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Muslims in the West: Integration or Exclusion?

Julia Suryakusuma

From a speech delivered on 22 November 2006 at the University of Melbourne Law School

For most people, whether Muslim or not, the West means modernity. And all Muslims, whether in Melbourne or Mecca, Jakarta or Jerusalem, have to decide how they will respond to a complex, demanding world that presents them with complex moral and spiritual challenges.

What is Islam in Indonesia? Whenever you find an article about Islam in Indonesia it’s usually accompanied by a photo of people wearing Islamic costume, the women in jilbabs or long white mukenas and the man in sarung and peci. They are often depicted in the act of praying or preaching.

As if that’s all Muslims do. As if these are the only type of Muslims in Indonesia. Being a Muslim in Indonesia you don’t have to look a certain way. There’s no rule, nothing in the Qu’ran, that says you have to wear a particular outfit or hat to win God’s approval. Religion is about faith and the spirit, not about fashion design or millinery – and that’s as true for Islam as it is should be for Hinduism or Christianity. It’s not what you look like, it’s who you are.

Take for example me and Neng Dara Affiah, one of my best friends, as examples of two Indonesian Muslims.

People are puzzled by our friendship, because on the surface we are so strikingly different. Let’s start with physical appearance. I am 1.72 meters tall and at 1.53 Neng is, well, petite. I wear make-up and jewelry but Neng never does. I like to dress up fashionably and to wear figure-hugging clothes. Neng, however, dresses in modest, loose-fitting trousers and tops, in plain colours. She has short hair that she covers with a jilbab. Mine comes down almost to my waist and is never covered. Together, we really are the odd couple!

Neng says that wearing a jilbab makes her easily accepted in Muslim communities when she does grass-roots gender training, gives seminars or attends Qur’anic recitals and other religious meetings. And it is part of her cultural background, as she hails from a Labuan, Banten, an Islamic stronghold, and comes from a strong pesantren tradition. So she’s used to wearing it and feels comfortable in it. Like me in my tank tops.

So Neng and I are two very different West Javanese Muslims. Sometimes we speak to each other in Sundanese (the language of the West Javanese), but it is not culture and ethnicity that makes us close, but intellectual and spiritual connections. We share an appetite for knowledge and a belief in democracy, which despite its shortcomings, is a better than authoritarianism, religious or otherwise. And, we belong to the same mutual admiration club!

I admire Neng for many things: her understanding of Islam, both as scripture and practice. I admire the fact that because of her village origins and her academic achievements, she can straddle two Indonesian worlds: mediating and interpreting between the theoretical and the empirical. And I admire her role as one of the heads of the Fatayat NU, the women’s wing of Nahdatul Ulama, dedicated to empowering Muslim women in the villages.

Most of all, I admire Neng because it was through her that I first felt the beauty of Islam, especially, its spirituality and subtle complexity in the Indonesian context. She believes that Islamic ultra-conservative radicalism is “desert Islam,” and inimical to Indonesia. She dreams of an Islam that is open, even to people with differing backgrounds, views and ways. This is why she says she can be close to me. If others merely see me as intellectual and sensual, she sees the spiritual and even ascetic in me. Most of all, she admires my attitude of trying to surrender everything to God, which she says is the essence of Islam.

Could anyone judge any of this if they saw us standing together? Could anyone guess that two Indonesians, so different in appearance, hold number-one tickets in each other’s fan club? Would they even guess we share the same religion? Most Indonesians would not because unfortunately Muslims in my country are becoming increasingly concerned with formalism – surface things like clothing and rules, rather then spirituality and faith. Even in my own family!

Let me give you an example of what I mean about formalism and how Neng tried to help me out.

On one of his frequent trips to Indonesia, my husband Tim brought my mother some of his favourite smoked chicken from Australia. A day or two later I called to ask if she liked it. She said she hadn’t eaten it yet, as my brother, who has become very religious, had questioned whether the foreign chicken was halal or not.

I respect my brother’s religious beliefs because they are what make him a good person but sometimes I think a little flexibility would not be entirely out of place. I conveyed this to my mother. She said, “Well, he’s just trying to safeguard the family purity.”

“But Mamih, our purity is measured more by our thoughts, emotions and feelings than how a chicken died. Why don’t you just say ‘bismillahirahmanirrahim’ and leave the matter to God?” But I also told her I’d call Neng, whose religious knowledge my mother respects a lot, to help us resolve our chicken crisis. I did so. Neng’s advice corresponded exactly to what I had said to my mother and I told her so. Of course, because of the way I dress, because I don’t always follow Islamic rituals, and because I’m her daughter, my mother just said “hmmm.”

I left it at that, and didn’t push her further – I didn’t even say to her, please Mamih, have a bit of consideration also for Tim who lugged the (by now) jetlagged chicken in his suitcase all the way from Melbourne to Jakarta, then from Cinere where we live, to Bekasi, where she lives, not to mention appreciating his effort to please his mother-in-law. I know she would have eaten the well-travelled chicken had my brother not questioned how it met its end, but she tends to defer to him on these matters, perhaps because he’s a haji.

It is true that Islam is a religion that concerns itself with all aspects of life, both mundane and sacred, but it is contextual in many of its precepts and rules, and can also be very open and non-rigid. Even on the issue of religious freedom and belief in God, it is amazingly flexible. A vast array of Quranic verses specify that the question of faith and belief is a matter between the individual and God. Rather than determining a worldly punishment for converting from Islam, many Quranic verses assert that all human beings are free to believe or not to believe in God or any particular religion: “Let him who wills believe in it [Islam], and let him who wills, reject it.” I need to tell my brother about this verse perhaps, but I suspect it would fall on deaf ears, or worse, he’d contradict me with a barrage of admonitions about what happens to people if they deviate from the Islamic path.

So how does my friendship with Neng and the case of the unwanted chicken relate to my theme of “Muslims in the West: Integration or Exclusion?” The answer is that the West is, in the end, a state of mind. For some Muslims it is somehow the enemy, for others it is where they live. And for some Muslims it is who they are. If it means anything, however, for most people, whether Muslim or not, the West means modernity. And all Muslims, whether in Melbourne or Mecca, Jakarta or Jerusalem, have to decide how they will respond to a complex, demanding world that presents them with complex moral and spiritual challenges.

It easy to fall back on formalism, like my brother, finding refuge in simplistic rules and formulae. This is the path to exclusion. Others embrace the West, surrendering to it and becoming entirely secularized. This is something beyond integration, closer perhaps to abnegation. Neng, however, follows a different path, one of true integration, where she retains her sense of self as a Muslim woman but operates in the modern world on the basis of an Islamic spirituality that looks to spiritual meaning rather than rules. This is not easy and it requires a constant examination of the meaning of Islamic values and of our own motives, and it is a path that millions of Muslims resisting cultural change in their societies are prepared to resist with guns and even bombs.

Perhaps, in the end, Neng’s path the only constructive way forward.