Reassessing the Idea of Non-Egalitarian Islam in Indonesia: A Debate on Constitutional History

DOI

10.2991/icclas-18.2019.32How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Islam in Indonesia, Philosophical Debates, Constitutional History

Abstract

This paper was aimed to reassess the idea of non-egalitarian Islam in Indonesia in the lens of a constitutional history and the extent to which it has been contested and negotiated to the face of Indonesia’s current political landscape. This study was a doctrinal research by collecting relevant articles on state-religion debates within Indonesia’s constitutional history. The data were compiled to examine the rise of non-egalitarian Islam driven by the Muslim's struggle over the state in the constitutional design. It reveals though Pancasila is regarded as a final document to represent Indonesia’s identity and philosophy, it is inevitable to be part of a long contentious history since the idea to establish independence whether it was pluralistic society or a society with a dominant rule based on Sharia. The idea of a pluralistic society was initially reflected by the introduction of a semi-secular principle as it was proposed in some drafts of Pancasila, but later it was radically negotiated in Jakarta Charter which aimed to impose Sharia. The development of Indonesian politics in post-independence affirmed that identity politics was also sharply shaped and it culminated in Konstituate (parliament) dominant supports to establish an Islamic rule based in Indonesia. This evidently shows that Indonesian history, among Asia’s current politics reluctant to secularism, was colored by complex and most often pervasive philosophical debates on the constitutional design in a divided society. Currently, such an idea has developed in which Islam plays an important role in the political arena to define Indonesia’s national identity and philosophy. However, it is now contested to transnational Islam which takes such previous debates to renegotiate Islamism over pluralism.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Muhammad Bahrul Ulum
PY  - 2019/02
DA  - 2019/02
TI  - Reassessing the Idea of Non-Egalitarian Islam in Indonesia: A Debate on Constitutional History
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd Internasional Conference on Culture and Language in Southeast Asia (ICCLAS 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 121
EP  - 123
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icclas-18.2019.32
DO  - 10.2991/icclas-18.2019.32
ID  - BahrulUlum2019/02
ER  -