However, this situation would not bring an actual novelty without us trying to dismantle the epistemic braid between the three in the life of Muslims in Indonesia and propose critique against its political economy ideology. We are now living in a decisive transitional situation. In turn, new social ethos seeds are emerging, shifting individualism and put individualism irrelevant: the social ethos with an effort to reattach social bonds torn apart by capitalistic life style that idolise the fulfillment of individual desires.
The discourses of liberalism that teach individualistic of political economy freedom has receded in the midst of people’s enthusiasm for a new solidarity social bond, based on community or social organisation. When these political economy institutions suffered more of its lack of confidence, the lower it is the confidence of the political economy ideology behind it: liberalism, as an ideology, will fall into crisis. The laissez-faire doctrine – “let the market operates free” – collapsed, proving that the market cannot detach itself from the control of the state politics rely on the real sector (non-financial). The global financial crisis over the last several years have torn down the political economy institutions, especially financial markets and banks, that pushed the market back into the state’s protection in order to save their falling capital assets. There is a close relation between the three, and when one of the elements is proven to suffer a crisis, the other elements would be affected and would undergo fundamental shifts. This political economy ideology is manifested and gain its institutional support through the presence of political economy institutions guarantee to maintain the competition and the flow of capital in order to create an abundance of accumulation: corporations, financial markets, banks, stock exchange, etc. This social ethos is nurtured by political economy ideology in which it provides space for the individualism to flourish – a political economy ideology of market oriented that transform society as its economic competition arena.
The diminishing of empathy to the fate of the poor peasants is a kind of social ethos brought by the growing individualism, selfishness, and greed rampant in our society. How does the critique toward these two political economies possible? What are the relations between the death of the two peasants with the thought of Ulil Abshar-Abdalla or those Muslim intellectuals linger in Freedom Institute, with a stock market at Jakarta Stock Exchange (Indonesia’s ‘Wallstreet’), and even with the preaching of Aa Gym and Ary Ginandjar’s “ESQ” Islamic-business motivation? The intertwine is invisible today because that is exactly how the ideology operates: it obscures the material conditions as the basis of material contradictions, a locus of virulent forces where political economy operates, by providing a stage for the chess play of discourses overarching the conflict that occurs among those forces. This ideology hegemony is sustained by two things: Islamic liberalism political economy that lies together with the neo-classical political economy of capitalism. Our Islamic faith is constructed through the hegemony of an ideology of political economy conception, in which it shifts the attention of Islam from material issues to ideational issues, from the attention toward the material-concrete conditions to the theology and truth-claiming discourses. It is first and foremost a material issue. One that perpetuates selfishness and personal desire, diminishes solidarity, increases the pride of material luxury over social inequality. Let us point it directly, as a critique and auto-critique: our Islamic faith is a bourgeois faith. the problem of our Islamic faith is classic: our act of Islam is yet to actually exist as a saviour to those of the oppressed. Did their act of Islam – and the act of Islam by people around them – able to save them? No. Their death would only bear witness to the need of the proletariat Muslim peasant couple for money to pay their debts and save their lives from the hunt of loan shark. Their death need no certification from Indonesian Cleric Council (MUI), or a cheek-in-tongue discourse by the Islamic Liberal Network (JIL), or mourning youths who often claim themselves as ‘Muslim progressives’. Both were devoted Muslims, but the snare of the loan shark did not demand their faith. They both committed suicide by drinking poison due to the unbearable amounted debts.
11 August 2016, a couple of poor peasants named Suhartono and Sulistiorini were found dead in a paddy field of Butuh Village, Keras Subdistrict, Kediri, Indonesia.