Gus Dur says Moslems getting shallower

Gus Dur says Moslems getting shallower

JAKARTA (JP): The religious life of Indonesian Moslems is
becoming more superficial resulting in recent outbreaks of
religious violence, Abdurrahman Wahid said yesterday.

The chairman of the 30 million-strong Moslem organization
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) described at an interfaith forum here how
religiousness had been getting shallower and how its symptoms
were borne mostly by Moslems.

"It's a process that started about 25 years ago when Moslems
here began interacting with those in the Middle East, where Islam
was blatantly used for political means," Abdurrahman said.

The scholar believed that this interaction had caused peaceful
Moslems here to become "more aggressive" as the regimes in Middle
Eastern countries had made Islam the means and reason to fight
those of other faiths.

"Subsequently, Moslems here have developed a fear of other
faiths, of 'Christianization' for instance," he said. This term
is used locally to describe Christians' proselytizing to convert
Moslems.

"This fear has materialized in, among other things, aggression
toward people of other faiths," he said.

He cited the reportedly rapid increase in the number of
churches being built here. He said that Moslems saw this as a
threat, rather than something which was actually a competition
among Christian groups themselves and irrelevant to Moslems.

Official 1996 data says the country has 30,000 Protestant
churches and 13,000 Catholic churches. And that 87 percent of the
country's 199.7 million people are Moslems, 6 percent are
Protestant, 3.5 percent are Catholic, 1.8 percent are Hindu, 1.03
percent are Buddhist and 0.3 percent are undecided.

He said this misperception showed Moslems' failure to
differentiate "which are their interests and which are non-
Moslems'".

Quoting fellow scholar Nurcholish Madjid, who founded the
Paramadina Foundation, Abdurrahman said that some Indonesian
Moslems had treated their own group's interests as the "utmost
interests".

"Moslems place this interest on an exclusive level,"
Abdurrahman said, again quoting Nurcholish.

He pointed out that the recent outbreaks of violence in the
East Java town of Situbondo and West Java town of Tasikmalaya had
resulted from Moslems' failure to differentiate which
developments concerned their interests and which did not.

On Oct. 10, thousands of Situbondo Moslems rampaged, attacking
churches and property belonging to people of other faiths. The
violence started when the prosecution in a local court case
demanded too light a sentence for a man accused of blasphemy.

On Dec. 26, a mob rampaged over police brutality against local
Moslem preachers. The mob attacked churches and public buildings.

Five people were killed in the Oct. 10 incident, and four in
the Dec. 26 incident.

Abdurrahman insisted that the incidents were contrived by
"certain people" to tarnish the image of Nahdlatul Ulama.

He revealed that the violence in Situbondo had involved
several hundred paid "tattooed men" who were sent from the nearby
town of Malang in trucks and on motorbikes.

"The riot is said to have followed the light sentence demanded
for Saleh (the defendant), but how come the burning of churches
began before the trial had even started," he said. "It was
clearly premeditated."

Premeditated

He said the riot in Tasikmalaya was also premeditated.

But Abdurrahman said it was not important which Moslem
organization was implicated in the riots.

"The riots were simply the result of the shallowing process,
where people became ignorant of their own religions and therefore
became easier to agitate," he said, adding that religious leaders
needed to double their efforts to stop their congregations being
exploited by political-interest groups.

He acknowledged that it would be an uphill battle to protect
society from "those who strive to mix politics and religion for
their political cause".

"If the efforts to mix politics and religion prevail, this
nation's religious life will suffer from the shallowing process,
and manipulation of religion for politics will occur and
eventually burn the nation," he warned. (08)