (fiqh)).  The discussion yesterday was whether or not Islam prohibits body-piercing.  I thought it was going to be very much opposed, given that it started off with videos of tons of Indonesian schoolgirls with pierced tongues and big thick bars through their ear cartilage, accompanied by a soundtrack that would have been appropriate for any telenovela.  But it turns out, according to Hasyim Muzadi, the leader of the Indonesian Council of Ulamas, body piercing is not necessarily that big of a deal.  The only things that would make it forbidden are whether its done out of pride and self-centeredness, in which case it violates injunctions against immodesty, or whether it is harmful to your health, in which case it violates injunctions against self-injury.  So body piercing is OK unless it’s done "excessively" (berlebihan) or makes you sick.  Given that these are very fuzzy concepts, there’s an interesting amount of personal discretion there.

    The other was a news piece on a village in Central Java that was carrying out a ceremony to ward of disasters, given that Indonesia’s current national disaster is floods.  They slaughtered a cow and buried its head with a bunch of medicinal plants, then banged on some gongs and did a bunch of chanting that I did not understand.  Then the local religious leader said an Islamic blessing.  This is a good illustration of how Islam coexists rather easily with pre-Islamic religious practices in Indonesia.  Although I’m not sure why this should surprise most Americans, with their yearly Saturnalia festival and all.

  • Political Islam

    So.  Some more on why I’m here.  One of the things that political scientists do not really know is why people vote for Islamic political parties.  Part of the problem is that there’s just not a lot to study: very few countries in the Muslim world have anything like free and fair elections.  But clearly the question is a big one, given that one of the big reasons why successive American administrations support awful dictatorships in the Middle East is that they believe that Islamic political parties would prevail in free and fair elections (and more importantly, that this would be a bad thing).  Indonesia is neat because it’s one of the only Muslim countries that actually has free and fair elections.  The other ones right now would include Turkey, Bosnia, some West African countries, by some accounts Bangladesh and Albania, hopefully Iraq someday, and that’s pretty much it.

    I think that there’s a more fundamental question here.  What is an Islamic party?  There are a number of possible answers, but I think that this question is a lot more difficult than some of us recognize.

    1.    Clearly, it’s not sufficient to just call any radical party with Muslims in it an Islamic party.  Because that would include groups like the Kurdish Worker’s Party, which is a socialist party.  At a more fundamental level, though, it’s inaccurate to just identify radicalism with Islam.  That’s a stereotype, not a definition.

    2.   Another view is that a party is Islamic if it wants to impose sharia.  It’s a seductive idea, but when there are all sorts of problems.  How does a "party" want something?  Maybe this is a gloss for its leaders wanting something.  OK, then how do you know if the leaders want something?  We can err in a couple of directions.  The paranoiacs at Little Green Footballs, and Virgil Goode, think that everyone who’s a Muslim wants to impose sharia.  This is clearly false, BUT the opposite is also silly, only asking people if they want to impose sharia.  There are good reasons to think that maybe some groups that don’t openly espouse sharia actually do want to impose it.  This is a suspicion often leveled at some parties in Indonesia, which "everybody knows" would impose sharia if they were elected.  So even if this is a good definition in theory, it’s difficult to operationalize it.

    3.    Another possibility is that a party is Islamic if it calls itself Islamic.  I actually like this definition, but then it raises problems of comparability.  "Islamic" in Indonesia is likely to mean something very different than "Islamic" in Senegal or Tunisia or Turkey.  So then we’re left with the problem of distinguishing what Islamic means in these contexts, which just recreates the problem again.  So you might be including parties that call themselves Islamic but are different than the others.  Then again, you might also be leaving some out.  I’m not actually sure if the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, which is commonly considered a conservative modernist Islamic party, actually identifies itself as Islamic.  This might be one of those "everybody knows" sorts of situations.

    So we’re left with a conundrum.  For our research, we are fortunate in studying Indonesia only, where parties openly state what their "basis" (asas) is.  The choices are basically Islam, Pancasila (the pluralist and nationalist ideology of Sukarno and Soeharto), Marhaenisme (a precursor of sorts of Pancasila, espoused by Sukarno, less religious in content and more socialist), and other forms of social democracy. In essence, it’s either Islam or Pancasila, as Marhaenisme is only espoused by two parties that are led by two daughters of Sukarno, and I believe only one small party calls itself social democratic.  And parties will say "our basis is X."  So that’s one definition, easy.  Since we’re doing a survey, though, we can also look at what ordinary people think are Islamic parties, and that’s nice because it’s sort of what we’re after anyway.  It’s not really relevant for our purposes that the Justice and Development Party in Turkey is likely different from the Prosperous Justice Party here, although drawing lessons from Indonesia will require doing some sort of adjustment to take this into account.

    And to answer your questions, yes, this is what social scientists do all day.