The on-going campaign in Indonesia, to ban and persecute the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community
underscores the challenges facing the nation in protecting human rights,
forging a secular identity and strengthening the spirit of democracy and rule
of law. It is worth recalling that freedom of belief is a fundamental human
right, guaranteed by the Indonesian Constitution, and no citizen can be denied
this right on the grounds of his or her beliefs. Any thinking citizen would
agree that as a religious order, the Ahmadiyya has every right to preach and
propagate all of its doctrines and beliefs. It is immaterial for a secular
state whether the beliefs or ritual practices may or may not conform to the
beliefs and practices of the other denominations in Islam.
The religio-political campaign obviously seeks to discredit the
teachings of the Ahmadiyya community and to call attention to the
"danger" faced from this intrinsically peaceful sect of Islam. Instead
of displaying sectarian intolerance and moral bankruptcy, the orthodox
leadership would do well to engage the Ahmadiyya Muslims in a theological,
civilized, intellectual debate and thereby show a modicum of respect for the
faith, intellect and convictions of ordinary Muslim citizens and others.
The sectarian politics of religious mobilization and its current
manifestations will have divisive implications for the country's plural future.
Clearly, banning the movement to prevent its spiritual appeal or declaring it a
non-Muslim minority to stop its growth is not the business of a secular
government. Leaders of the country and conscientious citizens would do well to
reflect over the politically disastrous and socially divisive legacy of
Pakistan's experiment with the criminalization of the Ahmadiyya sect. Social
scientists and political analysts have, in recent times, traced the growth of
Muslim extremism and cultural intolerance in Pakistan and elsewhere, to the
divisive politics of anti-Ahmadiyya rhetoric.
At one level, what is at stake is the very notion of human rights and rule
of law in a secular democracy. Extremists and right-wing Muslim orthodoxy
should not be allowed to dictate the future of Indonesian identity. At another
level, perhaps even more importantly, what is at stake for devout Muslims is
the very meaning of being a Muslim in our times. After all, the Holy Qur’an
explicitly states: "Let there be no
compulsion in matters of faith." Islam's plural character and legacy
of religious tolerance needs to be defended, ironically enough, against an
"orthodoxy" that claims to represent it!
In an article published on The Hindu,
one of India’s leading newspapers, on June 15, 2013, Pallavi Iyer has thrown
searching light on the persecution of Ahmadis and other minority religious
denominations and the growing signs of cultural intolerance in Indonesia, the
world’s largest Muslim country.
Read the Article:
Over the last few years, Jakarta has laid down legal infrastructure that
discriminates against religious minorities, allowing Islamists to take the law
into their own hands
The marble minaret of Jakarta’s largest mosque, the Istiqlal, and the
cast iron steeples of the city’s Catholic Cathedral, jointly punctuate the
city-centre’s skyline. The adjacent location of these two places of worship is
a powerful, sensory manifestation of Indonesia’s multi-religious and tolerant
ethos.
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country. Although around
87 per cent of the population, or 210 million Indonesians, self-identify as
Muslims, the nation is a tapestry of religions from Hinduism and Christianity
to Confucianism and Animism. Scan any newspaper and the names that pop up —
Teddy Anwar, Suryadharma Ali, Veronica Colondam — confirm the syncretism that
has long defined this part of the world.
As a Muslim-majority, democratic republic, whose constitution guarantees
the right of citizens to freedom of religious belief and practice, Indonesia is
a rare creature. The U.S.-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation, awarded
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a high-profile prize for
promoting tolerance just last month. The country is, moreover, regularly feted
by world leaders, as a beacon of moderate Islam and a model for the Muslim
world.
And yet only a few dozen kilometres east of Jakarta, in the suburb of
Bekasi, a group of 18 Ahmadis has been holed up inside a fenced-off mosque for
over two months. They barricaded themselves inside in early April, after local
police sealed it, placing locks on the entrances and erecting a fence of
corrugated metal sheets. [Inset: An Ahmadi peers out of the sealed door of a mosque in Bekasi where he has been holed up for over two months.— PHOTO: PALLAVI AIYAR
They refuse to come out until the mosque is allowed to reopen and serve
as a place of prayer for the area’s 400-odd Ahmadis. Until then, their only
contact with the outside world is through a square slat that opens in a back
door to the mosque. It is through this opening that food is passed to them and
through which they talk daily with Mohammad Iqbal, the leader of the
congregation, about his attempts to secure redress. All efforts, he says, have
so far failed.
Outside the mosque, a local government-planted hoarding refers to a
number of anti-Ahmaddiya decrees and resolutions passed by religious and
central governmental authorities.
Intolerance since 2005
In 2005, the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), a coalition of Muslim
organisations, issued a fatwa condemning the Ahmaddiya community as religiously
“deviant.” Mohammad Iqbal dates the start of his communities’ problems to that
year, with some members receiving threatening text messages on their mobile
phones.
But the real harassment began later, after 2008. That year, President
Yudhoyono signed off on a decree issued jointly by the Religious Affairs
Ministry, Home Ministry and Attorney General, which ordered the Ahmaddiya
community to stop all activities that “propagated” its beliefs. The vagueness
of the decree’s wording has emboldened some regional governments to interpret
the law as an outright ban on the practice of the Ahmadiyya faith.
The Ahmadis are not the only ones to have fallen victim to growing
intolerance. On a recent evening in Jakarta, this reporter spent several hours
talking with victims of religious violence and discrimination from across the
country. Their complaints ranged from administrative inconveniences, to
intimidation, violence and even murder at the hand of hard line Sunni Muslims.
The vast majority of Indonesia’s Muslims are Sunni.
Muhammad Zaini, a 22-year-old Shia from Madura, in East Java, spoke of
600-odd Shias being forced out of their homes from two villages in the area,
when a 200-strong mob of Sunni Muslims attacked their homes in August 2012.
Several houses were burnt down and Zaini’s paternal uncle was killed. The Shias
are currently camped out in a refugee camp in a sports stadium. Local Sunni
authorities have issued edicts against allowing their return.
Permits for churches
Reverend Palti Panjaitan, of the HKBP-Filadelfia protestant church,
talked about the seven churches in the Bekasi area (where Ahmaddiyas were also
under attack) that had been forcibly closed or demolished by local authorities
since 2005. Christian congregations across the country have been having a
difficult time in recent years securing permits for the construction of
churches. There are an estimated 22 million Christians in Indonesia, comprising
over nine per cent of the population.
Dian Jennie, a believer of the indigenous Javanese religion, Sapta
Darma, elaborated the routine harassment faced by faiths not part of the six
officially recognised religions of Indonesia: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism. Mandatory state-issued identity
cards for all adult citizens that list the holder’s religion, leave a blank
space for those who don’t agree to be classified under any of the official
religions. Citizens with blank spaces on their IDs are often pilloried as
godless. Their children find it difficult to gain admission to schools and even
getting their marriages registered can be impossible.
“What we are seeing,” says Andreas Harsono, an activist journalist and
researcher for Human Rights Watch, “is a creeping Pakistanisation of Indonesia.”
Harsono claims that like Indonesia, Pakistan too, was a relatively tolerant
country until the 1970s. But the situation changed dramatically in the 1980s,
one clear manifestation of this shift being Islamabad’s 1984 anti-Ahmaddiya
ordinance.
In Indonesia, the authoritarian regime of General Suharto from
1967-1998, had largely kept religion’s role in politics under check. Following
the transition to democracy, however, Islamist political parties have been
allowed to play an open, legal role in politics. Radical civil society groups
operating outside the formal political system have also grown in size and
influence. The latter include the notorious Front Pembela Islam, an
organisation that was set up in 1998 with support from government security
agencies and whose goons use Islamic edicts to justify vigilante actions
against bars and nightclubs, as well as Christian churches and the mosques of
so-called apostates like Ahmadiyyas and Shias.
More discrimination
“Over the last eight years the government has basically laid down the
legal infrastructure which discriminates against religious minorities,” claims
Harsono. This allows Islamists to take the law into their own hands, while the
police look the other way. He gives as examples a 2006 decree that has made it
harder to obtain permits to build houses of worship for minorities, and an
increasingly cavalier use of a 1965 blasphemy law.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Mr. Zubaidi, dusts
off such accusations. He admits that Indonesia has “small (religious) conflicts
in a limited area. But we are a big country and despite everything, we maintain
our unity.” He claims that at the level of policy, matters are improving,
rather than deteriorating for religious minorities. He fails, however, to
elaborate when pressed. He does agree that on “a social level” there might be
some cause for concern regarding increasing intolerance.
It is true that for the moment at least, Indonesia is a far cry from
Pakistan. The most popular face of Islam in the country is still the Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU), the country’s (and the world’s) largest Muslim social organisation
with 70 million members. The NU was founded in 1926 and has always defended a
moderate and culturally rooted approach to Islam, in open opposition to more
fundamentalist Wahabist interpretations. Islamist political parties have yet to
win a single general election. In fact their showing at the polls has been
worsening in the years since 1998.
Imam Pituduh, a member of the NU’s secretariat, looks more like a rock
star than a cleric, with dark shoulder-length hair, shot through with silver,
hanging loose about his face. He says the NU believes Islam in Indonesia can
only survive by accepting its admixture with local traditions. NU imams , for
example, use local beliefs in astrology to help decide on the names of
newborns. “The real Islam is what we represent not what Wahabis claim,” he
says. The imam is confident that “the people” of Indonesia will reject radicalism
since it is not a part of their traditions.
Perhaps, but it is also a fact that religion’s role in Indonesian
society has been growing. A new education bill is about to double the number of
hours devoted to religious education in elementary schools at the expense of
science classes. A new criminal code under discussion is proposing harsh
punishments for couples who live together before marriage, and increasing the
maximum prison term for adultery to five years from the current nine months.
According to the Setara Institute, a non-governmental organisation that
monitors religious freedoms, 264 cases of violent attacks on religious
minorities took place in 2012, up from 216 in 2010.
Andreas Harsono remains deeply concerned. “Once you allow religion to pervade
politics and society, it becomes very difficult to undo it in an Islamic
context,” he concludes.
(c): The Hindu, June 15, 2013