Goenawan Mohamad: Malino

Tempo Magazine, Sidelines

12-18 March 2002  

"In peace, the children bury their fathers; in war, the fathers bury their
children".

On the streets of the city of Ambon, those living that day, whether Muslim or
Christian, embracing, crying, happy to be making peace, essentially buried
something that had become an integral part of their life stories: a past.
They wanted to lay to rest memory cloyed with blood and revenge of the
previous three years: memory of three years of civil war, three years that
wiped out 8,000 people, destroyed countless buildings, and made daily life a
misery. In short: three years that killed hope and buried the seed of the
future. As the saying goes, it is peace, not war, that knows how important
the future is.

However one looks at it, the Moluccan peace of late February 2002 bears big
stories. It is probably the most important good news in the world at the
beginning of this millennium. It is a tale that boosts the spirit, a moving
story about people who quietly built a bridge between two camps that were
murdering each other, in order for weapons to be finally laid down. It is
also a story of how, at a time when this state is currently weak through
corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, its citizens can show a more
effective force for making history.

The peace in the Moluccas, marked by the accord in Malino in far South
Sulawesi, also makes us better understand: when religion becomes a sign of
group identity, when people murder each other because of this, something
communal is needed so that life is not completely crushed: we need a state
that does not take sides. In other words, a state whose position is accepted
as something without any religious identity at all.

A state whose position is accepted as something without any religious
identity, a state considered impartial, is a secular state.

The word "secular" is of course a word that easily causes anger. It indeed
emerges from tension in Europe in times past. Since the terrifying 1789
revolution, French history, to quote the words of the historian Pierre
Birnbaum, has been a "gigantic confrontation between a nation of citizens
governed by the goddess of Reason and a Christian people anxious to recover
the divine protection it had lost." This confrontation has now subsided, but
it has not completely disappeared. In Germany, a similar clash was reflected
in the Kulturkampf: the dispute that went on for more than a decade from 1871
between the Catholic church and Bismarck's government, when both sides wanted
to determine who actually held power, over, schooling and civil marriage for
example.

But now "secular" is no longer closely tied to any history anywhere.
Kulturkampf ended up becoming a word inseparable from the large movement of
modernization, when interpretation of the world was no longer governed by
religious teaching, or superstition, and when the world was no longer a place
full of mystery, no longer bewitching and enchanting. At that moment,
science, not the Holy Book, took on a greater role in elucidating man and his
position. The sacredness of what was initially considered sacred started to
become eroded, and what used to be untouchable or forbidden ended up as part
of life that could be debated, analyzed, even ignored.

When Nurcholish Madjid in 1970 advocated the need for "secularization", this
is what he meant: there are some things, for example what is meant by
"Islamic State", which should not be considered holy and thus beyond dissent.
Around two decades later, Abdolkarim Soroush from Iran formulated this
further in its relation with democracy: secularism is a system or social
pattern that considers there to be no rules, nor values, existing above man
to judge and test him. Everything is open for debate: statements of heads of
state, legislation, court edicts, expert opinions, the voice of the people's
representatives, the interpretations of religious teachers.

When everything is open to examination and criticism, society will be in
contact with power that is linked to The All Truthful in only a limited way.
And from this is born a state that cannot possibly consider murder a Divine
order, or a person's blood a religiously sanctioned punishment, or that a
feud of destruction is a Way of the Cross. There is a profane morality-in
Indonesian these days we call it "Pancasila"-that must become our communal
basis, a morality that respects humanity and yet also admits its fragility,
and through this, we can extend a hand to one another.

Formulated or not, it is this simple morality that was operating on the
streets of Ambon that day. In that euphoria and joy, God was certainly not
forgotten. But the hating and killing in His name had become the past-like a
cruel father, buried-for peace had become a common wish, and because peace is
a dream that children can rise once more and run to greet the unthreatening
waves: the Moluccan sea, the future.