Is Islamic Identity Important? (Saddam Husain)

The spirit of religiosity is embodied in the Islamic identity. Some Muslims are very proud of showing their identities up such as using fashionable veil, headdress, names, card identities, quranic ringtones, and so on. By using Islamic identity sometimes people pretend to be real Muslims as if Islam can be understood from the surface appearance. This phenomenon can affect people’s perspective about Islam because people assume that the religious one whose appearance is nice will do better thing than non-religious one. Meanwhile, some cases that happen in the world are done by those who look like Ulama or preacher for example corruption, sexual harassment, war and even massacre.

It has been believed that Islamic identity, attributes and symbols, will persuade Muslims to do the best as reflections of their identities. This is because of the attributes should be followed by good attitude. Thus when Muslims wear the identities they endeavor to show the best because they will feel ashamed if the attitudes and the appearances are different. In this case, Islamic identity seems very import*nt for Muslims.

However, some people stated that Islamic identity doesn’t have any correlation with good attitudes at all. Otherwise, it has been precisely an artificial identity to cover fundamentalism, extremism, conservatism, and personal interest in order to deceive anyone in anywhere. For example a group of mass organizations in Indonesia that looks like Ulama or preacher but unfortunately their movement contradicts with the identity that causes society blame on Islam rather than the group.

It is ironic to realize that Muslims compete to show Islamic identity each other, not only in fashion, economy, educational system, but also in national political development Islamic identity is used by some people as a pretext to empower their group. Let us see international political constellation these days that is very dirty where Islamic countries, Middle - East fragment to be partitions, sects, fundamentalisms, moderates, and many others. That proves how bad Islamic brotherhood nowadays is.

In conclusion, Islamic identity will be better if the value of Islam as a “rahmatan ill alamiin” is embodied in attitudes. I personally think that the identity of Islam has been perfect, so it is no longer important to debate about identity; it is time to prove to everyone that Islam is peaceful at wherever, on whenever and for whomever it is.