LIBERALISM AND RELIGIOUS MODERATION: THE DILEMMA IN INDONESIA

Liberalism was born from European society's con-dition that was oppressed by feudalism. It is a paradigm that is easily accepted due to its principle of freedom and its em-phasis on the human ratio. In its development, liberalism in-fluenced various aspects of the Eastern world, including Is-lam as the religion of the majority of Indonesians. The two basic problems of this research are: (1) how does liberalism influence Islam and (2) what efforts are required to prevent liberalism's influence on Islam. This research used the quali-tative method with the literary and historical approaches. Re-sults showed that liberalism is currently the mainstream para-digm of thought and culture in the world. The atmosphere of thought as well as the constellation of contemporary humani-ty are dominated by this paradigm. One of the important ef-forts to prevent liberalism and extremism is to strengthen the scholarly system of Islam through religious moderation that still strongly holds on to the Qur'an and Hadits, making peo-ple knowledgeable and religious. Serious studies on Islamic thoughts should be conducted to be placed from the Islamic worldview perspective. There should be the development of science using the Islamic concept and perspective, rather than using Western methods to assess Islamic concepts.