Word: indonesianness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...plays out will dictate just what kind of a Muslim democracy the world's fourth most populous nation aims to be. "I believe we must strengthen the moderate paradigm and say that our Islam stands for tolerance, dynamism and freedom of expression," says Zuhairi Misrawi, a researcher with the Indonesian Society for Pesantren and Community Development in Jakarta. "But is that what the majority of Indonesian people want? It's becoming harder to tell...
...index fingers in demonstration. His wife Wayuni says only 5% of girls wore headscarves in high school when she was growing up. Now it's mandatory, and many women wear the covering even in the privacy of their own homes. "Some people say we should just follow our Indonesian traditions, where women wore revealing clothing," says KPPSI's Hasan. "But many of our traditions are not on the true path of Islam. We must correct that." As for southern Sulawesi's non-Muslim minority, who are required to wear headscarves if they want to enter civil service, Hasan says...
...Those who have the most to lose are the millions of Indonesians who are either non-Muslim or belong to heterodox Islamic sects. In 2005, the nation's ruling clerics prohibited interfaith marriage and prayer. The Indonesia Ulema Council also renewed an edict deeming heretical the Islamic sect Ahmadiyah, which claims up to 500,000 members. In the past year, several Ahmadiyah mosques have been forcibly closed or destroyed by mobs, as have dozens of Christian house churches. Separately, a Muslim cleric in East Java was jailed for preaching in Indonesian, as opposed to the normal Arabic. In West Java...
...There are some signs, moreover, that the drift toward radicalism is, at last, prompting action by the nation's central institutions. Last year, the Indonesian parliament quietly shelved a controversial antipornography bill that could have criminalized public kissing and forms of traditional dance. And in December, after a popular Muslim cleric announced that he had joined a growing trend of flouting national law by taking a second wife, President Yudhoyono spoke out against polygamy-even though the Koran permits it in certain circumstances. The President surely knows the risks of radicalism. Foreign direct investment fell 46% year-on-year between...
...secularized state ideology promoted during the Suharto era. But if Indonesia is to shore up its international reputation, more will be needed than recycling an old ideology tainted by its association with a former dictator. In the absence of more vigorous mobilization by moderates, the rising conservative tide in Indonesian Islam looks unlikely to wane soon. Indonesians who return from study overseas-and those who don't leave home-are just a mouse click away from Salafi scholars anywhere else. "The Internet has helped encourage a uniformity of opinion in the Islamic world," says Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia project director...