Thursday, November 8, 2018

Dār al-‘Ahd wa al-Shahādah: Muhammadiyah’s Contemporary Ijtihād of Siyar and Pancasila

Bachtiar, Hasnan. 2018. Dār al-‘Ahd wa al-Shahādah: Muhammadiyah’s Contemporary Ijtihād of Siyar and Pancasila. MA Thesis, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University.

Abstract

This thesis examines the concept of Siyar that has been developed by Muhammadiyah, especially in the context of nation-state, globalisation, and the post-9/11 and post- reformation era of Indonesia. In 2015, Muhammadiyah proclaimed the notion of Negara Pancasila sebagai Dār al-‘Ahd wa al-Shahādah, which means the state of Pancasila as the state of consensus and witness, as a representation of the Siyar. This thesis fills three gaps of study: first, Siyar, which has been developed in the Arab- Islamic traditions, has not been studied in the context of Southeast Asia, and especially Indonesia, a non-Arab country with the largest Muslim population; second, academic works on the specific topic of Muhammadiyah produced in Western universities have not discussed the Muhammadiyah’s view of Siyar; and third, the studies that have focused on Siyar have not yet dealt with discourse on contemporary Indonesian politics and especially Muhammadiyah’s place in it.

This thesis combines library research, and social and historical contextualisation. This combination relies on primary sources consisting of official documents of Muhammadiyah, academic and intellectual works of its elites and research publications, and secondary sources that consist of scholarly works on the specific issue of the Muhammadiyah conceptualisation under study. This analysis is supported by interviews with key persons in Muhammadiyah elites who have contributed to the development of the notion of Negara Pancasila sebagai Dār al-‘Ahd wa al-Shahādah.

The thesis finds that Muhammadiyah conceptualises the notion of Negara Pancasila sebagai Dār al-‘Ahd wa al-Shahādah as an intellectual reconciliation between the state ideology of Pancasila and the doctrine of Siyar. This notion is based on its fundamental basis of thought called Islam Berkemajuan (progressive Islam), whereby Islam should be viewed progressively as a problem-solving religion. This effort, in Muhammadiyah’s perspective, is ijtihād which primarily aims to solve the problem of the significant spread of conservative and radical Islamism. In its view, this problem can potentially lead to national disintegration since the Islamists have questioned the status of Indonesia as a state (because it is not dar al-Islam or an Islamic state) and its political system (it is not a Sharī‘ah system). In this context, Muhammadiyah argues that Indonesia is the state based on Pancasila (Negara Pancasila), and since Pancasila was conceptualised through the national consensus by its founding fathers, Indonesia should be understood as the state of consensus (dār al-‘ahd) that is, neither the Islamic state nor the state of war. 

Through this argument, Muhammadiyah emphasises that it supports a moderate Islamic concept of democracy. Accordingly, it adds the concept of dār al-shahādah (the state of witness) which suggests that all Indonesians should become witnesses to the development of Indonesian civilisation. Its approach of ijtihād – ‘theologising democracy’ – proposes developing democracy as a paradigm built on a theological interpretation of Islam that emphasises the importance of values such as shūra (people’s sovereignty or consultation) and adālah (justice), among others. It is, in this way, viewed as having potential for the future development of interreligious relationships and as a model for the dynamisationof Islamic law. 

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