Surabaya, NU Online
The Chairman of East Java's Ma'arif NU Prof. Dr. KH Abd Haris said that Islam as a religion spreading around the world could hold a creative dialogue with the local community in a position to accept its tradition in addition to modifying it into a new culture that could be accepted by the local community and still be on the path of Islam.

"Therefore, the arrival of Islam is an enlightenment for Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, because Islam stresses the importance of intellectualism that could not clearly be seen on Hinduism-Buddhism," he told NU Online here recently.

According to Kiai Haris, the displacement of Indonesian society from the religious system and Hindu-Buddhist culture to Islam is equated with a change in the outlook of the Western World which was originally influenced by Greek mythology to the world of reason and enlightenment.

"A reconciliation of Islam with local traditions is believed to be the process of admission that is done naturally and peacefully without conquest. This is different from that in the Middle East, where Islam spread through a process of political power," he said.

He added that the dialogue of Islam with this tradition could be carried out in the spirit of negotiation, saying it was a process of interpreting something present and interpret itself to look for a new something that is culturally known as a living thing.  

"In a cultural context, people have the ability to negotiate with their own way. And in reality, the struggle between the attended (local community) and attending (Islam) parties in negotiations is not based on the spirit of changing each other, because when it changes each other, it is no longer called as a negotiation, but is a hegemony even repression."

"That means the negotiation is part of a cultural transformation within the cultural movement. The process that occurs is the creative one in a spirit of culture, so that both parties are located in the equal structure," he said. (Masdar)