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"The call of the secular, or a Javanese Kulturkampf"
Goenawan Mohamad, journalist, editor, poet, activist

My paper attempts to describe Kulturkampf, Javanese style. I will discuss Wédhatama, a 19th century didactic text written in the Javanese language. The slender volume of verses was composed probably by the court literati but for many years it has been widely read by Javanese of different social layers; it is not unusual to hear it sung by street singers on the side walk.

I use the word "Kulturkampf" - but what I mean is simply a hegemonic struggle to establish a discourse of piety in imagining the social, particularly in the history of Java. Out of the text and its politics, the "secular" emerges.

Unlike Durkheim's notion of the "profane", my notion of the "secular" is less as spatial category than a pattern of motives. It is a dynamic that moves and changes religious practises and conversations, as "the numinous" (the word is Rudolf Otto's, of course) is increasingly mediated by the believers' aptitude as world-disclosures, as agents generating and opening coherent and distinct contexts..

Here I am adopting Vincenzo Vitello's ingenious reading of St. Paul. In his "topology of the religious", he argues that Paul, promising "the veil shall be taken away", secularized Christianity, making it "the religion of the wholly unveiled world".

Needless to say, my proposition does not presuppose the identity of the "secular" nor the "religious". Either of them may take shape as a different moment in the discourse that shapes subjectivity. In theory, a Kulturkampf is a process that crystallizes identities. But in Wédhatama, as I would like to point out, the "religious" and the "secular" are adjectives made of fluidity.

Goenawan Mohamad is one of the world's leading voices of moderate Islam. He has written extensively and eloquently about the power of the press and the importance of free speech.

The founding member of the Utan Kayu Community for Free Expression, an alternative cultural center in Jakarta, Indonesia, Goenawan has published six volumes of his short essays; the English version of the selected essays, translated by Jennifer Lindsay, are Sidelines (1994) and Conversations with Difference (2002).

To date, there have been six volumes of poetry published under his name; a selected version of it was translated into English by Laksmi Pamuntjak in 2005.

Goenawan also writes librettos and lyrics for operatic works and dance-theater. The King's Witch, a contemporary opera with the music composed by Tony Prabowo was produced as a concert performance by the New Julliard Ensemble at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York in 2000 and as a fully staged work at Taman Ismail Marzukli Arts Center in Jakarta (2006).

Goenawan is known as the founding editor of Tempo weekly political magazine, published in Jakarta.