by CHARLES A. COPPEL
The provocative Julia Suryakusuma on the rampage
If Australia has been blessed with excellent cartoonists, Indonesia has been similarly blessed with excellent columnists. Thanks to Jennifer Lindsay’s translations, English-speaking readers outside Indonesia can appreciate Goenawan Mohamad’s ‘Catatan Pinggir’ (Sidelines) columns from Tempo magazine.
Julia Suryakusuma, well-known as Indonesia’s most provocative columnist, needs no translator. Julia’s Jihad is a selection of more than a hundred of her columns published between 2006 and 2013. Most made their first appearance as her Wednesday column in the English-language The Jakarta Post (‘Julia’s WC’). Others come from the English language edition of the weekly Tempo.
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The title of the book is itself a provocation both to Islamist extremists and Islamophobes. The author is a liberal feminist Muslim who has chosen this title with serious purpose – not just for alliteration. She wants to recover the meaning of the word jihad from prevalent connotations of armed warfare and terrorism. For her, the original meaning of jihad in Islam is ‘spiritual struggle’ in its widest sense. It gives her and fellow Muslims not just the freedom but the obligation to seek justice and truth and to try to create a better society that is free of poverty, injustice and corruption. An Islamic praxis, so to speak.
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