Controversial Muslim scholar visits Australia
Updated
Progressive American Islamic scholar Dr Amina Wadud is visiting Australia to talk about her main academic interests - Islamic identity and the struggle for women's rights within Islam. Amina Wadud was born Mary Teasley but changed her name in 1974 after she converted to Islam. In 2005, she became the target of death threats after she led Friday prayers in a Catholic Church in New York against the accepted ban on women as imams. But Doctor Wadud has another passion in the Asian region: Indonesia, where she's lived and taught. She's also taught in Malaysia but its Indonesia she describes as uniquely hopeful, though not without potential fractures.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra correspondent
Speaker: Dr Amina Wadud, American-born Islamic scholar
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WADUD: When you talk to most Indonesians they will tell you they have anywhere between 200 and 400 ethnicities and there's a kind of vibrant inter-relationship between these ethnicities and this includes religious differences, language differences and other aspects of culture. And I think that that feeds into the necessity to be able to accept what I call radical pluralism, that the world is not a monolith. And some countries are trying to homogenise themselves in a time when I think pluralism is much more important. Whereas Indonesia has always had to grapple with all of this diversity. So I think that it's an exciting place that accepts for itself that we are not one ethnicity, but at the same time we are one people.
MOTTRAM: That sounds somewhat idealised, it's obviously not an ideal existence in Indonesia. What are the potential fractures in that society, particularly given that it's still quite a young democracy?
WADUD: I think they probably in my observation the biggest problem has to do with the class disparity. Again estimate are anywhere from 22 to 28 per cent live below the poverty line, and yet there are obviously very, very wealthy people at the other end. And for my observation I'm not seeing the same kind of seamlessness that's happening with regard to class, and I don't mean to say that people have unusual prejudices, not snobbishness, but how is it that people can simultaneously live without adequate say sanitation right next to or even working for people who have five luxury cars in their driveway. So I see that there's a kind of fracture in terms of making at least in the United States we call the sort of viable middleclass, they don't really even have a middleclass. They sort of have like above being poor, and then they have wealthy.
MOTTRAM: Do you think that is sustainable?
WADUD: Well I'm not sure how sustainable it will be because it seems to have somewhat of a permanence because that large per cent of the poor population creates a service class for developments at other levels, and literally direct service for the wealthy. And it seems to sustain itself because in actuality you can live a life of dignity without having to have a great deal of money. They keep food and basic necessities very cheap.
MOTTRAM: Can you contrast Indonesia with Malaysia for me where you've also spent considerable time?
WADUD: Well my area of interest is in Islam and Islamic thought and because I came to Malaysia specifically to teach at the University, certainly I might have some idealised expectations of what happened there. But I found over time that there was a tremendous effort to be able to keep a very tight lid on what could be possible in terms of the intellectual field, in terms of Islamic thought. And in Indonesia they are actually contributing some of the most interesting things in the area of reformist Islam in terms of politics, relationships between state and religion, issues with regard to women, relationships with non-Muslim minorities or in some cases of course non-Muslims are a majority like here in Australia and my home country the United States. And they are keeping a very intense relationship between what is the intellectual legacy from Islamic history, what is their own identity as Indonesian people and what I call post-modernist thought. They are actually making contributions that are not being made anywhere else in the world. Malaysia on the other hand is sort of in that kind of liberal modernity phase which means it's not really clear about its intellectual legacy, the intellectual thought that comes from Islamic past, and it's not really clear of its own, what's clear in some ways of its own Malaysian identity, but how that contributes to the discourse I think in the framework of post-modernism. So they tend to be repeating things rather than creating things. In Indonesia they're creating new possibilities, and they're actually working them out and making contributions for the rest of our lives as Muslims we're going to be referring back to.
MOTTRAM: Where then does radicalised violent Islam in Indonesia come from?
WADUD: Well it's an interesting thing because of course being there this past year and a half, including two bombings, and my assessment is that sometimes freedom has certain consequences. What happens in Indonesia is by making a space for these things they have very, very good things, but they also have very, very bad things having manifest like the terrorist. But they're actively engaged in challenging it and it is a multi-prong approach in terms of raising the level of education and awareness at the level of students, a public campaign as well as very strict measures about how they will respond to people who are perpetuating those types of violence.
