I always want to do a survey on how Indonesian people
perceive the implementation of Shari’a as a part of positive laws. Many
surveys have been done on this issue. The problem is, either the
questions are too general or only deal with the “famous” provisions of
Islamic law.
By general, I mean that the question only asks
whether a person accepts the implementation of Shari’a without knowing
whether he would agree entirely with any kind of implementation or only
to a certain degree.
By famous, I mean that the question only
deals with classical provisions that are well known by many people such
as hand cutting for thievery, stoning for adultery, etc.
I
believe that this kind of survey cannot be used to know precisely
whether the respondent fully understand his answer, that he gives his
responses based on a good understanding of Shari’a and not just because
he doesn’t want to be considered as a religious blasphemer.
In this article, I will provide certain guidelines of questions that can be
considered when we are doing the above survey. First, do not start by
asking the general question. Rather the survey must start with questions
on specific provisions of Islamic law without any reference that such
provision of law is a part of Islamic law.
The first set of
questions should deal with slavery issues. Here we test whether the
respondent would agree with the legality of slavery and whether they
perceive slavery as a bad thing. Classical Islamic law permits slavery
for more than a thousand of years. If people disagree with such notion,
their belief on the supremacy of Islamic law should be questionable.
The
second set of questions deal with economic issues. In this part we ask
the respondents on whether they would agree to lend money to other
people without any interest at all time, even for business purposes. And
then we ask them whether they perceive bank interest as something bad,
or just business as usual.
Classical Islamic laws stipulate that
bank interest should be prohibited because it resembles "riba," that
the sin of charging "riba" is equal to killing a person or having incest
relationship with your own mother. Interestingly, for such type of sin,
no criminal punishment is available (making me to believe that in terms
of economic matters, Islamic law is pro capitalism).
Third, we
deal with family law issues. The questions should be, among others,
whether they agree that divorce rights should stay exclusively with the
husband and that courts should not interfere at all (so husbands can
divorce their wives as they wish) and whether husbands can do polygamy
without requiring any approval from his first wife.
Here I
primarily want to see how women respondents will react. The above
provisions are parts of classical Islamic law which is not even
implemented under Indonesian Islamic law. Yet, if we are staying with
the tradition we should go with the old ones, unless you want to say
that Islamic law is not eternal and its provisions can be changed in
accordance with the relevant situation.
Fourth, we go with the
criminal law issues, we can ask the usual famous questions with some
twists. We should ask whether respondents would agree that any murderer
can be released from punishment as long as he pay a decent amount of
compensation to the victim’s family.
If they say yes, we can ask
them whether they would agree that a thief can also be forgiven if he
pay additional compensation to his victims along with returning the
stolen goods. Such concept does not exist in classical Islamic law.
What
I want to test here is whether people would agree that Islamic criminal
law is good for the rich but not for the poor since the poor has no
money to pay their way out from punishment, whether they will perceive
this as a fair law or not.
Finally, we ask them about
procedural law issues. Would they agree that a woman’s value of
testimony will only be considered half of a man? Would they agree that
non Muslims cannot testify in a case and if there are no Muslim
witnesses for an important case, what would they do?
Would they
agree that any witnesses must satisfy the strict requirement of Islamic
law, meaning that such witness is close to a perfect human being, e.g.
consistently maintain 5 times prayer a day and any other type of
worshiping activities, never lie, maintain body cleanliness all the
time, nice to other people, etc.
All these questions test the
respondents believe on whether the above requirements (which no longer
work in actual practice due to their inefficiencies) should be accepted
as a part of positive law.
The final goal of these questions is
to test the respondents consistency, especially when we close the survey
with this question: would you agree that Indonesia should implement
Islamic law in entirety because it is God’s law?
If they still
say yes in the end, we should see whether they accept everything from
the beginning or whether they agree to certain parts only. If they only
accept certain parts, we can ask them whether they truly believe that
Islamic law is perfect and thus should be implemented without any
further questions.
Once we go with these kind of questions, I
doubt that the number of people who vote for complete Shari’a
implementation would be many. But this is still a prediction.
So, is there anyone who want to try conducting this survey and find out the real answer?