Interview dengan Mediacodex

Baru-baru saya diwawancarai oleh Wahyd Vannoni dari Mediacodex.com. Wawancara ini diterbitkan dalam bahasa Perancis untuk para pembaca berbahasa Perancis. Edisi online dengan satu video youtube kota Bristol dan Universitas Bristol bisa click di sini.

Appreciating the establishment of the Inter-Religious Council

(An abridged version of this article appears in The Jakarta Post, February 19, 2010)

Appreciating the Establishment of the Inter-Religious Council
Gabriel Faimau*

The establishment of the Inter-Religious Council (IRC) in Indonesia recently, as reported in The Jakarta Post (Jan. 29, 2010), deserves our appreciation. Indeed the launching of this forum is a timely response by our religious leaders to safeguard the spirit and the soul of our beloved country. The forum itself aims “to build communication among communities from various religions, promote peace and tackle horizontal conflicts, by developing an understanding of pluralism within Indonesian society.”

Inter-religious dialogue initiatives in fact are not new in our country. Such initiatives have been flourishing, at least for the past two decades. However, what makes the initiative of formalizing this IRC an important milestone is the fact that it embodies the spirit of good will and demonstrates a serious intention to protect our national harmony. Moreover, it tells us that we are a realistic nation that always faces up to the various challenges and never gives up in attempting to find creative ways for moving forward.

Echoing the question raised by The Rev. S.A.E. Nababan of the Council of Churches in Indonesia (PGI) at the launching of this forum, we might now simply ask, “So, what is next?” I would argue here that the success of the IRC depends on two basic developments: further advanced steps to strengthen our intra-religious dialogue and proper attention to the role of the secondary elites. Why?

While paying attention to the inter-religious dialogue, attempts to develop this dialogue should be accompanied also by intra-religious dialogue, that is, dialogue within each religious tradition. Using academic terms, scholars often point out that in the inter-religious dialogue we deal with our ‘far-other’ and in the intra-religious dialogue we deal with our ‘near-other’. This point is raised because on the practical level, we cannot deny the fact that there are also different traditions and practices within every religion.

In this context, intra-religious dialogue channels the internal conversation towards communicating the differences between the traditions, views, texts, teachings and practices within any one religion. The importance of intra-religious dialogue lies in the argument that it leads to the public arena of interreligious dialogue, through which conversation is generated from a renewed self-understanding on the one hand and a new understanding of the dialogue partner on the other hand (Kramer, 1990).

We can now turn to the second point about the secondary elites. It becomes evident that the success of any initiative does not simply depend on the strong voice and position of the top leaders who are the primary elites but also on the secondary elites. What I mean by the term ‘secondary elites’ is the local leaders who are in direct contact with people at the grassroots level on a regular basis.

In the context of our discussion, at least, there are three groups of ‘secondary elites’. Firstly, within religious communities, secondary elites include various positions such as local imams, priests, pastors and religious leaders from various faiths. These leaders play an important role because they are dealing directly with their people and therefore their voices carry a lot of influence.

Secondly, we may also call our religious education teachers secondary elites on the grounds that they are in direct contact with our future leaders and young citizens of our country. We might still remember the shocking findings of a survey in 2008 conducted by the Center for Islamic and Society Studies (PPIM) at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta. As reported by this newspaper (The Jakarta Post, Nov. 26, 2008), the survey indicated that most Islamic studies teachers in public and private schools in Java oppose pluralism while tending toward radicalism and conservatism.

Of course this survey should be followed by a qualitative study. However, it does give us an alarming call to deal seriously with the formation of our religious education teachers in connection with our undeniably pluralistic society. Moreover, this formation should be accompanied by the development of a creative and contextualized religious education system that is appreciative of our multicultural society.

Thirdly, another group that we may call secondary elites is our interfaith activists. They are the ‘soldiers’ on the front lines who know the real conditions and the real needs. Various studies indicate that the success of inter-religious dialogue is determined also by how inter-religious activists use religious language to define their civic relationships. This means that inter-religious activists have a special place in our efforts to safeguard our peaceful co-existence.

We applaud the establishment of the IRC in Indonesia. While the success of this council will depend on our willingness to work hard, special attention needs to be given to the discourse of intra-religious dialogue and the important role played by our secondary elites. The late Gus Dur often said that the core of every religion is the genuine brotherhood of humanity. With the establishment of the Inter-Religious Council (IRC), we are hopeful that our commitment to protect our pluralistic society may lead us to the realization of this truth.**

The writer is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, United Kingdom and is co-editor of the Journal of NTT Studies.

Challenging "West versus Islam" media paradigms

Artikel berikut adalah versi singkat dari artikel di JP yang disebarkan oleh Kantor Berita Common Ground.

Challenging “West versus Islam” media paradigms

By Gabriel Faimau

09 February 2010

Bristol, England - At an international conference on “Islam and the Media” organised by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado-Boulder in January, many of the participants, including myself, examined the negative stigma attached by the media to Islam and Muslims, especially after 9/11 and various terrorist attempts made in the name of Islam by extremists and militants operating on the fringes of the larger mainstream Muslim community.

In his influential 1981 book, Covering Islam, the late author and literary theorist Edward W. Said captured public attention regarding how experts and the media have determined the way we see Islam. At the heart of Said’s analysis is the notion that media coverage of Islam has closely associated Muslims with militancy, danger and anti-Western sentiment.

In 1997, the Runnymede Trust, a UK-based think tank that promotes a successful multi-ethnic Britain, echoed the same idea in “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All”.

A similar tendency was employed to read the events of 9/11 in 2001. Analysing these events, a good number of pundits, analysts, journalists and politicians believed that what we witnessed in the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath was a “clash of civilisations”, that is, a battle between Western and Islamic civilisations as predicted earlier by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.

For the past three decades, scholarly studies on Islam and Muslims in the media have heavily relied on frameworks such as Said’s analyses, Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” theory, Islamophobia or cultural racism to analyse the questions regarding representations of Islam and Muslims in the media. These frameworks still have a big influence on current studies. In fact, a good number of papers presented during the recent “Islam and media” conference were based on these frameworks.

Of course, the use of such frameworks undeniably shapes the outcome of such findings and analysis. The problem, however, is that at the heart of the above approaches is a binary way of thinking which puts the West on one side and Islam on the other.

Why is the media so obsessed with this binary approach? In my opinion, the binary style of thinking raises two issues.

First, it provides no space for understanding the productive side of the encounter of people with different cultural and religious backgrounds. In a society characterised by increasing complexity, society cannot be just simply painted black and white. After all, society is not static. It has always been dynamic.

Second, the binary approach, which includes the idea of “West versus Islam” or the civilised versus the uncivilised, has been developed upon the premise that media discourse has the power to control the unjust social representations of other cultures or religions. This premise assumes that people are basically trapped, or even imprisoned, in a fixed context of clash. As a result, the binary approach is inadequate for the complex challenges faced by a multicultural society.

The news, however, is not that bad. As we move on to a new decade, a continued exploration of cultural or religious representation based on dialogue offers more hope to the encounters of people from different cultures and faiths than what is currently portrayed in the media.

Indeed, people of different cultures or faiths are naturally strangers to each other. For the possibility of recognising and respecting each other to occur, a courageous step should be taken through which must move toward the other and allow the unusual and strange to become internalised.

In this way, as argued by Zali Gurevitch, Professor of Anthropology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, one’s uniqueness is recognised and differences are accepted without hostility. If studies of media representations of cultures and religions give more space for analysis based on dialogue-centric approaches, in today’s multicultural society, we would move forward with more confidence and hope.

###

*This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the author. The full text can be found at www.thejakartapost.com.

Source: Jakarta Post, 1 February 2010, www.thejakartapost.com

Argumentative Flobamoranesis dan Identitas Institusional

Gabriel Faimau*

TULISAN Jonatan Lassa berjudul Argumentative Flobamoranesis di Pos Kupang (25/01/2010) bukan saja menarik tetapi juga sangat inspiratif dan menantang. Tambahan lagi, argumen-argumen yang dipaparkan memang tampak sangat Flobamorais. Artinya lahir dari kandungan bunda tradisi kultural Flobamora.

Di aras tulisan Lassa, terdapat pertanyaan yang sangat penting dan krusial: mengapa ketika orang-orang Flobamora terjun dalam lingkup universitas dan birokrasi, 'kebiasaan alamiah' untuk mengajukan argumen secara kritis justru tampak terkikis habis? Pertanyaan penting ini lantas dijawab dengan lugas bahwa 'institusi formal kita cenderung mengebiri dan menghabisi modal dasar kultural kita yang argumentatif, yang berpikir kritis, bebas tanpa terkungkung kerangka-kerangka represif kelembagaan formal.'

Jawaban ini mengingatkan saya akan kritik Barack Obama Presiden Amerika Serikat atas Washington saat berkampanye untuk memenangkan kursi kepresidenan di tahun 2008. Tentang kultur kebiri Washington, Obama saat itu berkata, "Masalah yang kita hadapi bukanlah bahwa kita kekurangan ide. Masalah yang sesungguhnya adalah Washington saat ini merupakan tempat di mana ide-ide yang baik justru (di)mati(kan)."

Teknik jawaban dan tafsir atas kebiri institusional di atas memang sangat tepat. Tetapi hemat saya, situasinya malah jauh lebih kompleks. Mengapa? Sebenarnya yang terjadi bukan saja bahwa lembaga akademis dan institusi-institusi formal kita dijahati menjadi semacam ruang gas yang menghancurkan mental dan semangat kultural kritis yang sebetulnya sudah mendarah daging dalam asuhan ibu budaya. Yang terjadi adalah sebuah siklus 'tanpa sadar' atau malah 'bawah sadar' di mana setelah mental kekritisan orang dikebiri atau dilibas lembaga atau institusi, orang-orang yang telanjur dikebiri itu lantas ikut mengebiri lembaga atau institusi-institusi kita.

Untuk itu, melengkapi paparan Jonatan Lassa, saya ingin mengajukan argumen bahwa argumentative flobamoranesis perlu disertai pula oleh kuatnya sebuah identitas institutional. Ide identitas institusional yang banyak digunakan dalam studi-studi organisasi atau institusi merujuk pada kelekatan profesional dan organisasional anggota dan pekerja pada organisasi atau institusi tertentu. Dalam arti ini, penekanan terletak pada loyalitas dan rasa tanggung jawab anggota atau pekerja pada lembaga tertentu.

Tetapi dalam konteks diskusi ini, identitas institusional lebih tepat dipahami sebagai komponen kritis dalam usaha struktural untuk mengkomunikasikan tradisi berpikir, bertanya dan mempertanyakan dalam institusi-institusi publik kita khususnya institusi-institusi pendidikan, politik, ekonomi dan hukum seperti universitas, institusi pemerintahan, perwakilan rakyat, perbankan dan pengadilan. Pembentukan identitas institusional dalam arti ini hanya bisa terjadi apabila institusi-institusi publik lebih dipahami 'bukan sebagai entitas pendidikan, politik dan ekonomi tetapi sebagai entitas sosio-budaya dalam sebuah masyarakat tertentu dalam konteks waktu tertentu pula' (Hamada & Sibley, 1994).

Mengapa? Dalam setiap masyarakat, ada panggilan tak terbantahkan untuk menjaga dan melestarikan budaya. Ini terjadi karena budaya dianggap menentukan jati diri sebuah masyarakat. Itulah sebabnya kita biasa dengan mudah mengidentifikasi diri dengan 'budaya kita', terutama karena budaya bisa menjelaskan siapakah kita, bagaimana hidup dihidupi dan ke mana hidup diarahkan. Dengan kata lain, budaya memberi perlindungan dan rasa aman bagi kita.

Gagasan identitas institusional mengikuti alur pikir yang sama seperti budaya. Artinya, kita baru memiliki identitas institusional bila institusi-institusi publik menjadi wadah penting yang menampilkan aspek esensial hidup kita persis seperti budaya sehingga di satu pihak institusi-institusi itu tampil sebagai pelancar hidup bersama dan di lain pihak sebagai warga dan masyarakat, martabat, arah atau pilihan hidup dan hak-hak kita terlindung secara institusional.

Contoh saja, kalau ada klaim bahwa 'Kupang adalah kota terkorupsi di Indonesia', klaim ini langsung menyentuh identitas institusional dalam lingkup regional kita. Artinya, klaim itu tidak hanya menelanjangi para pemimpin dan praktisi dalam institusi-institusi politik dan ekonomi regional, tetapi juga secara keseluruhan memotret masyarakat kita secara umum dalam potret buram kecenderungan jatuh dalam korupsi.

Pentingnya identitas institusional tampak dalam keterkaitannya yang sangat erat dengan hak-hak kolektif. Ini menjelaskan mengapa gerakan-gerakan sosial seperti tampak dalam demonstrasi politik maupun pernyataan bersama seperti dalam kasus-kasus pertambangan perlu dibaca sebagai langkah praktis dan kritis untuk membentuk atau memperkuat identitas institusional kita.

Dalam skala nasional, berbagai suara publik atas orkestra kasus Bank Century mestilah secara politis dibaca juga sebagai bentuk penyadaran atas hak-hak dan identitas institusional kita. Ini karena lembaga perbankan bukan saja lembaga ekonomi per se. Lembaga semacam itu berfungsi karena andil rakyak untuk ekonomi bangsa. Itu berarti, kalau suara publik mengkritisi kebijakan dan keputusan politis yang mengandung seribu satu pertanyaan, suara kritis seperti itu bukanlah bentuk kriminalisasi kebijakan politis. Suara kritis publik itu justru sebaliknya mesti dipandang sebagai 'sakralisasi' tanggung jawab publik untuk ikut menjaga martabat institusi-institusi ekonomi dan politik kita.

Bila identitas institusional kuat, sebuah masyarakat yang menyebut diri masyarakat demokratis memiliki tanggung jawab untuk mengambil tindakan di kala wibawa institusi dinodai dan prinsip dasar yang membuat sebuah institusi berfungsi dilangkahi. Singkatnya, dengan memandang institusi-institusi kita persis seperti menganggap budaya kita, kita lalu memandang diri kita sebagai bagian dari institusi itu dan karena itu mempunyai komitmen total untuk menjaga institusi termasuk komitmen untuk mengkritisi arah kebijakan institusional entah itu institusi pendidikan, politik, ekonomi ataupun hukum (bdk. Goffman, 1961).

Dalam konteks kita, identitas institusional sejauh ini memang lemah atau belum begitu banyak dibahas secara publik karena dua faktor dasar. Pertama, para pemegang kendali institusi atau lembaga cenderung menganut paham bahwa penguasa atau yang berkuasa adalah pemegang 'kebenaran abadi'. Mungkin karena itu maka Ralph Waldo Emerson pernah berkata bahwa institusi sebenarnya hanya perluasan bayangan satu orang.

Kedua, karena proses kebiri kemampuan kritis terjadi secara struktural, masyarakat umum yang daya kritisnya telanjur ikut dikebiri dikondisikan untuk percaya saja bahwa mereka yang mengendalikan institusi-institusi kita tahu apa yang mereka buat dan bisa mempertanggungjawabkan yang mereka buat. Lebih buruk lagi, saat kebiri ini berubah wujud menjadi pembodohan, bukan suara kritis yang disampaikan tetapi tekanan untuk memberi upeti terhadap pengebiri. *

* Warga TTU, sedang menyelesaikan program doktoral di Universitas Bristol, Inggris, Co-editor Journal of NTT Studies.

This article was published in Pos Kupang, 3 February 2010

Islam and Media: Moving Forward with Hope

Gabriel Faimau*

Earlier this month I participated and presented a research paper at the International Conference on “Islam and the Media” organized by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado-Boulder, in US. Based on various presentations during this conference, I would like to use the space here to reflect briefly on the current trends in the discussions about Islam and the media.

As early as 1981, the late Edward W. Said captured public attention on how experts and the media have determined how we see Islam through the publication of his influential book Covering Islam. At the heart of Said’s analysis is the notion the media coverage of Islam has closely associated Muslims with militancy, danger and anti-Western sentiment.

In short, the intense focus on Islam and Muslims in the Western media has been characterized by “a more highly exaggerated stereotyping and belligerent hostility” on Islam and Muslim.

In 1997, the Runnymede Trust in the United Kingdom echoed the same idea through the publication of a report entitled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, within which “Islamophobia” is defined as “unfounded hostility towards Muslims”.

A similar tendency was employed to read the events of 9/11 in 2001. Analyzing these events, a good number of pundits, analysts, journalists and politicians believed that what we witnessed in the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath was “a clash of civilizations”, that is, a battle between Western and Islamic civilizations as predicted earlier by Samuel P. Huntington.

For the past three decades, scholarly studies on Islam and Muslims in the media have heavily relied on the frameworks such as Said’s orientalism, Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Islamophobia or cultural racism to analyze the questions of representations of Islam and Muslims in the media. These frameworks still have a big influence on the current studies. In fact, a good number of papers presented during the recent “Islam and media” conference were based on these frameworks.

Of course, the use of such frameworks undeniably shapes the outcome of such findings and analysis.

The problem is that at the heart of the above approaches is the binary way of thinking by having the West on one side and Islam on the other side. This should make a researcher ask the following challenging question: Why are studies on the representations of Islam and Muslims in the media so obsessed with this binary approach?

Sherene H. Razack in Looking White People in the Eye, for example, observes that scholars play important roles in sustaining the colonial formulas by actively producing and reproducing the binary opposition of the civilized or liberated and the oppressed.

Of course, the binary approaches provide insight and analytical tools to uncover the hidden repressive or oppressive power in the relations of individuals or groups. However, in my opinion, the binary style of thinking raises two basic questions.

Firstly, it provides no space for understanding the productive side of the encounter of people with different cultural and religious backgrounds. In a society characterized by increasing complexity, society cannot just simply be painted black and white. After all, society is not static. It has been always dynamic with its own rhythm.

Secondly, as far as media discourse is concerned, the binary approach, such as the West versus Islam or the civilized versus the uncivilized or barbaric, have been developed upon the premise that media discourse has the power to control the unjust social representations of other cultures or religions.

This premise assumes that individuals and groups are basically trapped or even imprisoned in a fixed context of clash. The problem is that this premise is arguably dominated by the ideological baggage of domination and control. As a result, the control paradigm that shapes the binary approaches is inadequate for the complex challenges faced by a multicultural society (McNair, 2006).

The news, however, is not that bad. Modern socio-political theories such as the political theory of recognition, the dialogic formation theories and the theory of complexity offer different enlightened perspectives by focusing on the richness of human, cultural and religious relationships.

In my opinion, as we move on to a new decade, a continued exploration of cultural or religious representation based on dialogic approaches offers more hope to the encounters of people from different cultures and faiths.

Indeed people of different cultures or faiths are naturally strangers to each other. For the possibility of recognizing and respecting each other, a courageous step should be taken through which one is required to move toward the other and should allow “what is considered unusual and strange” to become wholly internalized.

In this way, as argued by Zali Gurevitch, one’s uniqueness is recognized and differences are accepted without hostility. If studies on media representations of cultures and religions give more space for analysis based on dialogic approaches, in today’s multicultural society, we would move forward with better confidence and hope.

* The writer is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

This article was published in The Jakarta Post, 1 February 2010

Renewing Our Spirit of Tolerance

Gabriel Faimau*

Amid the political bubbles concerning the Bank Century scandal, we are once again disturbed by the news of the recent destruction of a church that was still under construction in Harapan Indah residential complex, Bekasi, West Java (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 19, 2009). Indeed, this event again and again puts our national sense and spirit of tolerance into question.

Our country has long been recognized internationally as a country with an “outstanding” performance when it comes to respecting cultural and religious differences. An international seminar held in Rome, Italy, last March 2009, for example, elevated Indonesia as a model of international tolerance.

Opening this seminar, Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister mentioned Indonesia as an important actor in world peace (Paulinus Yan Olla, Kompas March 27, 2009). So, with the recent event of the attack on this church, we should again ask ourselves: are we really still a nation that respects our multicultural and multi-religious pride?

Destroying a place of worship often occurs when a society loses its capacity and ability to live together differently.

This loss becomes even worse when small differences become a thorn in the flesh. Sigmund Freud interestingly invented the phrase “narcissism of the small difference” to explain this problem. What Freud meant is that too often people see difference as an absolute and a continual threat to one’s identity even though it may be just a slight difference.

According to Adam Selligman (2008), when a society is challenged with the notion of the “small difference”, we often develop two common moves.

Firstly, the small difference is exacerbated by pushing away a group beyond our sense of shared humanity. Members of this group are seen as objectionable strangers or outsiders. In this context, tolerance is ruled out simply because it does not have a place.

Secondly, the need for tolerance is avoided by directing the small difference in a different direction.

Here the importance of differences is reduced or even neglected by only appealing to some basic shared characteristics. The problem with this approach is that tolerance is not needed because we appear to run away from our differences.

If we want our pluralist society to work, tolerance should be appreciated as a virtue that must be cultivated as the basis for our Indonesian spirit guided by a principle of equally sharing our Indonesian civil space.

Recognizing our differences and strengthening our shared humanity requires renewal every now and then.

Events that involve the destruction of places of worship have often occurred in our country, particularly in the past two decades. Analysts often view this problem through the frame of majority-minority relationships. Such a frame makes sense. However, Indonesians are brought up on the belief of a nation of many faces with one heart. But there is still the question of how we define the notion of majority-minority relationships when we have a shared-responsibility for taking care of our Indonesian spirit.

I think the main problem we often face is the ideological contests through which one or a group may consider another group as an embodiment of an ideology or an embodiment of a religious belief that is not his/hers. Within a political space, too often such contests become more problematic when they are based on the premise that “faith is so important and therefore everybody should follow the faith that I or my group believe in”.

This way of thinking does not only deny the basic rights of human freedom. It does deny humanity as a whole. A better way of living in a multicultural society will only be accessed by every citizen if there is a will to embrace a new perspective based on the proposition that “faith is so important that everyone should respectfully be allowed to live according to a faith that is true to him/her” (Sacks 2002).

Indeed, our diversity is something to be cherished. But che-rishing our diversity is not enough. Unless we respect and protect the rights of every citizen and every cultural and religious group under the rule of law, our diversity will only be romanticized as a tourist attraction, while in the political sphere it may become ‘an everlasting sensitive issue’ and on the practical level, diversity may turn out to be something we are scared to talk about.

This means that if we lose our willingness to guard diversity as our nation’s pride and if we fail to allow space for virtuous tolerance, it is very possible the idea of Bhineka Tunggal Ika (unity in diversity) will easily become an empty slogan memorized in schools or written in the textbooks. A renewal of our sense and spirit for tolerance is therefore urgently needed.

* The writer is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol and is the co-editor of the Journal of NTT Studies.

This article was published in The Jakarta Post, 4 January 2010

Islam and Democracy in South East Asia

Is Islam incompatible with democracy? The flow of publications addressing this question has been remarkable over the years. Recently, Anwar Ibrahim, leader of the Opposition in the Malaysian parliament and Former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, gave a lecture on governance, democracy and contemporary politics in Southeast Asia at the Goldman School of Public Policy. This lecture provides some basic arguments to support the premise that indeed Islam is compatible with democracy. I think his arguments are very general representing a moderate voice of Muslim politicians. The example of Islam and the Indonesian model of democracy seems to be oversimplified. However, given the fact that Mr Ibrahim has fought  all his life for freedom and democracy, without any doubt this lecture is very  inspiring.

Islamisasi Eropa atau Eropanisasi Islam?

Mayoritas kerap gugup dan gagap melihat angka minoritas. Inilah yang membuat misalnya mayoritas penduduk Islam di wilayah tertentu ‘takut’ akan kristenisasi dan mayoritas penduduk Kristen di wilayah tertentu ‘takut’ akan Islamisasi. Sejumlah analis mutakhir kerap menggunakan ide ‘ketakutan budaya’ (cultural fear) sebagai titik berangkat dalam mengamati berbagai fenomena masyarakat modern. Gagasan ‘Islamisasi Eropa’ jelas lahir dari budaya ketakutan mayoritas.

Apa yang membuat budaya ketakutan berakar? Biasanya ketakutan itu menjadi kuat didukung oleh statistik pertumbuhan jumlah minoritas. Agar statistik menjadi sedikit lebih dramatis, biasa ada perbandingan misalnya perbandingan antara tahun 2000-an dan tahun 1960-an. [Perbandingan ini kerap lupa bahwa masyarakat itu bukan barang statis tetapi selalu berkembang/berubah dari waktu ke waktu]. Akan tetapi sebetulnya kecemasan mayoritas akan kehadiran minoritas lebih banyak menjadi-jadi gara-gara simbol yang menunjukan kehadiran minoritas. Dalam hubungan dengan Eropa misalnya, yang dilihat adalah banyaknya jumlah mesjid, banyaknya jumlah sekolah Islam, semakin banyaknya orang yang mengenakan jilbab di jalan-jalan atau banyaknya wacana seputar Islam di media publik.

Susahnya, pengamatan simbolis yang lalu melahirkan istilah seperti ‘islamisasi Eropa’ kerap tidak sejalan dengan makna istilah itu dalam arti ‘pengislaman Erope’ atau sederhananya Eropa diislamkan. Meskipun belakangan cukup banyak orang Eropa yang memeluk Islam, persentasinya boleh dibilang tak seberapa signifikan, paling tidak di negara-negara seperti Jerman, Inggris dan Perancis. Yang membuat kecemasan justru bertambah adalah sejumlah kasus militansi yang dihubungkan dengan sejumlah orang Eropa yang memeluk Islam, misalnya dalam kasus penangkapan Fritz Gelowicz dan Daniel Schneider, dua orang Jerman yang memeluk Islam dan ditengarai ikut berpengaruh dalam jaringan Islam militant di tahun 2007.

Kita lihat dari sisi yang lain. Ketakutan yang sama juga biasanya melanda wilayah Islam mayoritas yang dibungkus dalam istilah ‘kristenisasi’. Sheikh Ahmad Al Katani, presiden salah satu institusi penting yang menghasilkan banyak imam dan pengkhotbah Muslim di Libya, pernah di wawancara stasion TV Al-Jazeerah. Mengamati apa yang terjadi di Afrika dan berbagai belahan dunia di mana Muslim adalah mayoritas, Al Katani menunjuk pada kristenisasi didukung oleh statistik bahwa setiap jam 667 Muslim meninggalkan Islam dan memeluk agama Kristen; setiap hari, sekitar 16.000 Muslim memeluk kekristenan; dan setiap tahun sekitar 6 juta Muslim meninggalkan Islam dan menjadi Kristen.

Statistik, data dan kehadiran simbolik kelompok tertentu yang mencemaskan kelompok lain seperti tampak dalam isu islamisasi atau kristenisasi tentu saja masuk akal dalam berbagai segi. Tetapi, dua isu ini lebih menarik perhatian orang karena langsung berhubungan dengan dua peradaban besar dengan latar belakang sejarah sangat panjang yang kompleks dan penuh onak dan duri. Yang menjadi masalah adalah kerap rasa cemas dan takut bisa berubah menjadi motivasi politis yang mendasari berbagai rancangan kebijakan publik.

Kembali ke Eropa. Saya setuju dengan pandangan bahwa yang sementara terjadi sebetulnya bukanlah Islamisasi Eropa melainkan Eropanisasi Islam, seperti tampak dalam gagasan Euro-Islam yang dikembangkan Bassam Tibi. Yang dimaksud dalam ungkapan ini adalah bagaimana Islam tidak menjadi sesuatu yang asing tetapi bertumbuh dalam budaya dan nilai-nilai Eropa. Ini bukan gagasan baru karena pribumisasi Islam yang mempunyai kontak dengan budaya setempat terbukti berhasil di berbagai tempat seperti di Afrika dan Indonesia. Mungkin masih terlalu pagi untuk menduga bahwa Islam masa depan akan ditentukan oleh Eropanisasi Islam. Tetapi asimilasi budaya dalam sejarah tampak lebih memperkuat kohesi sosial daripada konflik yang menandai pertemuan antar budaya atau peradaban. Di samping itu, kekristenan di Eropa sebetulnya ‘beruntung’ karena adanya wacana publik tentang Islam di Eropa. Mengapa? Karena wacana ini membuat Eropa yang tampak sekular kembali bertanya tentang apa kiranya yang menjadi akar nilai Eropa.[Saya teringat akan buku yang ditulis bersama oleh Paus Benediktus XVI dan Marcello Pera berjudul Without Roots dengan pertanyaan mendasar seputar akar-akar budaya Eropa]. Kalau kekristenan diklaim sebagai akar Eropa maka diskusi publik tentang Islam di Eropa, hemat saya, justru membuka ruang baru bagi wacana baru tentang kekristenan di Eropa. Atau seperti dikatakan Philip Jenkins, perkembangan religius di Eropa memberi pelajaran penting tentang kodrat agama-agama besar dan juga tentang perubahan wajah kekristenan di Eropa. Meskipun ide analysis tentang Eropanisasi Islam hingga kini masih banyak dikritisi pemikir lain, saya pikir, kecenderungan membaca Islam di Eropa sebagai Islamisasi Eropa ujung-ujungnya hanya akan mengekalkan berbagai konflik dan dengan demikian memberi alasan kuat untuk sejumlah orang yang mengklaim ‘keinginan untuk berkuasa’ sebagai perjuangan atas nama agama tertentu. G.Faimau/2009