This meant that Muhammadiyah want to implement the social...

This meant that Muhammadiyah want to implement the social principles of the Koran during the early history of Islam into the new social condition of modernization. Prof. Dr. Kuntowijoyo (2001: 9-29), a prominent Muhammadiyah thinker, confirms that Muhammadiyah had imitated the modern structure of state and society to implement Islamic social principles.

In deed, it ha s been relatively success ful in fill ing in the modern structures of Indonesia in such areas as bureaucracy, education, and military. Muhammadiyah also adopted the modern cultural ideas of growth and progress as a derivation of materialism. It tried to introduce materialism into Islamic society, which had been ignoring this worldly life and had fallen down into the inappropriate practices of Sufism.

Another characteristic of this systematic approach to worldly life is a result of rationalization of religious interpretation. This is not only an intellectual movement but also modern organization covering all aspects of living. Within Muhammadiyah there has developed many autonomous organizations to support worldly living, besides religious bod ies to develop religious interpretation s .

Abdul Munir Mulkan (2000, v-xiv), a vice-secretary of Muhammadiyah, mentions that two kinds of expenses should be paid for following the modern approaches. The first is elitism, in which religious interpretation only fit s well for the Moslem middle-upper class es by excluding the interest s of the Moslem majority who live in the rural areas. Second is the tendency of diverting from a social-religious movement into a formally religious interpretation.

Both consequences are a result of the modernist misusing of materialism and of rationalism as an ideology instead of a methodological framework. Moreover, Kuntowijoyo argues that Muhammadiyah lacks a cultural movement so that it is not able to attract the majority of Moslem s He traces that this cultural senseless ness is rooted in the sociological structure of Muhammadiyah’s followers at the time of its establishment.

They come from urban society with the main attention to fulfill ing the material needs of modernity. That is why they are pragmatic by fulfilling the temporal demands of modern society while ignoring ultimate human desires. They think that life is a matter of material needs, which can be fulfilled by technical and organizational means alone . Previous…