“Barangsiapa Memelihara Kehidupan…”: Esai-esai Tentang Nirkekerasan dan Kewajiban Islam

Kaum Muslim saat ini menghadapi dilema besar: di satu sisi, Islam mengajarkan mereka untuk melawan ketidakadilan. Namun, di sisi lain, Islam juga mengatur tata tindakan mana yang diperbolehkan dalam melakukan perlawanan. Buku yang merangkum buah pikiran Chaiwat Satha-Anand, seorang pemikir dan aktivis perdamaian Muslim, selama lebih dari tiga dasawarsa ini berusaha menjawab dilema tersebut dengan menunjukkan bagaimana aksi-aksi nirkekerasan memungkinkan kaum Muslim untuk melawan ketidakadilan sekaligus memelihara nyawa orang-orang tak berdosa. Sudah saatnya peran agama dalam menopang perdamaian ditekankan kembali, diingat kem­Bali, dan ditampilkan kembali sebagai sesuatu yang menarik, yang mungkin, doable, dan penting. Buku ini menunjukkan bahwa ke­mungkinan dan sumber normatif nirkekerasan dan dukungan kepada perdamaian bukan saja sudah ada dalam tradisi agama-agama, atau telah terpateri dalam sejarah para nabi atau sahabat mereka, tetapi juga sudah dan masih dipraktikkan oleh para aktornya di tempat dan konteks tertentu

Bridging troubled waters: forging cohesion in divided societies

In an era of social tension and conflict, building bridges to foster cohesion has become critical. As the classic song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” reminds us, we should not ignore the troubled waters under the bridges that we are building.Published versio

Agama dan budaya perdamaian

Yogyakartaxi, 191 p.; 21 c

The Governor, the Cow-Head, and the Thrashing Pillows: Negotiated “Restrictive Islam” in Early Twenty-First Century Southeast Asia?

There are obviously several ways to explore the issue of Islamic radicalism in Southeast Asia. Instead of focusing on explicit violence such as those carried out by jihadi groups or those associated with them, this research article chooses to examine three empirical cases of Muslims’ expression of “restrictive Islam” that have taken place in the public sphere in both majority and minority Muslim contexts of Southeast Asia. They are: Muslims’ calling for the removal of an elected Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta on account of blasphemy in Indonesia; Muslims’ cow head protest to intimidate Hindus in Malaysia; and some Muslims’ thrashing of pillows at a hospital for COVID-19 patients as an expression of vehement faith-based refusal and protest in Buddhist Thailand against health protocols issued by Thai officials in the current fight against the pandemic in Southern Thailand. This article argues that the “restrictive” lives that some Muslims lead in Southeast Asia today have to assume a negotiated form that is a mixture of “high artificiality”, recently adopted from a version of purist Islam they claim to be authentic, and the “pure normality” resulting from a combination of political reality informed by existing forms of governance in these countries and the legacy of how historical Islam arrived in this land. The result is that the “restrictive Islam” espoused by many Southeast Asian Muslims could not be overly “extreme” or “radical” but tends to appear in a somewhat “negotiated” form