Islamic groups told to consolidate to fight terrorism
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta/Yogyakarta/Surakarta
Muslim groups in the country should consolidate to fight against terrorism and work to develop healthy religious behavior, instead of putting the blame on each other or on a Western threat, an Islamic scholar says.
Moeslim Abdurrahman, a scholar from Muhammadiyah -- the country's second-largest Islamic organization -- said it was understandable that Muslims became defensive and were loathe to link their religion to terror.
"It's only natural. Any religious follower would be upset if his or her religion is related to terror because no religion justifies such an evil act," Moeslim said on Monday.
On Saturday, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University rector Azyumardi Azra criticized Islamic organizations for speaking out against those who connected a series of bomb attacks in the country to Islam. Azyumardi said the groups were ignoring the fact that confessed bombers were avowed Muslims. He chided them for acting defensively and for being reluctant to give their full backing to the national antiterror drive.
Islamic groups, he said, made no attempt to solve the problem by finding out why Muslims were ready to carry out suicide bombings, neither did they investigate how such extremist thinking could grow in the country.
Moeslim denied that Islamic organizations tended to be less supportive of the fight against terrorism, saying they also empathized with the bombing victims, as many of them were Muslim too.
"What kind of support we should give, as terrorism is about politics and related to the global political structure. The most responsible party to handle this is the security forces."
The important thing, Moeslim said, was for Islamic organizations to campaign for healthy religious behavior and to assure the nation that terrorism was a serious threat.
"And an anti-Western political stance is pointless. What are we going to do, close down all the McDonald's? That would only make farmers suffer, and I believe most of them are Muslims too," he said.
Meanwhile, Vice President Jusuf Kalla's recent call for the monitoring of several Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) has sparked more protests.
Kalla said last week that there were only two to three pesantren which should be closely watched as they were believed to breed extremists and terrorists by brainwashing their students. He however refused to mention the name of these schools.
National and international intention has focused on the Al- Mukmin boarding school in Ngruki, Central Java, which was founded by imprisoned extremist Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir. Its graduates included several of convicted terrorists who bombed Bali and the J.W. Marriott Hotel.
After the second Bali bombs, International Crisis Group (ICG) director and terrorism expert Sidney Jones said that there were 18 Islamic boarding schools affiliated to the terror cell Jamaah Islamiyah in the country, which were used to train jihadis.
Jones also linked these schools with a "very prominent" university in Surakarta, Central Java.
Farid Ma'ruf, chairman of the Al-Mukmin school's foundation, said the call to monitor pesantren was a "repressive act" against Islamic movements.
"Religious freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution, so what is the legal basis of the government's monitoring? I think it's just a way to find a scapegoat," Farid, also an executive of the Ba'asyir-led Indonesian Mujahidin Assembly (MMI), said in Yogyakarta on Monday.
In Surakarta, Al-Mukmin school director slammed Jones' statement.
"Sidney Jones's accusation was not backed up by accurate data. It was a matter of making an international accusation which always connects Ngruki with terrorism, with the goal of building a negative image of Islam," Wahyuddin said.
He said police had never gone to Ngruki to investigate the relationship between the school's graduates with several bombing cases.
"Police know that nothing can be found here, especially the accusation that this place breeds terrorists. That's too much."