International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 188

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES SPRING 2016 The FIQH Paradigm and the Moderate Theory of Secularization: Abdurrahman Wahid on Islam, Democracy and the Republic of Indonesia Saefur Rochmat Biodata: Saefur Rochmat is a lecturer at the History Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Yogyakarta State University (UNY). His research interests are Islamic groups and parties, religious studies, and Indonesian politic. His contact email is [email protected]. Abstract This paper examines Abdurrahman Wahid’s thought on the interface of Islam and the Republic of Indonesia, culminating in his affirmation of the liberal democracy. It was to resolve antagonism between the followers of the secular and Islamic aspirations by persuading them to accept liberal democracy as the common issue to deal with. By so doing, he developed a political approach, concerned more with the democratic relationship between the ruler and the people, rather than with an Islamic state. Indeed, he has departed from a legal formal approach advocated by the followers of Islamic ideological paradigm and argues that democracy is a kind of quasi-norm which should be respected by both the regime and the people, namely Muslims. In this regard, he has developed the Fiqh paradigm adopted by Nahdlatul ulama (NU) which has justified the existence of the Republic of Indonesia. By doing so, he was able to provide a counter discourse to the monolithic interpretation of Pancasila by the autocratic Soeharto regime which had tried to marginalize the role of NU. Key words: Abdurrahman Wahid, Islam, liberal democracy, quasi-norm, and Indonesia. Introduction Abdurrahman Wahid developed his religious political thought in the context of an autocratic Soeharto regime with the obsession of supporting the establishment of a democratic state in Indonesia, considered as the implementation of the principles of syuro (deliberation). As a traditionalist Muslim, he understood that the earlier traditionalist Muslim leaders such as from NU, Perti, and Jami’atul Wasyilah, had supported the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia as the political reality, and he evaluated that they had failed to halt the rise of autocratic regimes, namely the old and new order regimes, because they were not able to develop cooperation with the secular nationalists who tended to support the regimes because of ideological preference. It was not surprising that the traditionalist Muslims and the secular nationalists came from different knowledge systems. In this regard, Wahid, by means of the Fiqh paradigm, tried to incorporate a modern knowledge system in order to provide the traditionalist Muslims with the philosophical foundation of a modern political system. By so doing, the traditionalist Muslims would be able to develop cooperation with the secular nationalists for the purpose of controlling the regime in order to run the state democratically. In other words, Wahid’s thought of liberal democracy was designed as a 188 | P a g e