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Pewartanusantara.com - What is obvious about the similar character of Muslim countries is that almost all of them develop their economy through natural resources extraction. Some scholars call this mode of development as rentier economy.
Rentier state tends to increase national productivity primarily not through human capital building—which necessitates education and innovation—but merely through the hands of foreign investor to explore natural resources.
This pattern made Muslim counties still underdeveloped but at the same time, their national revenue is highly comparable. However, this revenue basically needs to be absorbed by society as the engine to increase the standard of living or in another objective.
Muslim countries, also well known as post-colonial societies, tend to allocate the amount of national revenue to subsidize poor people. Despite all agreeing to prefer developing educational institutions, the subsidy is vital for most people who live in Muslim countries.
The reason is that the subject of post-colonial citizens has long been dispossessed of their capacity to increase productivity. And the state cannot handle these complex cultural problems with financial access or more recently digital access.
Subsidy is the only incentive that the poor people take for surviving and adapting to industrialization and globalization. It is opposite to welfare state logic that enacts the subsidy to help poor people to enhance their capacity to enter the workforce.
Post-colonial society has been functioning the subsidy for vested interest goals, that is the vehicle to maintain populist regime. In other words, subsidy is a means to prevent poor people to present critical aspirations and making them become economic clients.
Therefore, the rentier economy clearly has established a kind of public policy that privilege extractive sectors. These extractive sectors frequently attract capitalists to deceive and manipulate the law in order to enlarge their business.
However, it cannot be accomplished without the signature of the state agency to approve their proposal or to revise the law. While the rule of law is weak, the consequence is nothing other than corruption and the abuse of power becomes blatant.
That picture can be simplified as a problem of preservation and the effects of rentier economy in Muslim counties. As we knew that Muslim countries have abundant resources such as petroleum and natural gas. Intriguingly, this natural advantage is not utilized efficiently and managed carefully to push a broad range of economic life due to the lack of state capability.
It is why the revenue from extractive sectors and its multiplier effect is very low. This seems clear when we read the portion of tax revenue from extractive sectors to annual national income that is mostly far from standard or underperformance.
Since the 1980s era, the first oil ‘boom’ happened, the number and volume of petroleum offshore increase drastically. Surely, it also was influenced by the market demand triggered by the rising of low-priced transportation modes to accommodate urbanization and the city as the centre of the economy.
In such manifestation, the state that possesses and controls rich natural resources must play a pivotal role to increase productivity. And the only viable way to establish that is through cooperation with foreign companies. On some level, this cooperation can be perceived as upright while there are technological transfers and reliable profit sharing at stake.
Considering the conditions of economic life in Muslim countries, subsidy especially on energy is also an attempt to suffice the basic need of most people. The mobility of the lower-middle class in the informal economy and their living standard is never feasible without an amount of subsidy for instance electricity, gas, and fuel.
Energy subsidy is actually not required while the people are not encouraged to consume unified and monopolized energy products.
I don’t know what the main interest behind this state monopoly is toward the production and distribution of energy. Maybe the central planning wants to organize economical life in a certain direction. For instance, while energy is well distributed the standard of living automatically would increase.
Nowadays, this standard of living is always perceived as someone who enables to consume modern lifestyle and provides technological devices from household electronics (such as TV, radio, AC and freezer), mobile communication (for example smartphone and internet) and automobile transportation.
Nevertheless, the core effect is that the amount of energy-consuming by people is increasing enormously. We must point out that increasing energy consumption is a new possibility to make labour more efficient in terms of time spend. It seems obvious when we observe the portions of private automobiles and public transportations in post-colonial society.
Indonesian people, for example, calculate that having private motorbike is the only way to be more efficient for daily mobility. This logic emerges because the government is never having the intention to build integrated public transportation and they did not have feasible long-term urban planning.
This mechanism thus enforces the state to take subsidy policy to help the middle- and lower-income classes keep mobile. This is the reason why Muslim countries tend to take populist policies such as giving energy subsidies to their people. It is being inevitable if they sacrifice the long-term development (with low-cost energy) to praise the short-term accomplishment.
Pewartanusantara.com - The current debate concerning the democratic institution is about how we elaborate on the question of to what extent are human rights being alright? Since the government incrementally increases their capacity to control and assist human conditions, there is a bounce of law issues that should be legalised in order to secure citizens and society and make explicit the rule of government. But the mechanism of democracy tends to construct the relationship between the ruling authority and the subject of citizens always in dialectical tense.
On the one hand, citizens want protection—based on their recognized rights—from the state. And the other, the state must be obliged to provide it through law as the rule of game. However, this dialectical tention is never monolithic because society has complex interests.
The revision of the Roe vs. Wade case nowadays can be said a clear sign of the dialectical mechanism of a democratic society. That case surely is a result of the development of the American regulation system that is based on liberalism. Liberalism can be understood as an ideology that insists on individual choices. This ideology tends to celebrate and encourage self-expression and personal decision. But, for some people, in a certain condition personal preference must be regulated.
For instance, a condition that lies in abortion. This abortion issue thus becomes a public debate because of the variety of arguments about whether the pregnancy is better decided to continue or to end with certain conditions. This debate then has been simplifying between the pro-life vs. pro-choice.
Barrack Obama, former American president, commenting the overturn of the Roe case as an effort to reduce human freedom. Then, he called the American people to involve in activism and support the local protest. From political point of view, this new legal framework is actually influenced by conservative arguments that prioritize public morality over personal decisions. It is also the effect of the American political situation since Donald Trump holds the power.
This situation, which is worsened by inequality and the wane of hegemonic power, made civic life in America experience polarization. In other words, the American political outlook tends to handle the socio-economic problems by withdrawing from their previous paths. It seems clear in Trump’s restriction of economic policies.
Such a scene lifts me to ask deeper about how we understand human rights. Maybe we should comprehend that human rights are a doctrine that demanded a kind of recognition of the essential rights that were embedded since we were born.
The scope of human rights is broader and covers but is not limited to the right to life, the right to have an identity, the right to have culture, the right to determine the self and etcetera. But we have to consider that the universal claim about human rights assumes that the embodied individual is its main object.
This necessarily requires biological approach to construct the features of human rights. Therefore, human rights are permanently possessed by human living.
From this point, thus, when human living actually carries out human rights? It is a simple question but also sometimes problematic. Because human living cannot be born or exist without the women's body, human rights have a contradictory problem to approach pregnancy.
It is a transgressive case while the agent of reproduction of human living also has the right to decide their body. This specific feature is thus confusing when we consider the different moral stances and the complexity of the actual condition at stake.
From religious perspective, the moral stance about this issue is how to accommodate and accept human living whatever conditions are. In contrast, the liberal perspective tends to take seriously the actual conditions and insists that the agent take full responsibility for their choices.
This is why human rights are nothing other than the realms of contestation to seek the balance between personal life and communal interest. It is also the tension between individual preference and public morality. Then, what is the significance of human rights? It is nothing other than a universal truth that we accept to be a fundamental value in our modern worlds. But, as a human concept, human rights have no idea about what made humans alive. In other words, human rights are based on the materialist paradigm. Therefore, the objective of human rights is how to secure the human body, and something attributed to it from outside harm.
I suppose this conceptualization impoverishes the human universe in which the meaning of life is not limited to the body but also the spirit or soul. However, the insistence to secure a human integrated body is one virtue that we must accept. The problem is, then, when it is being regulated by institutional power that can coerce, not secure, humans in a certain direction.
Pewartanusantara.com - Since technologies took a pivotal role to transform the medieval age into modern times, there is the insistence that technological advancement would bring welfare to the society. The invention of the printing machine enables the circulation of scientific works and philosophical arrangements to flow smoothly. In such conditions plus the supply of natural resources from the colony European civilization grow faster. This is the beginning of the modernity ethos that is well known as the idea of progress.
The idea of progress is the vision of individuals and society to archive well-being. The meaning of wellbeing is nothing other than a condition in which the material resources is sufficient to fulfil the needs and the necessity of symbolic capital to guide and organize human being. In the other words, this concept has been accepted to be the mode of existence in modernity. Furthermore, this specific historical development has been transmitted across the world in order to establish the legitimacy of the Western framework. But one obvious thing is that the competition for power in the modern world is primarily about control over natural resources. Besides that, advancement in technology is needed to maximize the production process.
In the early twentieth century, the one-line manufacturing industry has been developed to increase production with a limited amount of energy. It is a combination between human capacity and machine power. At the time, we witness that electric power has been used effectively to reach optimum production. This is the reason why the motor factories such as Ford became one of the biggest factories in the first half of the 20th century. But the manufacturing industry is also the main source of state revenues. Therefore, the state has interested to make a policy about securitizing and prioritizing the industry.
Today, energy can be said as the “oxygen” of our globalized world. Without energy, all businesses would be paralyzed. Our secondary oxygen lies in two things, that is the electricity and the fuel. We frequently perceive such energies as taken for granted. It means that it always exists and is available. But the fact is not so, contrasted indeed. Energy, as it can be used for pragmatic goals, is a limited resource. It might be available because we enable to produce in constant amounts and establish an integrated chain distribution. In other words, energy is an economical management issue.
While we evaluate our energy consumption in daily life, the amount is higher when we possess electronic devices. Our daily activities, for example, watching movies, browsing websites, accessing social media, and working tasks, consume a certain amount of energy. But we seldom consider that the use of electricity or fuel in our daily life contributes to the worsening of the atmosphere and climate change. We tend to perceive our electronic devices as a sign of welfare. Further, the new launched electronic devices with smarter features are attractive when we have accepted the idea of progress.
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This is the irony of modern society. We have created a social condition in which the extraction of natural resources is required to generate energy and develop the economy. But as a member of society, we did not realize that the used energy surely has long-term and large-scale impacts that we call crises. And I must assert that the crisis of energy is more dangerous and lethal than the financial crisis. Maybe, this crisis would not have occurred as long as the natural source of electric energy such as coal and fuel such as crude oil is arranged to be available. From such analysis, the relation between energy and welfare is stronger when society utilizes technology to increase its productivity. Our modern society manages to ground out technological advancement as the locomotive to pursue wellbeing. This lie in the mechanism in which the technology (of information) gains a prestigious position and is valued with high expectation. This made the fate of modern society vulnerable and dangerous because the circulation of information and mobility necessarily needs a constant amount of energy and it is increasing every day. To supply that energy, diversified explorations of natural resource across the world is needed. One possible thing is that in the future the crisis of energy leads the human tragedy and lethal conflicts.
The recent global issue has been arousing political tension and emerged the Muslim outrage about the Indian ruling party spokeswomen’s case of defamation. The defamation subject is the derogation of the prophet Muhammad's marriage. I going to stress that what Nupur Sharma said in her public performance not only reflect their thought but more significantly the internal dynamic of the ruling party's foundational ideology. It needs further elaboration from the global political perspective to conceive a better understanding. And I try to make sense of the Muslim countries’ response to this issue.
The current stage of global political development shows a democratic recession. This seems obvious when we read the index of democracy in the last past decade. Political scholars and observers from different schools of thought then discuss and conclude that the main cause of this issue is the rise of populism. Why is this political style dangerous? One eligible reason is that this political style tends to promote strong leaders supported by alerting rhetoric and conservative political platform.
The emergence of strong political leaders such as Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Narendra Mody is a vibrant sign of populism. A strong leader necessarily needs historico-cultural narration to make their political claim legitimate. While Xi Jinping summoned the great narration of China's empire to legitimate and centralize his political power, Donald Trump calls up America the great nation to be her political narration to win the election. Thus, Narendra Mody establishes narrations of the Hindu country as the political instrument to hold power in India. As a strategy of political contestation, this political style is very effective because intensifies the religio-cultural sentiment of the majority of people. But the side effect is clearly lethal.
In the countries led by populist leaders, the right of the minority is limited or cut down indeed. They also being the object of discrimination and persecution. This happens mostly because of the populist leader’s alarmist rhetoric. It became a modus to gain support from the majority of the population. In order to strengthen alarmist narration, populist parties tend to spread out a kind of imagined enemies, threats or dangerous situations that often attach to the minority. This is obvious in the case of India’s populism since BJP come as the ruling party. So, we are not surprised when the conflicts and tensions triggered by the religious issue are more frequent.
I suppose this kind of majoritarian politics promoted by populist parties thus urges people to construct an oppositional mental model. This can be called the hidden ideology of politico-cultural supremacists. The important fact is that supremacist ideology tends to monopolize the public discourse according to what they perceive and think appropriate and valuable. The case of BJP spokeswomen’s defamations can be said to reflect this ideology. One probable reason is that the public performance of the party planned to evaluate the reputation of the sacral figure believed by the Muslim minority in India. Maybe Nupur Sharma has a similar stance to the feminist critics, but she has no moral ground to say it because she is part of the ruling party.
What makes me more intrigued by this case is the Muslim response. I agree with Ahmet T Kuru when he pointed out that the Muslim countries, especially with authoritarian characters and strong Islamist supporters, have more profound religious foundational sentiment. Unfortunately, when the persecution and the abuse of human rights toward Muslim minorities within and in the foreign territory they seem to have not a powerful voice to protest or give advocacy. I think it is the huge problem in our Muslim world today.
The world's Muslim solidarity is a virtuous political vision. Until now, this solidarity only operates in passive (or defensive) manners especially when Islam as a historical normative narration is damaged. Therefore, the case of blasphemy, heresy and defamation is being sensitive within the Muslim world. These normative guardian preferences do not operate in a vacuum. It undoubtedly has a historical trajectory in that mode of circulation. I believe that the Islamist movement—beginning with the Islamic reformation and then strengthening with the Islamic resurgence— is the historical cause of the dominant circulation of normative preferences.
Maybe, someone argues that Islamist political platform is also a form of populism based on the narration of religion. It is undoubtedly correct because the Islamist political platform going to establish the culture of normative traditions called sharia. But this political aspiration has a fundamental problem when accepting orthodox discourses and tends to eliminate the heterodox religious interpretations. In the other world, the Islamist movement cannot tolerate the diversity of Islamic experiences. This is the main reason they persecute the minority because they practice Islam differently from the majority. From our short discussion above, I must assert that populism based on cultural-religious narrations constructs the solidarity of the majority people (with dominant traditions) to hold power and always sacrifice the other to maintain their exclusive visions.
Everybody has their own story. All people knew it. But what makes a story more interesting than the other stories is because its covey values that we expect to enrich our lives. Story is a kind of imaginary world that we shape with language for living in human interactions. Sometimes, it has powerful narrations that persuade people to conduct in a certain kind of direction. Therefore, story is an essential element of human culture.
Maybe, someone tends to define story as the objective dimension of human experience. It is accurate as far as the story is shared human experiences. Our natural conditions necessarily need a story to identify and construct ourselves for living with others. So, as Max Weber famously put it, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” the story is a form of significance. In other words, what made the story possible is the meaning of life itself. And it is transferred from one person to another and transmitted across generations through collective memory and historical accounts.
From such abstraction, we need to pin it down to conceive a better understanding. I would begin with my last weekend's story about modern popular culture called cinema. In my developing countries, cinema movies are popular entertainment that attracts most middle-class people. They enthusiastically follow the film story as a sign to be modern. It is also the way to appropriate modern cultures. For this reason, the cinema theatre is the main site of reproducing modern imaginations and disseminating its values through fascinating narrations. When I was there, I attempt to reflect on the position and mechanism of the movie within modern cultures.
From the consumer perspective, the cinema theatre service is clearly making people comfortable. The room is full AC, and the movie theatre is a good effects setting. But this service must be paid with the amount of money that not everybody is able to afford it. The cost of one cinema ticket is $5. This amount is the average daily living cost in my city. This year, my city’s minimum standard wage is around $ 150 a month. When we divide it by 30 (day), the labour class just take $ 5 per day. So, the labour class hardly prefers to watch a movie in the cinema theatre and tends to spend their money on more affordable or costless entertainment.
What makes this popular culture inaccessible to the lower class is the logic of capitalism. This logic operates when we perceive the population of society as potential consumers to build the market. The capitalist mode of cinema making tends to produce films or movies with a massive budget to achieve some degree of qualities that are expected to gain attention in the market. For them, movies must be costly produced in order to craft the narration of the story with special features and effects that provide new experiences for the audiences. This is why the genre of movie films varies from romance, drama, action, and horror to science fiction.
I must point out that all these genres lie from imagining contextual human experiences. But as a cultural product with market logic, the film story must be distributed with a restrictive mechanism (ticketing) to gain revenue. And the cinema theatre's main function is to maintain this mechanism. So, when the modern stories are intertwined with the market logic the consequence is cultural products tend to be functioning as distinctive identities. This mode of distinction is conducted not only by the well-off people but also by the poor ones. For instance, poor people can consume the costly modern popular culture through alternative channels. Thanks to the ICT revolution, the alternative movie channel is flourishing widely and costless distributing. This account can be called the popular cinematic story in the modernized city.
Despite modern culture being dominant, I found the resilience of traditional popular stories. This resilience seems clear when I attend to pagelaran wayang (shadow puppet show) a few days ago. When I was a child, I perceived that the wayang performance is often held by the traditional public figures who are well known as wealthier people. And wayang is a popular culture show among Javanese people. The popularity of wayang comes from the well-established moralistic narrations performed by the dalang (shadow puppet master). Besides that, wayang as a public show has a deep root in the history of Javanese cultures.
What makes me feel amazed when attending wayang showsis the skill mastery of dalang. A dalang necessarily knows the stories of Mahabarata and Ramayana and is sufficiently mindful of the biography of its characters. Because of pagelaran wayang is the performative show, dalang must mastering the motions of wayang (puppet). And more interestingly, dalang is also able to make different voices regarding the character of wayang. However, shadow puppet shows—performed one full night in length—have thematic wayang stories. This thematic story is regularly chosen according to the celebrating events. It can be a wedding, public promotion or anniversary.
Attending pagelaran wayang in the rural setting get me think that one of its key functions is to maintain social cohesion. It seems obvious to me when this show originally is presented to people who live in the rural community. I observe two different clusters of audience. The first one is the audiences who have a connection—it can be bold or work ties— or influence in the rural community. All of them are the preferentially targeted audience. And the second is the public audience who live in the rural community or have curiosity about wayang. The two clusters of the audience are not divided strictly, they can sit down wherever they feel comfortable and appropriate. But the first one has a different treatment because they are invited.
I suppose the narration of wayang stories carries essential values for human living. For instance, the story of “pandu swargo”— the title of pagelaran wayang I have been attended—can be interpreted as the value of respecting the old people. This title is chosen to remind us (the audience) that people who are born later must respect their parents. I must recognize that I hardly understood the flow of the wayang story because the show was narrated in high strata of the Javanese language. I am not familiar with it. But I try to make sense of it as far as I can.
One last thing we must consider in pagelaran wayang is the role of women singers (pesinden). Pesinden has a beautiful voice to sing Javanese lyrics (tembang). Their vocal ability is unique because possess a highly controlling level and sometimes are energic. Unfortunately, this aesthetic part in wayang is difficult to grasp the meaning. Concerning this phenomenon, I must assert that this is a clear sign that Javanese culture accommodates women's role in public. By such a short comparison, modern times certainly possess their own popular culture as the story of distinctive identity. But when we travel in the periphery, the popular tradition still exists with its own value; namely the story of collective and inclusive solidarity.
As the main site of religious practices, mosque is perceived to be the heart of cultivating Muslim community. At the beginning of Islam, precisely in the Madinah periods, this site has social functions for instance building solidarity, making social cohesion, and solving public problems.
These functions thus made mosques to be an institution that educates the community with egalitarian values and inclusive participation. From this point, we can understand that the da’wa of Islam is not mere spreading normative values but also how to handle a wide range of social problems. And more interestingly the mosque is frequently used to be the site of musyawara (public discussion). In there, the Muslim community and the broad range of social unit called umatan wahida—according to the Madinah treaty, this social unit is plural in character because comprise cross religions and cross ethnics bounds— establish public spheres.
The contemporary world comes to our consciousness with a burden of problems. These problems sometimes brought a certain kind of conflict. For instance: conflict of interests, conflict of differences, conflict of power and more importantly conflict of legitimate visions. Why is this happening? Maybe we can’t get a convincing answer. But at least in my opinion that is always there because human being lives in two worlds, the mental world and the material world—subjective experiences and social conditions.
This seems obvious when we trace the past to identify our cultural infrastructures—as a tool to understand ourselves and the environmental conditions within historical continuity, for example, language and technique. With it, we enable to learn how our ancestors threatened the problems and what their insightful inventions are.
I suppose the emergence of ‘religion’ as a set of belief prepositions is a magnificent invention in human history. Whatever how we formulate to understand it, the spirit of religion tends to drive humans to acknowledge the limitations of their existential power and the only way to surpass it is to subsume the self into supernatural power. We can call it the first archetype of ‘religion’ in human history. And obviously, it necessarily grows and developed to be the cornerstone of human life while the interactions become complex.
There is an important thing to say that human civilization necessarily has a more systematic ‘religion.’ But historical narration tells us that civilization built upon centralized authority succeed monopolize the power (this can be military army or symbolic legitimacy) to make people comply. They hold the power tend to personalize themselves as a god or have god-like capacity. It is very effective to integrate and coordinate people in certain ways of conduct. However, while the kings or emperors ignore or sacrifice the live conditions of their people to shake their ambitions, it is absolutely the enemy of the human being.
I think religion as a counter narration has the ultimate role to evaluate the destructive tendency of human beings in history. The current world religions in their formative periods try to capture this evil tendency with the term or concept ‘satan’. This is obvious when we read how religious narrations draw the exegesis of the human being.
Adam was created by God from earth soil in the transcendental world called heaven. In there, Adam was accompanied by Eve. And the only prohibition is to eat the forbidden fruit. Once upon a time, satan enter heaven to sway Adam and Eve. Satan say “why you two did not eat the forbidden fruit? It is delightful fruit in the whole heaven. Do you think God does not have mercy while you misconducted? Because Adam and Eve conceive that God has mercy, thus, they eat the fruit. Afterwards, God speak to them. “you broke My rule in heaven, and the consequence is you must live dawn on the earth.” Since that time, Satan hasalways tried to deceive Ada’s descendants.
That story—despite the Biblical or Quranic version—gives us the matter of deception inherently within human existence. Therefore, prophetic revelation insists that satan is the common enemy to live in this world and return to the transcendental world. But what the satan is? According to the Quranic verse, satan is something that deludes our mental states to praise the living creatures as well as psychologically or intentionally. This means that one of the fundamental religious visions is to humanize human beings. But to maintain humanization religion provide transcendental narrations that all human being is equal.
While that narration infiltrates particular human cultures the principle becomes faint. It is the manifestation stage of the humanization visions of religion. Sure, this is a complex process and depends on the social and cultural infrastructure within it. However, the concept of satan, evil and bad thus still being interpreted as the main element of moral foundation accepted within a certain socio-cultural unit. This moral foundation thus enables people to behave as stable as possible to manage the chaotic effects of their conduct within society. My point is while we live in the fast-changing world one of the main tasks is to create a common enemy for human beings. Clearly, this is the enemy of humanism. Nowadays, we must be aware of the political movement under the banner of religion. They advocate religious supremacy but unfortunately, they seem to ignore the humanistic principles. The true enemy of religion is not something in external reality but the mental attitude that being deceived with the hate of human existences. It is the satanic personality that justifies conflictual reality in our times.
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When I was a child, one day my mother took me to visit an unregular communal festival. As a child, I just felt happy because my mother promised would give me ice cream. When we arrive, I quite wondered why so many adult people gather in that place and they seem passionate to get some coupons. For me, it is a new experience since the only regular festival in my town is the traditional celebration of Independence Day. As far as I remembered that the festival was held by the local government to distribute basic goods at discounted prices. Later, I have informed that the name of that festival is ‘bazaar rakyat’ (a familiar idiom in Javanese-Indonesian people). There, people were allowed to exchange a certain amount of basic needs with coupons they possessed. Therefore, the bazaar is nothing other than a cheap market.
My understanding of bazaar was elaborated when I read one of Geertz’s articles. He describes bazaar as a form of traditional market with specific features. Not like the modern market that promotes effective and efficient production, idealizing the free flow of goods and price as the sole constituting power, bazaar is a market where household (small scale business) products meet their local consumers. They sell products without a target and frequently with fluid prices. They just vending their product to whoever came to bazaar.
Geertz insisted that in this market people who hold more price information—accumulate through regular visiting—would take advantage because this information enables him/his to negotiate. Moreover, when people maintain social connections within this market they would be trusted.
That explanation encourages me to think more clearly about the transformation of economic practices in underdeveloped and developing countries. This drives me to seek another bazaar practice from different sources. In Iran, Asef Bayat describes, the economic activity before Revolution was mostly conducted in bazaar markets. At the time, Iran was underdeveloped because economic industrialization was still limited and how Iranian people fulfilled their basic needs generally in traditional fashions. Interestingly, the social consequence of the former is urbanization cannot improve the standard of living indeed. Those who migrate to the cities tend to be absorbed in the informal sector. And this condition made their traditional economic practices keep alive.
Bayat state that the vitality of the bazaar market in the main street at the occasional times is the survival mechanism shown by poor people. Street dealers sometimes confront the police because what they do is illegal. But they have established a strategy to manage collective resistance or retreat from regulation. It can be called practical adaptation where the traditional market takes place in the regulated city. In the other words, bazaar is the main element of the informal economy that the state official cannot control and is incapable to manage.
In the age of globalized world, we tend to think that the neo-liberal free market would make state control wane. More precisely the logic of market would be dominant in society. In this condition, we must ask an interesting question: what are the effects of globalization on the informal economy where bazaar markets survive?
I would like to elaborate on that question with a proposition that bazaar markets would be enlarger when the social process led by market logic does not provide schemes for helping the bottom cluster of society. This is obvious when I observe my country, Indonesia. According to the central statistics bureau, 98 per cent of enterprise in Indonesia is small-middle enterprise (SME). It is mean that most SMEs operate autonomously and have never published or reported their financial account. Hence the portion of tax revenue with GDP never reaches two digits. Moreover, the activities of the informal economy sometimes being vitalized when the pressure of market competition triggered the lower middle class to build their communal solidarity.
For instance, in Yogyakarta—my current living place—there is a lot of bazaar markets where petty dealers install temporal booth to display product they want to sell. That is Sunday Morning Market, Sekaten Night-Market, Traditional Culinary Festival, Kampoeng Ramadhan Jogokaryan and Kauman Evening-Market. Some of these bazaars arewell organized. But in the last decade, Yogyakarta seems experienced intensive development because the public authority plane to make this heritage city become one of the leading tourist destinations in Indonesia or South East Asia.
What I want to point out is that this tourism model of development rests not only on the capitalist competition to take out estate assets but also made the middle-lower class vulnerable. For them, the only option to survive is to be active in the informal economy. Therefore, with the availability of inclusive economic channels—that is bazaar markets—they relatively safe. It is the persistence of bazaar market in the globalized world. Bazaar market still exists despite in the everyday life we are dominated by global products. Finally, this distribution mechanism can be treated as a clear sign of the resistance of traditional ethos against neo-liberalism.
Democracy is the most powerful political idea in the late twentieth century. The collapse of the socialist model organization represented by Uni Soviet was the impetus why the leading political thinker optimistically state that democracy was the only option to lead global history.
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History stand to celebrate the winning liberal-capitalistic model as a new norm of the global political economy. This thing, then, is followed by several occasions that pundits called democratization, civil society building, globalization, and neoliberal project. However, in Western counties, some scholars worry about something that can be a trouble in the process of strengthening the domination of liberal norms. Clash of Civilization is a term coined by Michael Huntington to identify the potential threat that comes from non-Western political cultures. More precisely he pointed out that Islam and China’s political culture, on some level, contrasted with liberal democracy. It is forceful claims that attract the debate about whether Islam and Muslim societies have or enable to build democratic values.
The most obvious sign of democratic values is the existence of public discourses. In modern society, the duty to manage public discourse is the press. But we must realize that press is not the sole social infrastructure to enable public discourse. Jurgen Habermas found that social institution that brought modern West cultures into democracy is the salon and café because it is a site where the bourgeois class discuss freely public issues. He stresses that beyond political parties, a non-formal democratic process is also conducted by public associations. However, this idea assumes intersubjective deliberative communication as an ideal norm that is supposed to be accepted by the most population. This direct public participation is well known as democratization.
At the end of millennium, the discussion about democratization and Islam or Muslim society reach a positive conclusion. Robert W Hefner’s study about the civil movements in Indonesia brought evidence that Islamic associations not only accept but also promote democratic values. But the other scholars tend to treat this argument as a mere exceptional case when we see the whole Islamic world dominated by totalitarian regimes. I think this critic mislead because what Hefner wants to point out is the possibility of transforming Islam to be democratic within a particular context. One of the interesting things from this discussion is how the principles of democracy—mostly in the liberal version—have been encouraged to be the norm in the political sphere in the Muslim majority counties.
The emergence of global terrorism was a nightmare of established political order. Within the Islamic world alone these extremist political movements thus complicate the problems faced by Muslims. Maybe one argues that Islam politics can be treated as an alternative to the secularized world. I am not sure and indeed tend to doubt that kind of political platform they bring would accommodate democratic values. Taliban’s regime who imposes Islamic values coercively in the public arrangement is a good example of this.
In the first decade of the new millennium, we witnessed ICT Revolution spread out globally. In this era, the cost of information transmission decreases and the effective model of communication flourish enormously. The easy access to the internet and the invention of communication devices such as smartphone thus drove unprecedented social transformation from politics to culture and business to religious piety. In this vein, democracy becomes stronger because each individual has an opportunity to participate in cyberspace.
While this information and communication technology is possessed and used largely by people who live in the authoritarian regime, it become effective tools to disseminate alternative ideas and mobilize the mass. What we call ‘Arab Spring’—a term to refer revolutionary political movement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—is the manifestation of the power of ICT to wipe out authoritarianism and set out democratization. But we can make a point that democratization in these countries is quite different from democratization before ICT Revolution take place. In the other words, democratization in cyberspace tends to be juvenile discourse with complex and fragmented features. This is contrasted with the core values of public sphere discourse that is rational argumentations and mature attitudes.
Then, we must interrogate the impact of cyber discourses on democracy. It is the main point of this article, to elucidate the cyber political myths.
The abundance of information in cyberspace brings down the difficulty to select valuable information. And people have a tendency when he surfing digital media without clear goals, or at least they just want satisfaction. It is can be said that cyberspace is fit for all modus of communications. This is the reason why communications in digital media usually lie misleading and misunderstood. Sometimes, little things can be problematic and become controversial.
When we are regularly active in cyberspace, we found that the most attractive theme or issues to be a source of debate is political and moral issues. But we have known that the debate in the cyber media is not always organic—that means come from person-to-person aspirations. In the other words, the debate can be manipulated according to partial-specific interests. The algorithm of the cyber platform also tends to provide information that conforms to personal preferences. The combination of these two characters bears framing techniques powerful.
In the last decade, a set of manipulation techniques become popular. One of them is framing discourse. This technique is crucial because it can be used to swift political preference, especially during the electoral campaign period. Recent research identifies some types of framing discourse. For instance hate spin, hoaxes, and alternative facts. The goal of these techniques is to gain more supporters and to reduce the political influence of the opponent through information technology. This has a consequence that electoral process as a manifestation of formal democracy thus seems become the competition about whose possesses a heroic persona in the eyes of the citizen.
That is what I call the necessary condition for the production of political myths. In such conditions, political actors are urged to make their image beyond factual accuracy. Then, they identify themselves as a heroic figure who believe can save all miserable people and hold power to solve a broad range of social problems. When this image is put in emotive effects or narrative framing, it is political myths in making. With an algorithm, having the map of audience preference, this heroic persona images and words are transmitted effectively and become the political myths because those who believe it tend to refuse factual verification. That is the recent conditions of our democracy.
Since the prophet Muhammad introduced Islam within the Arabic community fourteen centuries ago, we have known that Islamic tradition has its unique practices. As a religion, the foundation of Islam consists of five habitual obligations; shahada, sholat, zakat, fasting, and hajj (for those who are able to do). This obligation practices sometimes become problematic when a certain kind of human condition (as well as personally or sociologically) is not complied to perform it. To handle those problems Muslim community thus develop a methodological approach based on Islamic scripture and Sunna. And the product of that method is called fiqh.
I suppose this mode of knowledge, at least in basic form, have had inclusive feature because intellectual legal opinion discourse never claims to be the Truest. But when the official power formally promotes legal opinion as Islamic law and enables to enforce it in Muslim society, we can say that it is necessarily political.
Sure, the tension between Islam and politics (in a transformative sense) appears from the beginning when Muslim community vis a vis Quraish elite power. However, we must point out that the necessity of politics as a means of social organization in the Muhammad period tend to emphasize musyawara or democratic process to take public decisions.
The massive spread of Islam across Middle-East was mostly influenced by military conquest to establish political control. While the territory control was larger, a more complex political institution is needed. In the Utsman and Ali periods, the political institution still was not well developed. I think it is the root of political contestation between shahaba, especially on the matter of legitimate succession leader. Then the dynastic regime was created, inspired by sasanite kingdom, to monopolize political power.
Beyond such political dimension, we must realize that Muslim society has complex traditions. The spread of Islam also means that there is tension between established cultural traditions and religious normative values. In other words, it is the question of how religious-universal values shape the particularity of local traditions.
Muslim as social agent is not only behaving according to religious norms but also able to negotiate with other socio-cultural values and practices. For example, Muslims from Java mostly understand Islam with the available resource in pesantren—Islamic educational institution— and they tend to accommodate cultural practicessuch as slametan (communal fest) and ziarah. Concerning this fact, we can state that the traditions of Muslims vary depending on the local contexts.
Thus, how do we treat the diversity of Muslim traditions while at the same time we believe and recognise the universal value of Islam?
In principle, being Muslim is a process that stresses voluntaristic and inclusive participation to cultivate moral values. It is a never-ending process because we are human being. And every human being depends on their local circumstance to survive and learn to behave according to appropriate social conduct. So, within societies where Islamic value have been dominant, we found that Muslims never divorce and indeed creativity reproduce cultural practices. When this practice is consistently performed by Muslims the consequence is it becomes a tradition. And Surely each tradition enables to be transformed.
Unfortunately, the complexity of tradition within Muslim society has recently been threatened by the foundational-religious mode of thinking. Muslim foundationalist thinks that ‘Islam’ (more accurately their interpretation of Islam) must be a universal standard of human conduct. They believe that Islam contains a comprehensive solution to resolve contemporary problems.
But to become a universal standard Islam must be interpreted and formulated. What is the guarantee that all Muslims would agree with it? And in which ways the solution of Islam could be realized? These questions are simply answered by foundationalists with exclusive or dogmatic arguments that while Muslims are united Islam will hold the power and social problems miraculously eliminated only when Islamic norms are established to control society. It is can be said dangerous thought because they refuse to recognize the plurality of Muslims and never accommodate different aspirations. In other words, they want to suppress the complexity of Muslim traditions with a totalitarian version of Islamic tradition.