THE CONTEXTUAL DIMENSION
The characteristic of khutbah and fatwa as being ‘religious’ should not lead us to suggest that there is not contextual dimension. De-secularization of worldly issues requires contextualization.
If textual- ization is a process that involves the use of the sacred texts (the Qur’an, Hadith, religious books), contextualization is a process of making references to such religious texts relevant and meaningful to particular groups within specific contexts. Some preachers are more contextual than others, and suggest that the ideal preacher should possess not only religious knowledge but also ‘general knowledge’, especially of social and currentKhutbahs and fatwas in colonial Indonesia and Malaya 439 issues of his or her time. As one preacher put it, ‘human beings are the sons of their times.’[1519] Thus they need to ‘follow the times’ (mengikuti zaman) by continuously reading current news and affairs through the available media such as the books, newspapers, magazines and other sources.[1520]
One of the requirements of preachers is the ability to communicate by using appropriate speech and terminology because even the prophets were asked to ‘speak to people according to their level of comprehension’.[1521] As a result, preachers tend to adjust their language and ideas to the audience, whether it be courtiers, farmers, labourers, women or youth groups. In speaking to the Muhammadiyah Youth in Makassar, one local preacher chose as his subject the early life of Prophet Muhammad and his companions. Another preacher sought a rapport with his young audience by urging them to be physically healthy, strongly motivated to obey God, and aware of the danger of the ‘women problem’ resulting from a free intercourse between the sexes.[1522] Current problems and challenges, including the colonial and the local, informed the sermons, and the preachers sought to address them directly.
In 1937 a local preacher named Hamka openly acknowledged that the contents of Friday sermons should be appropriate for this day and age and not for a society that lived hundreds of years ago. He observed that many preachers taught the disregard of the world (dunia) for the sake of the life after death (akhirat) and still used the Arabic language rather than the vernacular in the Friday sermons. As a result the audience became disinterested in the sermon and could not understand the message being
conveyed.[1523] By contrast, he cited an example of a Bugis preacher named KH Abdullah who maintained the interest of his congregation by speaking his mind about the colonial situation.[1524]
Signs of both continuity and change are evident in the ideas contained in sermons and edicts from colonial South Sulawesi and Kelantan.[1525] In South Sulawesi, K. H. As’ad commented on religious matters such as the religious status of paying a fee for a religious teacher for a substitute of a Muslim not performing the daily prayer (salat) during his life time.[1526] In Kelantan, by the 1987 instruction of Sultan Ismail Petra, the Council of Religion published a collection of the fatwa that had been issued by the Council since its establishment in 1915. The new collection in 1997 simply added more fatwa, but did not modify the previously issued fatwa. The book contains a wide variety of religious matters, including belief (tauhid and aqidah), physical and spiritual cleanness and dirt, prayer for the traveller, prayer clothing for women, reciting the daily prayer in the Malay language, marriage procedures, man-woman relationships, gifts, food and drink, buying and selling, debt, endowment, sacrificed animals, jewellery, clothing, the messiah and the Prophet ‘Isa (Jesus Christ), and religious innovation and superstition (bid’ah and khurafat). Under the section ‘belief’, topics include the question of passive imitation (taqlid) of the recognized schools of thought, the right and deviant paths, whether the sinful believer and the good unbeliever go to heaven, and men reaching the moon.[1527] These collections of edict indicate that different issues and contexts produced variant resolutions.
In applying such textual and contextual methods, the ulama were able to do their duty in answering the ‘religious’ problems of the day.The Muhammadiyah, even though they argued for the use of the vernacular, were stricter than the Ahlussunnah wal-Jamaah group in their attitude toward aspects of local culture which were regarded as being contrary or alien to Islam. In 1931, the Muhammadiyah Council of Scholars issued their ruling on the pillars of faith: belief in God, belief in angels, in holy books, in the messengers of God, in the hereafter and in the human fate. It concluded with a short explanation that such beliefs were of the Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jama’ah, based on the Qur’an, the reliable Hadith, and the work by the early generations of Muslims (the Salafi).[1528] For the Muhammadiyah, the emphasis on the Qur’anic fundamental beliefs is directly related to the strict attitude toward local tradition (adat) deemed harmful to the purity of the belief in one God. Correcting the false adat became an important part of their preaching.[1529] The Muhammadiyah ulama emphasized the purification of the faith (aqidah) and rejection of religious innovation (bid’ah) and superstitions (takhayyul, khurafat), often connected to animism and polytheism (shirk).[1530] For the Muhammadiyah preachers, there is less toleration for cultural accommodation in matters of fundamental religious ideas because they regard the Qur’an and the Hadith as the primary references for judging what are true and false beliefs.
The ulama do not always recognize changing dimensions of their sermons and opinions when they believe that the fundamentals of faith (the essence of Islam) should not be compromised. It is not commonly realized that in reality there is room for contending interpretations, and that there is localization of even what is believed to be fundamentals of the faith, as will be demonstrated in the following.
IV.