Stadium General of Islamology

Orientalism, Occidentalism and Relativism

Proximity of strangers in the era of globalization

Roy Voragen, M.A., M.A.[1]

FIB-UI – 5 November 2008

            Globalization is not something abstract, it is concrete (and its consequences are real). Globalization is not out there, it is here (and now). Globalization is not metaphysical, it is political (because its consequences are real and public). While the consequences of globalization are obviously uneven, that, on the other hand, does not mean that people have merely to accept these consequences passively without any ability to alter, appropriate and acculturate.

There is nothing teleological about globalization. History has no purpose and the future is not inevitable. We are not progressing towards a situation where we will all be members of a single civilization, where all peoples of the world will embrace liberal democracy and market capitalism. Not only is globalization not a given its consequences are unequal and not benign (and can be bellicose).

            Globalization has impacts on every one, but not equally. Globalization, writes Beck, are “the processes through which sovereign national states are criss-crossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects of power, orientation, identities and networks.”[2]

            Globalization, Anthony Giddens writes, is a “[g]rowing interdependence between different peoples, regions and countries in the world as social and economic relationships come to stretch worldwide.”[3] Giddens sees modernity spreading across the globe as globalization progresses.[4] Modernization in the era of globalization is not the same as Westernization or homogenization[5] (hybridization is the keyword). Modernization becomes pluralized;[6] globalization thus means a move away from universalism.[7] Modernity in the era of globalization is not linear and not singular. The Enlightenment hope for progress and historical inevitability is utopian. Moreover, the Enlightenment dream of a universal civilization is Eurocentric.[8] A growing interconnectedness and interdependence does not necessarily lead to peaceful cooperation; globalization does not mean an end to all international political conflicts, interstate war remains an immanent possibility.

            Space and time are being compressed; we can go across space within no time. Activities can occur or experienced simultaneously around the globe. This does not mean that space is no longer of significance, how could we be and act without it? Space is the precondition to all existence, action and interaction. We, to state the obvious, live spatially. Territory is still important and we can see a dialectic between the local and the global. Globalization is thus still spatially constituted, however, the meaning of distance and proximity changes in a world where people, values and goods are mobile. I can be socially near to someone, but that person can be spatially distant (or the other way around).

            Globalization is not a one-way process people have to undergo passively, but, of course, not every one has the same power to alter and appropriate these social changes. We are connected in many ways, economics is only one way. Globalization should not be seen as something ‘out there’, it is also an ‘in here’ matter. Globalization “affects, or rather is dialectically related to, even the most intimate aspects of our lives.”[9] Globalization restructures space, what Giddens calls ‘action at distance’ is the possibility to act without being present. ‘Action at distance’ is a two-way process, globalization is without ‘direction’ and we can no longer speak of globalization as Westernization. No one is outside, and while for a long time, the ‘conversation’ went only from the West to the ‘other’ now “mutual interrogation is possible.”[10] With ‘mutual interrogation’ (for example the ongoing debate on post-colonialism and neo-imperialism) not only come all sorts of forms of (violent) resistance, but also a possibility for all sides to mutually change.

            One such interrogation to resist is the three-decade-old book ‘Orientalism’ by Palestinian-American Edward Said. The illegitimate invasion of Iraq by the United States – by ignoring the United Nations and the territorial integrity of the people of Iraq – makes that this book did not loose any of its power.

            What Said calls Orientalism is an Orient based on the experiences of Westerners. Orientalism is a discourse to make a dividing line between ‘us and them’, between those who are included in the making of history and civilization and those who are not. For this Said borrows from Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. From Foucault he borrows the term discourse and from Gramsci the term hegemony. Orientalism is an academic, intellectual and cultural discourse that helps to sustain the economic, political and militaristic hegemony of among others the United States.

            According to Said, borrowing from Giovanni Battista Vico, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. […M]en make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities – to say nothing of historical entities [such as nation-states] – such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made.”[11] However, Said continues, these ideas on space have real consequences for power relations in our global society.

            Through Orientalism the Orient becomes ‘Orientalized’, so that the Occident can dominate the Orient. Orientalism is not merely a set of myths that can be removed by revealing the truth. Orientalism is a hegemonic discourse about the Orient to hold power over the Orient. “Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”[12]

            Said is not saying that only women can write about women (men can be feminists, J.S. Mill and Amartya Sen are examples), or only homosexuals about homosexuals, or only blacks about blacks, or only Indonesians about Indonesians, or only Muslims about Islam. Said writes that “there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge – if that is what it is – that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and out-right war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external domination.”[13]

Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ is about how Westerners perceive the Orient and how this body of knowledge is used in a power structure. This book is not about the Orient in general or about the Arab and Islamic world in particular. This book is also not an anti-Western book. In the Islamic world, so says Said, this book is read as such. Said calls this ‘Occidentosis’, which means that Muslims claim that “all the evils in the world come from the west.”[14]

      The Dutch-British Ian Buruma and the Israeli Avishai Margalit write in the conclusion of ‘Occidentalism’: “The story we have told in this book is not a Manichaeistic one of a civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now, if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We cannot afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occidentalists, and there would be nothing left to defend.”[15]

‘Orientalism’ by the Palestinian Edward Said and Buruma and Margalit’s ‘Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of its Enemies’ are about those people who see the other as different, unlike them, less than human, i.e. these are dehumanizing ideologies, which reduces human individuals to sub-human classes, which, in turn, can lead to the destruction of human lives.

The Orientalist sees the other as the ‘lazy native’, as the ‘exotic savant’ (often pictured in erotic and feminized terms). The native is backward because of his irrationality, and this justifies colonialism and imperialism. Colonialism and imperialism are justified because they are civilizational forces, so the argument goes.

Orientalism is as one-dimensional as Occidentalism, but now it dehumanizes not the peoples of the Orient but the peoples of the Occident. Both ideologies have real and violent consequences. September 11, 2001, is an example where a dislike of the West took a very wrong turn. Buruma and Margalit’s book is an attempt to understand those fanatics who hijacked airplanes that destroyed the WTC in New York on an early September morning that reset the mood for this millennium.[16]

It is the spiritual and profound East versus the coldly mechanical, shallow, rootless, destructive, sex-obsessed, and materialistic West. Today Occidentalists often focus at the U.S., “anti-Americanism is sometimes the result of specific American policies […]. But whatever the U.S. government does or does not do is often beside the point. [… Occidentalism refers] not to American policies, but to the idea of America itself, as a rootless, cosmopolitan, superficial, trivial, materialistic, racially-mixed, fashion-addicted civilization.”[17]

How to deal with disagreement, indeterminacy, inconsistency, incoherence, incongruity, ambivalence, heterogeneity, opacity, paradoxy, and uncertainty. Nietzsche is the philosopher that warned us that ontological uncertainty causes anxiety,[18] and possibly violence against the ‘stranger’, against what is ‘alien’. According to Zygmunt Bauman the task of philosophy today is to teach us how to deal with uncertainty and contingency. The search for absolute and universal values, though, is the existential need for security.[19] Where in a traditional society the stranger would live on the other side of the border, today we no longer have that luxury.

Some long back to a traditional society, for it gives ontological security a society in present-day modernity cannot provide, with all the anxiety consequently. In a pre-modern society the question what a society is remains unasked. Within a tradition a person lives in a pre-established order. In modernity the individual has to ask the questions how society should be ordered. We can no longer rely on pre-established answers for these questions.

Modernity held the promise that we could find security in rationality. However, modernity is now primarily characterized by insecurity and instability. Radical doubt is turned against itself: how could radical doubt lead to certain and stable knowledge with which we could colonize the future? Many dangers we face in this world are manufactured by ourselves. Many things cannot be given, that makes calculating risks impossible.

We can know how to act if we are able to understand a situation. Indeterminacy makes global society a risk-prone environment. A high risk environment can lead to anxiety and alienation. We live in an ambivalent territory, as Bauman writes: “life is carried on by strangers among strangers.”[20] This can make life fragmentary. Bauman states that there is a gap between what we need to know how to act and what we can know how to act among people we perceive as ‘strange’. Freedom is no longer feasible when fear takes over.

The individual has to negotiate the proximity of differences. The stranger is near but socially distant. The high mobility in present-day modernity makes this situation even more complex. The danger is a renewed longing for communityhood – a community of thick relations of care – to exclude the stranger.

Now it is time to discuss the problem of relativism. Stereotyping – as done by Occidentalists and Orientalists – does not help communication, and, as we will see, relativism also does not help communication. The problem of relativism can be discussed from the perspective of epistemology and morality. I will first discuss the epistemological perspective briefly before elaborating on the moral perspective on relativism.

Epistemological relativism concerns the problem of the mind. How am I justified to claim that the mind of someone else works in the same way as my mind? After all, I do not have psychic powers to read minds. That someone else’s mind works by analogy to my mind presupposes that the other is similar to me.[21] From a logical perspective it might be possible to talk about and act in the reality in the same way while perceiving it in a very different ways in our mind. It is not necessary that the mental states of our minds correspond with our behavior. A way out of this problem is through the use of the Wittgensteinian games, i.e. intersubjective meanings come necessarily prior to subjective meanings. If I want to understand (or predict) the behavior of someone I have to look at her or his part in a certain game.

That brings us to the moral problem of cultural relativism. There is an old saying: ‘In Rome behave as the Romans do.’ Does that mean there is no room for universal values that cross the boundaries of space and time? One such universal value could be respect for human life. However, the debates concerning abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty seem to show that we do not have a consensus on the question what constitutes man. What is then the normative source of morality if our moral values and norms merely reflect the cultural conventions of a certain space and time?

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote extensively on Indonesia, defines culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”[22] And indeed, different cultures do have different moral values and norms. What can be seen as right in one culture can be perceived as wrong in another, and it is then naïve to assume that our norms have universal validity.

Cultural relativists assume that there are no universal truths in ethics, i.e. that every normative standard can only be applied within a culture. According to James Rachels cultural relativists distinguish six claims:

1.      “Different societies have different moral codes.”

2.      There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one social code better than another.”

3.      “The moral code of our own society has no special status; it is merely one among many.”

4.      “There is no ‘universal truth’ in ethics – that is, there are no moral truths that hold for all peoples at all times.”

5.      “The moral code of a society determines what is right within that society; that is, if the moral code of a society says that a certain action is right, then that is right, at least within that society.”

6.      “It is mere arrogance for us to try to judge the conduct of other peoples. We should adopt an attitude of tolerance toward the practices of other cultures.”[23]

We should, according to Rachels, first look at the form of argument cultural relativists are making. Cultural relativists conclude from the fact that there are cultural differences that we also cannot find agreement on morality. Rachels calls this the ‘cultural difference argument’. “The premise concerns what people believe […]. The conclusion, however, concerns what really is the case.”[24] This argument is therefore logically fallacious. As if the simple point that we disagree means there is no true position to be found.

But what if we would take cultural relativism seriously? What are the consequences if we do not have a normative point of view from outside a certain culture? The first consequence is that we can no longer perceive cultural practices as morally inferior to our own practices, i.e. we have no longer a tool for moral criticism (in the debates on human rights and Asian values this position is often taken, criticism is then not seen as enlightened but as a new tool for of imperialism). Second, we can only judge our society by the standards of our own society. So even when we know that our society is not perfect we have no tools to morally improve it. And third, moral relativism not only makes criticism impossible, it also makes moral progress infeasible. Relativism does not give us a standard to judge something as being better or improved, that makes social reform impossible.

According to Rachels, cultural relativism overestimates our differences. “The difference is in our belief systems, not in our values. […] We cannot conclude, then, merely because our customs differ, that there is a disagreement about values.”[25] All societies must have something in common for them to exist. Rachels gives two examples: lying and murder must be the exception to the rule for societies to function.

Cultural relativism is popular, so there must be something that can be learned from it. The first lesson to be learned is to warn us against arrogance that our moral values are based on an absolute rational standard and therefore ultimately better than other moral systems. Many of our values are indeed products of our cultural conventions. The second lesson to be learned is that cultural relativism warns us against prejudices. One such prejudice is against homosexuality. Many perceive homosexuality as immoral, but we cannot conclude from there that homosexuality is illegal. According to John Stuart Mill we should separate the law from other categories, such as morality, aesthetic criticism, etiquette, tradition, customs, and convention. Cultural relativism criticizes thus the dogmatism of universalism.

The French Calvinist Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), for instance, writes: “Education is undoubtedly capable of making clarity of truths of right utterly fade away. […] The same force […] which makes a Turkish child believe that the Koran is a holy book, would have made him believe the same regarding the Bible, if he therefore  been turned in that direction; from whence it arises that if that force was bad in the Turkish child, it would be in the Christian child.”[26] Eurocentrism is parochial, it takes Europe as the center of the world. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) explains this when he writes: “Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.”[27]

Rachels’ discussion of cultural relativism overlooks the fact that all modern societies have to deal with diversity. Pluralism and rational disagreement about the truth are common features in today’s societies.[28] Indonesia is no different from that perspective. “The question of how to achieve civility and inclusive citizenship in deeply plural societies is today a near-universal one.”[29] The theory that applies cultural relativism to a society is known as multiculturalism.[30]

Multiculturalism has two major flaws (beside the ones we discussed above). First, just as the world cannot be divided into homogenous civilizations, so can a society not be divided into homogenous blocks of separate cultures.  Global society is one of overlapping territories and interdependent histories according to Said. For example, Indonesia cannot easily be divided in Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucianist cultures. And second, multiculturalism locks individuals up in separate cultures by reducing their identity to a singular identity. For example, an Indonesian is not only a Muslim but can also be poor, Sundanese, angkot driver, fan of Persib and dangdut, a father, a husband, etc.

The Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen wants to make clear in his latest book ‘Identity and Violence’ that nations are not diverse because they are federations of peoples, each nation, on the other hand, is a collection of individual citizens and each individual inhibits a wide range of identities. Sen writes that he “can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in an afterlife (and also […] in a ‘before-life’ as well).”[31] It depends on the context, according to Sen, which part gets focus. No matter how constraint we are by circumstances, we still have to choose and for making choices we need to reason, i.e. to give arguments and justifications.

Identity is a complicated matter. And identity matters. Identity matters for the way we are, think, and act. “When we shift our attention from the notion of being identical to oneself to that of sharing an identity with others of a particular group […], the complexity increases further.”[32] Huntington wrote an influential book on group-belonging, titled ‘Clash of Civilizations’.[33] Huntington is right to claim that there are differences between East and West, but he makes those differences too pronounced, there exist considerable overlap. And not civilizations can clash, persons can, and a person is never only a Muslim, nor is one Muslim a representation of Islam as such (there is no Islam as such, that is false essentialism). “Civilizational or religious partitioning of the world population yields a ‘solitarist’ approach to human identity.”[34]

We all have plural identities according to Sen and he claims that it depends on a particular context which part is most important. “When the prospects of good relations among different human beings are seen […] primarily in terms of ‘amity among civilizations’, or ‘dialogue between religious groups’, or ‘friendly relations between different communities’ […], a serious miniaturization of human beings precedes the devised programs of peace.”[35]

As a slogan ‘bhinneka tunggal ika’ (unity in diversity) has the danger of denying diversity and thus the freedom of individual citizens. The emphasis on the oneness is a matter of establishing a unity where diversity is and where potential social unrest lingers. Thus while diversity is an empirical fact in Indonesia, these diverse phenomena are only seen as representations of the one and only. The ‘grand design’ becomes then more important than particular lives of individual citizens: “In diversity is unity; all phenomena are miniaturizations of the essential features of the universe.”[36] Of course, freedom can only exist in a safe and civilized society, but we should not too easily restrict freedom in the name of safety and security.[37]

The Indonesian Muslim Scholars Council (‘Majelis Ulama Indonesia – MUI’)[38] is very critical of cultural relativism and multiculturalism. In 2005 MUI issued a fatwa (religious decree) declaring pluralism haram (unlawful). While MUI acknowledges that a plurality of religions is a fact of life in Indonesia, pluralism is unlawful, because pluralism denies religious truth by seeing religions on an equal footing, hence relativism, which denies religious truth. However, from an epistemological point of view all religions are equal, no religion can proof it is more true than other religions.[39]

Society is a ‘collection’ of strangers; acknowledging this fact is an important step to the cosmopolitanization of urban society. Cosmopolitanization entails pluralization and hybridization instead of homogenization. The wider world becomes a part of society.

Resisting ambiguity can lead to violence: “someone who affirms and elevates ‘his own’ will almost inevitably rejects and despises the foreign.”[40] Prejudices are reflections of fear.

We need discussions concerning inclusive citizenship (prebumi vs. non-prebumi), freedom (the anti-pornography law) and tolerance. (the case of the Ahmadya sect).

If these discussions are going to be(-come) civilized ones then we should agree on at least thing first: we should agree that we can disagree.

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[1] He teaches philosophy and politics at Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung; he can be contacted at royvoragen@hotmail.com, and his weblog can be accessed at http://fatumbrutum.blogspot.com/. This essay was presented as a guest lecture at University of Indonesia’s Department of Arabic Language and Culture, Depok, November 5, 2005.

[2] See p11, Beck, U., What is Globalization?, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

[3] See p690, Giddens, A., Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

[4] See p63, p177, Giddens, A., The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Giddens defines modernity as “to refer to institutions and modes of behavior established first of all in post-feudal Europe, but which in the twentieth century increasingly have become world-historical in impact. ‘Modernity’ can be understood as roughly equivalent to ‘the industrialized world’, so long as it be recognized that industrialism is not its only institutional dimension. […] A second dimension is capitalism […]. Each of these can be distinguished analytically from the institutions of surveillance […]. This dimension can in turn be separated from control of the means of violence in the context of the ‘industrialization of war’.” See pp14-5, Giddens, A., Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

[5] Benjamin Barber, for example, claims that Coca Cola pushes tea of the market in Indonesia. The Indonesian company Sosro is very successful though. Instead of McDonaldization and Coca Colanization we can see an increase of diversity. See Barber, B.R., Jihad vs. McWorld, Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy, London: Corgi Books, 2003.

[6] See p3, Beck, U., World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

[7] See p14, p19, Therborn, G., ‘At the birth of second century sociology: times of reflexivity, spaces of identity, and nodes of knowledge’, in: British Journal of Sociology, Vol.51, no.1 (January/March 2000): pp37-57.

[8] See p170, Gray, J., False Dawn, The Delusions of Global Capitalism, London: Granta, 2002.

[9] See p95, Giddens, A., ‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society’, in: Beck, U., Giddens, A., Lash, S., Reflexive Modernization, Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. See also Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002.

[10] See pp 96-7, Giddens, A., ‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society’.

[11] See pp4-5, Said, E.W., Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

[12] See p7, idem.

[13] See pxix, idem.

[14] See p221, Said, E.W., ‘Orientalsim and After’, in: Viswanathan, G. (ed.), Power, Politics and Culture, Interviews with Edward W. Said, London: Bloomsbury, 2004.

[15] See p149, Buruma, I., Margalit, A., Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

[16] Portions of their book were published as an essay: ‘Occidentalism’, in: The New York Review of Books (January 17, 2002).

[17] See p8, Buruma, I., Margalit, A., Occidentalism.

[18] See pp32-3, Davies, T., Humanism, New York: Routledge, 1997.

[19] See p81-2, Bauman, Z., Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

[20] See p125, Bauman, Z., Life in Fragments, Essays in Postmodern Morality, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995.

[21] See p226, Hollis, M., The Philosophy of Social Science, an Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[22] See p89, Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973.

[23] See p18, Rachels, J., The Elements of Moral Philosophy, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.

[24] See p19, idem.

[25] See p23, idem.

[26] Quoted on pp49-50, Mori, G., ‘Pierre Bayle, The Rights of the Conscience, the ‘Remedy’ of Toleration’, in: Ratio Juris, Vol,10, no.1 (March 1997): pp45-60.

[27] Quoted on p14, Cassirer, E., An essay on man, An introduction to a philosophy of human culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Europeans can fall in the trap of Eurocentrism, then the West is seen as the norm for civilization (Western civilization is then a pleonasm).

[28] It would not be rational to disagree about something we actually agree about, neither would it be rational to agree about something we actually disagree about; see pp50-1, Larmore, C.E., Patterns of Moral Complexity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[29] See p4, Hefner, R.W. (ed.), The Politics of Multiculturalism, Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, Honolulu: University Of Hawai’i Press, 2001.

[30] See Dworkin, W., Cultural Cirizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. See also Bowen, J.R., ‘Normative Pluralism in Indonesia: Regions, Religions, and Ethnicities’, in: Will Kymlicka and Boagang He (eds.), Multiculturalism in Asia: Theoratical Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 (this chapter can be downloaded from http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/blurb/b_bowen.html). For a strong criticism of multiculturalism see Barry, B., Culture and Equality, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

[31] See p19, Sen, A., Identity and Violence, The Illusion of Destiny, Princeton: W.W.Norton, 2007.

[32] See pxii, idem.

[33] Huntington, S.P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon Schuster, 1996.

[34] See pxii, Sen, A., Violence of Identity.

[35] See pxiii, idem.

[36] See p128, Stewart, S., On Longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984; quoted from p241, Spyer, P., Belum stabil: Some Signs of the Times in Post-Soeharto Indonesia, in: Samuel, H., Schulte Nordholt, H. (eds.), Indonesia in Transition, Rethinking Civil Society, Region, and Crisis, Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2004.

[37] SARA (‘Suku, Agama, Ras, dan Antar-golongan’) guidelines prohibit to stir up ethnic, religious, racial, or group (class) tensions.

[38] MUI is founded in 1975 by Soeharto, but it is not clear what the legal status is of the organization or its decrees, as Bowen asks: “Does an MUI decree have the force of law […], or is it only advisory to the government, and to Muslim citizens […]?” See p235, Bowen, J.R., Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia, An Anthropology of Public Reasoning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

[39] We have to be careful for circular arguments, where the conclusion is supported by premises that assume the conclusion, for example: The Quran proofs that Allah exists. The Quran is written by Alah. Therefore, Allah exists.

[40] See p38, Beck, U., ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies’, in: Theory, Culture & Society, Vol.19, no.1-2 (2002): pp17-44.