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)