Intolerant Islamic groups versus religious minorities

---The Jakarta Post, Indonesia

Features | Wed, 04/07/2010 8:32 AM

Intolerant Islamic groups versus religious minorities

A. Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A wind of change swept through civil and political liberties under the so-called reform era – which was marked by the downfall of president Soeharto’s authoritarian regime 12 years ago.

But overtime, growing religious conservatism, if not downright radicalism, also crept through Indonesian society. Religious conflicts became unavoidable, and the victims, of course are the minorities.

The latest spat, which occurred last Friday, involved a group of people under the aegis of the Parung Ulema Forum who demanded Catholics cancel their Good Friday mass at their Saint Johannes Baptista Church in Bogor, West Java.

Earlier this year, another Muslim group protested against the building of the Filadelfia Huria Kristen Batak Protestant (HKBP) church in Bekasi, also in West Java. Subjected to relentless pressure, Bekasi Regent Sa’aduddin unilaterally banned the construction, forcing the congregation to hold its Sunday service in an open field nearby.

Tensions has not only flared up between certain Muslim groups and Christians, but also “inside” the Muslim community. The “victims” tend to hold different interpretations of Islamic teachings. Muslim hardliners, for instance, have been targeting the likes of Jamaah Ahmadiyah.

Many followers of traditional beliefs have also complained about the “threat” of increasing conservatism.

According to a report issued by the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, there were 200 violations of freedom of worship last year. The institute recorded 265 similar cases in 2008 and 135 cases in 2007.

Setara added that in many of the cases, state officials were either “actively” involved or guilty by “lack of action” or “omission”. State institutions involved include the police, the ministry of religious affairs, mayors, regents and courts.

According to the report, the Indonesian Ulema Council, the Islam Defender Front and the Forum of Islamic Community or FUI were the main culprits behind most of the violations of freedom of worship. Most of the cases occurred in West Java, Jakarta and Banten.

Setara is one of several organizations – including Imparsial, the Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsam), the Indonesian Human Rights and Legal Aid Association (PBHI), the Institute for Studies on Human Rights and Democracy (Demos), the Desantara Foundation, the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI), which filed a petition asking the Constitutional Court to revoke the 1965 Blasphemy Law, deemed as discriminatory against certain religious groups.

High-profile personalities who joined the groups include late former president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, Muslim activist M. Dawam Rahardjo, noted Islamic scholar Ahmad Syafii Maarif and women activist Musdah Mulia.

The petitioners believe the law can trigger sectarian conflicts as it only officially recognizes five religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Gus Dur’s administration later acknowledged Confucianism as an official religion. One article of the Blasphemy Law bans people from interpreting religious teachings differently from official religions.

The law is believed to violate the State Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion.

The court has been conducting hearings every Wednesday and Friday to hear the opinions of petitioners, government officials and dozens of experts.

URL: www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/04/07/int...minorities.html

Who and what defines blasphemy?

---The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Headlines  Thu, 02/11/2010 10:01 AM

Who and what defines blasphemy?

Arghea Desafti Hapsari, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Religious leaders and experts testified Wednesday on what and who defines blasphemy, in the second hearing of a judicial review request of the 1965 Blasphemy Law.

Rev. Franz Magnis Suseno, a Catholic intellectual and professor, was the only expert witness from the petitioners’ side.

While blasphemy refers to “deviant teachings” in the law, Franz Magnis said it was “relative”.

“It means that one has gone from the right path to another that is not.

“Those who use this word are people who feel they are right.

“One group may find another group’s teaching as deviant, but the latter may also affirm it is the former’s teaching that is deviant,” he said.

Franz argued that the state should not have a say in determining whether a teaching was deviant.

“The state cannot say which is true between, for example, Catholics and the Jehovah Witnesses, even if the Catholics have a hundred more followers than the latter,” he said.

The government’s meddling in religious affairs was among issues raised by petitioners of the judicial review request, which comprise of several NGOs and promoters of pluralism.

In January, they requested the Constitutional Court review several articles that they said discriminate d against minority religious groups.

The articles, they said, regulate the government’s authority to dissolve religious groups whose beliefs and practices were deemed blasphemous by religious authorities.

Under the law, the government also has the authority to charge leaders and followers of suspected heretical groups with an article in the Criminal Code, which carries a maximum penalty of a five-year jail term.

Article 1 of the law stipulates that it is illegal to “intentionally publicize, recommend or organize public support for a different interpretation of a religion practiced in Indonesia or engage in a religious ritual resembling another’s religion”.

It also says that “practicing an interpretation of a religion that deviates from the core of that religion’s teachings” is illegal.

The chairman of the country’s largest Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama, Hasyim Muzadi, who came as the government’s expert witness, said the law did not violate freedom of religion, as petitioners feared.

“In fact, the minority [among religious communities] will be the ones who will suffer more if the law is revoked,” Hasyim said.

Revoking the law would likely lead to national instability, he said.

“Religious tolerance, which we have been building for a long time, will be disrupted,” he told the court.

Outside, hundreds of people from Muslim mass organizations staged a rally against the request for the judicial review.

Another testimony was from senior journalist Arswendo Atmowiloto, who spent four and a half years in jail after the Monitor tabloid, where he was editor-in-chief, released in 1990 results of a popularity poll that ranked Prophet Muhammad in 11th place, below himself.

“That’s in the past,” he said.

“But what is pertinent is the interpretation of ‘blasphemy’ in Indonesia.

“I did not know then that comparing Muhammad to other humans was blasphemous.”

URL: www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/02/11/wh...s-blasphemy.html

Minorities’ right to liberty

---daily Dawn, Pakistan

Provinces

Minorities’ right to liberty
Anwar syed
Sunday, 16 Aug, 2009 | 10:27 AM PST |

A group of Muslims, professedly incensed and enraged over the alleged desecration of the Quran, killed seven Christians in Gojra in Punjab. The allegation may not have been valid.

It is possible that the victims and their killers had been involved in a local quarrel. It is also possible that the victims were targeted simply because they were non-Muslim. The following presentation is based on this latter premise.

The killings have been widely condemned. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif went to Gojra to condole with the victims’ families, and each announced an award of Rs100m as compensation to them. Mr Gilani also announced his government’s resolve to apprehend and prosecute the killers. This was a laudable response on his part, and we hope it does not turn out to be one of those promises that are lightly made and then forgotten.

This was not the first incident of its kind in the country’s recent experience. Hindu, Christian and Ahmadi communities and neighbourhoods in Sindh and Punjab have been attacked, persons killed, homes and businesses plundered and places of worship destroyed. These deeds were barbaric and so were their doers.

It takes a measure of intellectual sophistication and civility to value diversity and respect those who think differently from others. These attitudes of mind are cultivated in a democratic culture, which settles issues through discussion, debate and a process of give-and-take (compromise). This mode of arriving at decisions does not admit of absolutes. It requires admission of a degree of tentativeness in one’s own position, willingness to concede that the opponent has to be heard, for his argument may have some merit.

Granting exceptions, it may be said that absolute firmness of belief in the validity of a set of propositions, and tolerance of those who do not subscribe to them, do not go together. Indeed, they are mutually exclusive.

Intense believers in their professed faith have fought others in numerous times and places. Protestants and Catholics, and within the Protestant Church Anglicans and Presbyterians, persecuted, even killed, one another for more than 100 years in Ireland and Scotland respectively.

The same kind of conflicts took place in France, Germany, Switzerland and Massachusetts. In India orthodox caste Hindus have traditionally humiliated certain lower caste groups as untouchables. They have also been persecuting their Muslim citizens.

Islam enjoins tolerance of the non-believer. ‘Moderate’ Muslims are indeed tolerant of views other than their own. But there are, and have been, others who hold that those who disagree with them are not real Muslims, and that they deserve to be placed beyond the pale of Islam, if not eliminated. At the present time, the Taliban are the foremost of such groups.

Where in the configuration described above do we place the frenzied Muslims in Gojra who killed some of its Christian residents? It is most likely that they were intellectually unsophisticated, at best semi-literate, basically uncouth and uncivil.

Next, they were intense believers in the sanctity of their faith. The allegation that the Christians had desecrated the Quran may have been invalid but, if so, that fact was probably not known to most of them. They did, however, allow themselves to get into a rage without looking into the allegation. That may have happened because the accused were poor Christians.

Muslims constitute nearly 97 per cent of this country’s population. The remaining three per cent consist of Christians, Hindus and a sprinkling of Sikhs and Zoroastrians. Certain individuals from among them became renowned for their attainments. Justice A.R. Cornelius, chief justice of Pakistan, was one of the most learned, profound and eloquent jurists that ever worked in Pakistan. Justice Bhagwandas, a former judge of the Supreme Court, is another such luminary. Some of the more wealthy Zoroastrians have given large sums of money for the establishment and maintenance of educational institutions, hospitals and other charities.

The minority people are loyal citizens of Pakistan as much as the Muslims may be. They pose no threat to its security and well-being. Nor do they pose a threat to the well-being of their neighbours. They are not numerous or strong enough even to influence public policy (as for instance the Jews are in America). Why would then any group of Muslims want to persecute, harass, terrorise or kill them?

In most such cases they are accused of having committed blasphemy, such as insulting the Prophet (PBUH) or desecrating the Quran. The accusation is often unfounded. It is possible also that the alleged act, if it did happen, was accidental and unintended. The blasphemy law should be repealed because it is a bad law, but false accusations against minority persons will continue to be made, for the motivation behind them has nothing to do with the law’s susceptibility to abuse.

One reason why minority groups are harassed may be that they are weak, and weakness invites aggression. They can easily be driven from their homes and whatever little land they may have, which their tormentors can then appropriate. If some of them have defied any of the tough guys in the area, they will be punished for their self-assertion. The greater likelihood is that their oppressors are acting simply from perversity, viciousness and meanness of spirit of which they happen to have more than their share.

What is then to be done? I believe that governments and political leaders at all levels, particularly the Islamic parties, must do all they can to persuade the imams and khateebs in our mosques to tell their audiences that it is their Islamic duty to protect the non-Muslim minorities in this country.

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. anwarsyed @ cox.net

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