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As a
parent, what might first come to mind after reading the news that a deputy
principal of a senior high school in East Jakarta is accused of having
abused one of his students? While entrusting the legal process to the
police and prosecutors, we deserve to know more.
We send our children to school for education, not to see them suffer.
So let us start from the everyday dialog in the teachers’ room.
Before and after they teach, especially at junior and senior high schools
in Indonesia, teachers gather in that room. While they are having their tea
or coffee, spontaneous conversations outside of teaching affairs usually
start up.
Among the male teachers for certain, one of the most preferred topics is
sex, which is usually spoken of implicitly or using indirect expressions.
Some female teachers often get interested too and join the conversations
while others might feel uncomfortable and try to avoid them.
The more detailed topics of these “sex conversations” include issues
related to polygamy, beautiful or flirtatious students and sexually attractive
women. In smaller groups of male teachers, they often talk about more
dangerous topics: their own charming students.
Strangely, the teachers who talk most enthusiastically about these improper
topics are often religious teachers or the ones with strong religious
educational backgrounds. It is similar to the trend of many male religious
preachers in pengajian (religious services) who can sometimes be
irresponsibly excessive and forget their status and the age of children or
teenagers joining the congregations.
That is why, if we took the opportunity to question teachers who sexually
abuse their students about what they know of related religious teachings
from memory, we might be very surprised. Furthermore, if we take a look at
their religious life, whether they practice religious rituals individually
or congregationally, we might also be shocked that many of them would be
categorized as observant.
So, why do they become sexual predators when the word of God is in their
minds? Have religious teachings become so toothless that they can no longer
take impurities from men’s hearts? Or can religions — in sense that they
are socially constructed within a particular time and place — be really
taken as fair and everlasting escorts and guides for human life?
In his discussion on polygamy, the late Buya Hamka, an Indonesian Islamic
thinker and leader, convincingly came to the conclusion that it is almost
impossible for a man to be able to be just among his wives. Based on his
own experience of having a polygamous father he claimed there were always
inevitable conflicts and to a certain extent abuses that created disharmony
instead of harmony between the wives, children and relatives.
In short, Buya Hamka never recommended polygamy. He himself got married for
the second time several years after his first wife had passed away. He
decided not to “play with human hearts” and spent most of his time writing
and disseminating tasawwuf, the traditional Islamic knowledge of
self-improvement and spirituality that focuses on one’s relationship with
God.
The most interesting lesson here is how one’s conscience, in relation to
the understanding of religious teachings, can emerge with a different look
and essence. And it was made possible by his personal experience in actual
life and the use of logic and honesty in comprehending religious texts.
Comparing the relatively misogynic edicts or commentaries in many
traditional Islamic discourses and the false positioning of women — as if
their rights were respected properly — Buya Hamka, as an Islamic cleric,
came to greater empathy for women that materialized in his own life.
So, it is conscience and empathy that can control the emergence of
excessive and improper sexual impulses. In tasawwuf or Sufism we learn and
practice self-control as the first hard step to achieving greater spiritual
joy. Any pleasure gained through abusing others or their property is taken
as very sinful and will put the perpetrators at the very lowest level of
human life.
In today’s religious life, unfortunately, especially in an Islamic context,
religion is most often taken as aqida and fiqh (theology and
jurisprudence). This legal-formal approach is then exacerbated by the
symbolic tendency that one’s quality of religious life is measured by the
jilbab or the beard.
Quality spiritual life, on the contrary, can be more often found in
discourses, in the long and often boring cognitive discussions. Religious
services tend to be limited to halal and haram, or what is allowed or
prohibited religiously. God’s reward is counted in mathematical terms: the
more you pray, give alms, fast or perform the haj the more you are
guaranteed to get to heaven.
It is in the lack of humanistic conscience and empathy that sexual abuse
perpetrated by teachers happens at schools. Abusing female students seems
to have no correlation to religious teachings or is taken as something that
can be easily forgiven with the religious rites performed by the
perpetrators. Or giving alms is falsely understood as a mechanism to erase one’s
sins against others.
Lastly, from the teachers’ room, we also learn that there is a problem of
unfulfilled sex lives among the teachers. Many do not really enjoy their
sex lives since they keep looking at others instead of establishing a
faithful relationship with their partners through which sexual satisfaction
should actually transpire.
Is it because a religion such as Islam is understood to allow polygamy that
a faithful relationship seems to be so difficult, since a man can look for
two or three other wives? Surely God knows better. ●
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