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135 Is It Always Islam versus Civil Society? 135 8 IS IT ALWAYS ISLAM VERSUS CIVIL SOCIETY? Patricia A. Martinez INTRODUCTION This chapter will explore the issue of whether Islam — especially the agendas of political Islam — is antithetical to the democracy that defines a Civil Society. Among the many vital aspects one could explore in terms of civil society and Islam, I am choosing to address a core element of concern in Southeast Asia: are civil society and Islam antithetical to each other? This concern is about relatively new states and democracies — especially those with Muslim majorities — which are either appropriating, struggling against or juggling Islamists, political Islam and a fidelity to being Muslim countries, together with being configured as democratic, modern nation-states with heterogeneous populations. Among the questions raised by those who live with Islam and modernity, especially the nation-state, are: how can the universalism of Islam be reconciled with the reality of the nation-state, the embodiment of difference and pluralism beyond Islam encapsulated within national boundaries? Are the defining elements of a nation, premised on fundamental freedoms and an individual’s rights, resonant with a theocracy and/or the objectives of political Islam which are often to establish an Islamic legal and social order defined by the shari’a? This chapter deals with aspects of these questions, exploring whether the democracy inherent in the notion of civil society is cohesive with Islam, especially political Islam.These questions are especially acute in the context of the calls for and declarations about an 135 08 Islam Pt II_Ch 8 4/2/05, 10:40 AM 135 136 136 Patricia A. Martinez Islamic state in Malaysia and to a lesser extent, Indonesia; as well as the plan by Jemaah Islamiyya militants to forge a dawla islamiyya or Islamic nation in nusantara or Southeast Asia. The chapter explores what has been articulated theoretically about Islam and civil Society in both the Middle East and in Southeast Asia, while offering some reflections on a specific example, Malaysia. I am using the term “political Islam” to indicate a defining element of groups who proclaim an Islamic agenda — such as the primacy of the shari’a or the implementation of an Islamic state — to achieve power through political participation and democratically-constituted elections. As such, the coherence of “political Islam” is with groups that are essentially fundamentalistoriented , applying text and historical tradition literally to evolve a polity for the present. I struggle with using and finding terms that do not generalize all of Islam and all Muslims into orthodoxy’s extremists and/or terrorists — an especially acute problem since the attack on the United States in September 2001. I am sometimes even more uncomfortable with using “Islamists” and “political Islam” than I am with the term “fundamentalist”, because at least with the latter, Islam is removed from the immediate etymology although one has to qualify that these are Muslim fundamentalists because there are Christian, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalists. At various meetings, I have heard Indonesian academics too struggling with semantics: “cultural Islam” as opposed to “formal Islam” and “substantive Islam” as the antithesis of “political Islam”, to demarcate contextual and interpretive positions from those that demand literal applications of text and history. Civil society is a useful prism with which to explore whether Islam is contiguous with modern, democratic states. John Kean argued in the late 1990s that the emerging consensus that civil society is a realm of freedom highlights its basic value as a condition of democracy. He wrote, “where there is no civil society there cannot be citizens with capacities to choose their identities, entitlements and duties within a political-legal framework”.1 In its most general sense then, the term “civil society” when invoked generically, refers to autonomous, self-organized public and multiple forms of civic initiative. These are often defined in contra-distinction to the state, existing in a modern, industrial society with the pillars of liberal democracy, market economy and a scientific outlook. I choose not to hold theoretical detailed definitions from the substantial literature available on civil society as normative in measuring Islam and its embedded contexts against these definitions. I have chosen instead to surface what has been articulated by individuals reflecting about civil society in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia, thus privileging context and exemplification over theoretical definition, without making context and theory mutually exclusive from each other.2 08 Islam Pt II_Ch 8 4/2/05, 10:40 AM 136 [3...

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