By Dean Yates
JAKARTA, Indonesia (Reuters) – Joining a group of young
Indonesian intellectuals who hold liberal Islamic views was
once just a ticket to controversy. Now, it could be
life-threatening.
Since Indonesia’s top Muslim council issued religious
edicts in late July that banned liberal interpretations of the
faith, death threats against members of the 4-year-old Islamic
Liberal Network, known as JIL, have poured in.
The fatwas that JIL says triggered the hate campaign
coincide with the closure of numerous unauthorized Christian
churches by hardline Muslim groups and the jailing this month
of three Christian women for inviting Muslim children to church
events.
The developments have hurt Indonesia’s image as a moderate
Muslim nation and reflect a backlash against liberal opinion as
well as a push by Muslim conservatives to reassert themselves
after the failure of political Islam to gain traction during
last year’s elections, experts say.
“The fatwas have had a snowball effect,” said Nong Darol
Mahmada, a co-founder of the Islamic Liberal Network who has
received dozens of death threats via e-mail and text messages.
“People believe that JIL is banned and that it is now
legally permitted (under Islamic law) to murder us.”
Police guard the Jakarta office that houses JIL after one
militant organization threatened to attack the group, which has
never shied from controversy since its inception in 2001.
It has been quick to poke holes in the arguments of
militant clerics and take the lead in debates about issues from
marriage to the role of religion in politics, often using radio
to reach a broad audience across the world’s most populous
Muslim nation.
IN THE CROSSHAIRS
To some analysts, JIL was a key target when the Indonesian
Ulemas Council (MUI) issued its non-binding fatwas on July 29.
Apart from attacking liberalism, the council forbade
pluralism and inter-religious marriage.
“We are seeing a conservative high tide which is a reaction
to several things, but a common view that Muslim liberals have
taken things too far,” said Greg Fealy, an expert on Indonesian
Islam at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Fealy said he did not believe such a backlash meant the end
of progressive Islamic thought in Indonesia, where Muslims have
embraced democracy and have more freedom to express their views
than in just about any country in the Islamic world.
While it was clear Indonesians increasingly identified with
Islam, last year’s elections showed voters did not care for
Islamist parties that support strict Islamic Sharia law.
Those parties won 23 percent of parliamentary seats last
year, up from 19 percent in 1999.
“People are more self-consciously Islamic but it doesn’t
mean anyone is saying … we should make Indonesia an Islamic
state,” Fealy said.
Many Indonesian Muslims, especially on the main island of
Java, infuse the practice of Islam with local tradition
influenced by Hinduism and mysticism.
Indonesia is also officially secular and recognizes
Christianity and several other religions in addition to Islam.
That has not stopped Islamic militants in the past two
years from closing down some 25 unlicensed churches that
operate from homes and shops.
Christians say the growth of such churches underscores the
difficulty of getting a permit, which requires approval from
local communities where they are usually a minority. Police
have said they cannot act because the churches are illegal.
In another religious case, a court in West Java this month
jailed three Christian women for three years each for inviting
Muslim children to church events without parental consent.
UNFINISHED STORY
JIL was not actually banned in the MUI fatwas, but the
message was clear, said Mahmada, 31, an articulate graduate of
Islamic studies from Indonesia’s most prestigious Islamic
university, as she sipped a bottle of iced tea.
“I am pretty pessimistic about Islam in Indonesia,” she
added.
Down the road at the Al-Muslimun mosque, Imam Pambudi, 41,
a local Islamic community leader, said JIL had to leave the
area.
“At first we had no problems but after the MUI fatwa, the
people here were shocked that something considered haram
(forbidden) by the MUI was among us,” said Pambudi.
Despite what appears to be a series of blows to Indonesia’s
Muslim liberals and the country’s image in general, analysts
like Fealy and Merle Ricklefs, another prominent Australian
expert on Islam in Indonesia, remain generally optimistic.
“This is a story without an ending, but there are grounds
for thinking that the progressive liberalism of Indonesia has
withstood the attack,” Ricklefs wrote in the Australian
Financial Review on September 2.
“With its reactionary fatwas, MUI may indeed have sidelined
itself within a rapidly changing society.”
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