LIPI to study students' devoutness

JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Institute of Sciences is preparing to study how religious Indonesian university students are.

The institute will also look at how university students cope with conflicting values, and their role in increasing people's enthusiasm for religious activities.

The head researcher of the institute's department of religion and philosophy, Ibnu Qoyim Isma'il, was quoted by Antara yesterday as saying that preparations for the study were in the final stages.

He said the study would look at religious activities on campus from the 1970s until now.

One of study's aims is to explain how students become attracted to religious activities once they have entered university.

"We wish to find out what factors draw them to become involved in the campus' religious activities," he said.

He said that before the 1970s, many strong Islamic families were reluctant to send their children to public schools, preferring religious schools.

But in the 1970s these families started sending their children to public schools, exposing them to universal values different from the values they had been raised with, he said.

"(They were exposed to) clashes of values. What's interesting, however, is that this situation encouraged activities studying religious values," he said.

"The students' decision to study religious values at university, where the main focus is rationality, was an interesting phenomenon," he said.

Ibnu Qoyim said the current trend of executives returning to religious values could be traced to their student days.

But he said studies should be done to see if people were becoming more devout or just increasingly preoccupied with ritual.

He said ideally people becoming more devout would affect their social awareness.

They then could help "to search for the root of social problems such as corruption and collusion," he said. (swe)