I was saddened to hear about the passing of Ahmad Syafii Maarif on May 27. He was a principled and courageous intellectual. His PhD thesis (U. of Chicago, 1983) was a model of clear-headed argumentation. It was originally written in English but only published in Indonesian translation as Islam dan Pancasila sebagai Dasar Negara (1985). He argued that the Islamic politicians of the 1950s who demanded an “Islamic state”, a state based on Sharia, had no idea what they were actually demanding: “the demand for the total implementation and observance of the shari’a law” was “absurd” given that the Sharia is not a “comprehensive, systematic, and workable” political theory. The Islamic political parties pretended as of “by the implementation of the existing shari’a law in a state based on Islam, everything would be running well!” The sarcasm contained in the exclamation point is telling. He knew that “the great majority of the ulama” were not “ready to accept the arguments and evidence put forward in the present study,” yet he forged ahead nonetheless. I’m looking forward to reading his memoir published in 2020.
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