The Wednesday Forum organized by Religion and Cross-Cultural Studies Master Program or the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS) at the Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada (SPs UGM), serves as an intellectual space initiated by CRCS UGM to discuss current issues related to religion, culture, and society. This forum is held regularly and is open to everyone, completed with snacks and refreshments. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own tumblers as part of supporting environmentally friendly initiatives.
This time, the Wednesday Forum was held on Wednesday (May 28th) in the Classroom on the 3rd Floor of the Graduate School Building at UGM, featuring Aziz Anwar Fachrudin as the main speaker. Aziz is an alumnus of CRCS UGM who earned his MA degree in 2016. After completing his studies, he joined CRCS staff until mid-2017, before continuing his doctoral studies in the United States with a Fulbright scholarship. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in religious studies at the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies (SHPRS), Arizona State University.
“I am very happy to return to CRCS UGM, which for about three years was like a second home to me. Thanks to the support of the lecturers at CRCS UGM, I was able to pursue my doctoral education in the United States,” Aziz expressed.
In his presentation, Aziz raised a critical theme against the universal claim in Western academic discourse that religion is a modern European invention that later spread globally through colonialism and Christian missions. He argues that although this narrative aims to decolonize modern social categories, it remains historically problematic.
Based on a chapter from his ongoing dissertation, Aziz presented evidence from pre-colonial Malay and Javanese Islamic texts from the 16th and 17th centuries showing the existence of the concept of religion and dīn that had already been highly reified, even resembling the modern understanding of religion. These texts discuss topics such as Islamic creed (ʿaqīdah), Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), and comparative religion (muqāranah al-adyān), which, according to him, demonstrate that the understanding of religion as a category is not entirely a modern Western creation.
This Wednesday Forum discussion enriched the participants’ perspectives, especially in reconsidering the construction of the concept of ‘religion’ that has long been considered to originate exclusively from the West.
Author: Asti Rahmaningrum