People seek respect for religious rights

People seek respect for religious rights

After three decades when discussion of religion was virtually
silenced, Indonesians are coming forward about their beliefs. The
Jakarta Post's Rikza Abdullah and Ida Indawati Khouw focus on the
growing exploration of religious rights. Related stories on Page
6.

JAKARTA (JP): Confucians Budi Wijaya and Lanny Guito spent a
year in a legal battle to win official approval of their
marriage.

The problem for the couple from Surabaya was their religion
was not recognized by the state.

Gumirat Barna and Susilawati, who are believers in mysticism,
also were caught up in a long, arduous legal process to obtain a
marriage license from the East Jakarta office for civil affairs,
which previously refused to process their application.

Both couples succeeded but, as the country embarks on reform
and democratization, their experiences underline that some civil
rights, particularly concerning religion, are still not fully
respected.

The secretary-general of the Indonesian Council for
Confucianism, Budi Santoso Tanuwibowo, said it was time for the
religion to be recognized in the country along with Islam,
Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Buddhism.

He said that although Presidential Decree No. 14/1967, which
banned the propagation of Chinese cultural forms, including
Confucianism, had been revoked, local bureaucrats argued there
was a lack of guidelines to put Confucianism on official
documents for civil affairs.

Director for the development of Islamic higher education at
the Ministry of Religious Affairs Komaruddin Hidayat told the
Post last week that democratization encouraged followers of
different religions and beliefs to demand respect of their
religious and cultural rights.

"The government, including its Ministry of Religious Affairs,
must therefore try to accommodate demands for equality in
treatment for religious rights," said Komaruddin, who is also
chairman of the socioreligious Paramadina Foundation.

He added that in Indonesia, where legal, economic and
political structures were not well established, religious issues
could be easily used by the authorities to strengthen their power
and by the people to rebel against the government.

Religious beliefs and cultural and ethnic values influenced
each other, he said, so that followers of religions expressed
themselves differently. The situation required people to improve
their tolerance of others.

He said the government in the reform era could either
accommodate demands for equal treatment for all the followers of
different religions, or else disband the Ministry of Religious
Affairs and let the people deal with their own religious
interests.

The government's obligation would be to ensure that no
followers of a particular religion were oppressed by others.

What if President Abdurrahman Wahid shut down the ministry?

"He will face difficulty in disbanding the ministry because if
he did, he would find opposition from sympathizers of his own
organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, who think that Muslims have
historically played an important role in the struggle for
independence and the development of the country."

He added the ministry was currently in a status quo but it
would have to adapt to future demands.

The government should create conditions where followers of
different religions could practice their own beliefs freely, but
it must also issue regulations prohibiting religious followers
from impinging on the interests of others through slander,
terrorism or other damaging acts.

"If the government fails to create such conditions, I'm afraid
we will be involved in anarchy."

Komaruddin said the era of information technology was
interweaving religious beliefs and different cultural interests.

He advised religious followers in the country to prepare
themselves intellectually to enter a "free market" where no one
would have the authority to issue a "license" on the legitimacy
of issues on religion or beliefs. As religious experiences were
intensely personal, education and comparative views would play an
important role in making religious followers inclusive and
tolerant.

When conditions were conducive for religious tolerance, any
party may introduce new views or beliefs but their development,
without any interference from the government, would be determined
by the critical response of the people. Some of them would
inevitably die out if they were not accepted by the public.

Religious tolerance could develop if believers were secure,
both intellectually and economically. For example, graduates of
the State Institutes for Islamic Studies (IAIN) and pesantren
(Islamic boarding schools) who also underwent other schooling,
such as leading Muslim figure Nurcholish Madjid, were likely to
be more tolerant of other religious beliefs than graduates from
other educational institutions.

"Evidence shows that pesantren graduates are more liberal than
their fellow Muslims who have never studied in pesantren," he
said.

Komarrudin, himself a graduate of an Islamic boarding school
and Middle East University in Ankara, Turkey, said his ministry,
in trying to promote tolerance among Muslim students, was
formulating the integration of Islamic studies with world
sciences to illustrated there was no conflict between religion
and modernity.