PKS Party Rejects Idea of Islamic State

April 21, 2008

Lilian Budianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) on Sunday launched a book detailing its political platform and dismissing the idea it aimed at making Indonesia an Islamic state.

The Islamic party also rejects the idea of a secular state in the predominantly Muslim nation, it says in the 643-page book titled “Struggling for a Civil Society”.

The book also says the PKS promotes a free market system, calling it the most reliable and efficient means to provide equality for all economic players, while also acknowledging it does not always guarantee the fulfillment of people’s rights.

Muslim scholar Azyumardi Azra and Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who both spoke at the launch,praised the PKS for the book.

Azyumardi, also deputy secretary to Vice President Jusuf Kalla, said the PKS envisioned a moderate nation with its leaders, seeking to rule the country with Islamic values, not sharia law.

He said the book would explain the PKS’s stance on relations between Islam and the state to the public, which mostly misunderstood the PKS as a hard-line party.

“I recommend the PKS make an English version of this book to have more people learning about their platform.”

PKS chief patron Hilmi Aminuddin in his opening speech said the party envisioned a civil society in which people bring into practice their own religious teachings to support universal values of humanism.

The book was launched as the party was taking early leads in direct gubernatorial elections in West Java and North Sumatra. Political pundits say the six-year-old PKS could win significant votes in the 2009 general elections, challenging the two biggest parties, Golkar and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).

The book says the PKS does not want an Islam-based nation but seeks to restore the existence of Islam, which it called under-represented during the leadership of both Sukarno and Soeharto.

It says the survival of the nation cannot be separated from Islam, whose values have flavored the local culture and politics and gradually translated into the social structure of many generations.

The party, symbolized by a rice stalk divided by two partially eclipsed moons, says it was striving to reposition Indonesia‘s identity based on an anthropological study of the nation.

“Islam has become the integrating factor for a multi-faced nation and it is the catalyst for nationalism. Islam is the flame, courage and spirit of the nation,” reads the book.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani told the launch ceremony she was surprised the PKS promoted a free market system.

She said it was true the free market did not always ensure the fulfillment of people’s rights because it only aimed at efficiency.

It is the government, she added, that should monitor and check the market to ensure efficiency is achieved.

The book says the current market is marked with monopoly and business crimes perpetrated by a small number of giant capital owners amid the government’s corrupt institutions and weak international bargaining power.

As a result, the economic system has failed to become an egalitarian system that promises people fair prosperity, says the book.

In response to the concept of just prosperity, Mulyani posed a philosophical question: “Is justice the goal or a means for the PKS?”

“Justice as the goal means you divide something — let’s say a cake — equally for a group of people while justice as the means refers to meritocracy.

“It is when one has to compete with rivals from thesame playing field to win the cake,” she said.

Mulyani praised the PKS’s platform for its comprehensible goals but said it lacked methodological explanations of how the party was going to achieve them.( Source:

http://old.thejakartapost.com/detailweekly.asp?fileid=20080421.@01)