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.
