On Words and Tears: Let There be Light

On Saturday night, October 1st, 2005, terrorists struck again. As we watch and grieve
with the families as they bury and cremate their murdered beloved, we might ask
ourselves – “What use are words in times like these?”

Words are divine. They can evoke compassion or death and destruction. God gives them
to us as a gift when he breathes life into our bodies and brings us into the world with his
Hebraic call – “Let there be light!” Let their lives not be wasted, let their souls be
remembered. Let this be the final wake up call for the Government of Indonesia that
intolerance breeds hatred and hatred breeds death. It is time for the state to enact
legislation to criminalize hate mongering and to define terrorist acts and the incitement of
violence as hate crimes. Such crimes should be punishable with minimum and mandatory
life imprisonment. Words, both written and spoken, are divine. They have life force. Let
us use them wisely to such effect so that the recent dead would not have died for nothing.

As the newly dead settle into the peace of the grave, or ascend in the smoke of stunning
funeral pyres, Bali the beautiful and all sane and civilized Indonesians and people
everywhere unite in compassion for the victims as naturally as a flower unfolds in the
sun. After we have washed their bloodied bodies and wrapped them gently in folds of
burial cloth, pure, delivered them with thanks to God, let us celebrate the everlasting
power of love. Love heals all. It is God’s gift that unites humanity. Hatred, on the other
hand, is Satan’s dark and deathly call. Let there be light!

Just as we mourn their passing, Indonesian liberals still mourn another death, the
thankfully peaceful passing away of Nurcholish Majid. Majid’s death was a milestone in
Indonesian history for he was a beacon of liberal Islamic thought. It is his teachings
which should lead Indonesians forward now, not the hateful rhetoric of the Islamists who
are spearheading the movement to eradicate JIL and everything Majid stood for –
pluralism, liberalism, tolerance.

Recently, Goenawan Mohamad, on hearing of an Islamist preacher’s slander of Majid’s

soul, wrote passionately about words as spears in “Sidelines” in Tempo (September 19,
2005). In that thought piece titled “Spears,” he vilified Islamic preachers in Indonesia
who preach hatred. Though written in anger, it is inspirational. As he wrote there, though
these men derive their authority from the mihrab and the use of Arabic, their sermons are
garbage – “Garbage called hate: the trash of our times.” They use words as spears and
feel that the only way to display their faith is to fuel and spread their stinking bitterness.
The result is certain death.

Indeed, when words turn into spears, life becomes futile, a hopeless battle to assuage
their anxieties in a time of uncertainty. Yet as Goenawan exhorts us, words should be
used for lighting pathways in the darkness and not for fomenting hatred as Hitler did in
Mein Kampf and as the Islamists are doing across Indonesia in their persecution of
Ahmadiyah and liberal Islam. It is worth repeating the pluralist mantra: conflicting
opinions, diversity of beliefs, clashes of personalities and world views exist in an eternal,
dynamic and productive tension. That is the story of humanity. God created this diversity.
Indeed, he blessed us with it.

Diversity must be embraced. The world is a multicolored living tapestry of cultures and
religions and Bali is a spectacular example of this beauty inherent in the world. With
grace they are burying and cremating their victims today. Tomorrow, thank God, dressed
in Hindu splendor, they will make bounteous offerings of fruits and flowers to their Gods
to protect the souls of those beloved recently departed.

We all need to find common ground. Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and aetheists,
pagans and all. We all share a single essential bedrock value, that thing that makes us
especially human – compassion. Compassion will bring us together. Hatred will reap the
wind. When will the Shias and the Sunnis learn that they can never eliminate one
another? When will any of those who claim to be members of the only true faith accept
the glorious God given tapestry of the world? They must surely all learn from this
inhumanity, that we should learn to tolerate and accept each other, to understand
differences intellectually rather than emotionally. Only love can break the relation
between intolerance and its unforgivable apotheis – murder in the name of God.

The Qur’an emphasizes that Islam abhors both violence and coercion. Instead we must
constantly seek the truth. Belief is something that grows within the soul. It is not
something to be imposed through force and doctrine. The Old Testament and the New as
well as the Qur’an are there to teach us this, to inculcate it in our souls and lives. The
principle of compassion, and the values of liberalism and pluralism are not just the
essence of liberal Islam, they are the essence of Islam and the essence of all monotheistic
religions.

There, universal values, a golden renaissance, make up our horizon. Though the liberal
ideal may well be merely a mirage shimmering on humanities’ horizon, it is a living and
God given dream which leads us through the spiritual desert of intolerance. The
scripturalist cultural deserts, be they Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu in contrast are
renewed in every age by extremists who sow discourses which we can only imagine that
God must surely hate with all his being. Surely we all distort God’s grace through our
interpretive failings. But one thing that stands out as transcendent, as the light in the
darkness we must endure, is that love, compassion and tolerance are the final solution -
not hatred and oppression, not murder in the name of God.

Caliphs and Ulemas, Popes and Bishops will come and go. The rivers of history keep on
flowing, not necessarily inexorably towards a more just future, but we in JIL and decent
people everywhere believe that authoritarian rule, whether in the political or religious
sphere, is necessarily a thing of the past. We are blessed to live now in an era of emergent
democracy and increasingly empowered civil society. Yet democracy in Indonesia is still
fragile and it desperately needs the entire community’s commitment if it is to flower. As
Goenawan Mohamad so aptly put it last week in “Spears”, hatred is democracy’s poison -
tolerance at once its virtue and source of strength. And the history of religion? Yes the
history of religion is to its eternal shame a history of slaughter, but it is also about the
inexorable will to love. Love will win because it is noble and true, pure as the souls of the
beloved ascendant today.

Hatred fixes what is temporary and cements it into something eternal, something dark we
know as evil. It takes primordial imagined loyalties and turns them into forces of binding
oppression. It justifies patriarchy and religious intolerance. It allows for authoritarianism
in all its darkest hues. Let there be color. And for color - there must be light.

Goenawan proposes that Nurcholish Majid left us with an inspirational legacy, that he
showed us how to comprehend impermanence and how to use it constructively. Therein
Majid always struggled within contemporary political limitations to promote democracy
and liberal agendas. He taught us that there is a connection between impermanence and
tolerance, that to the contrary conservative religious thinkers all believe that if they can
only freeze the law they will be able to transcend time and place and thus become one
with a single transcendent truth. This desire for wholeness is natural but there is no
humility in it because its bedrock value is intolerance of difference and change.

Nurcholish Majid’s lasting contribution to Indonesia was his example of the importance
of being humble. Indeed, is not humility an essential goal and value in all the great
religions? Did not all the Prophets teach the value of humility? When we extend our
hands in greeting, it is a sign of both our humility and our humanity. It should happen
more often. Inter-faith compassion is Indonesia’s best option for a prosperous and
democratic future.

Hatred is in a sense the antithesis of humility though we usually think it is the antithesis
of love. Hatred springs from arrogance. In Indonesia and sadly all over the world, this
arrogance is a primitive defense mechanism which signals something else – uncertainty.
Indeed, the drive for certainty is at the heart of all scripturalist agendas, now and always.
There, hatred is an act of desperation. Yet shouting and inciting violence and calling
down the wrath of God is an abusive abomination of the spirit of God. Indeed, it can only
be conceived of and communicated through words. Words are sacred. They should not be
used as swords or poison but as agents of light in this darkness we tread.

Mutual understanding through compassionate discussion, the liberal ideal, will bring
about lasting and productive change in society and in systems of belief. Hatred never
will. Hatred, intolerance, necessarily consumes itself through its own passion. It is not.

It is not generative but destructive. Ultimately, even the worst of enemies should learn to
shake hands, to live together in harmony. Let us dismember the weapons of war and
joyously and creatively solder the now useless metal into public monuments for peace -
trees of life, plough shares and doves.
In the process of seeking peace, of ascending together along the multitude of pathways up
God’s mountain, we will always find that just as religions are perverted to divide
humanity, their grace lies in bringing us together to forge a fairer and more beautiful
world. That is perhaps what Saturday night’s victims might want us to know now. As
their children, spouses and parents and friends ache over their loss, our hearts go out to
them – because we are humans - not demons.