Word: sects
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Indonesia's government is caught between its constitutional obligation to protect religious freedom, and the demands of hardline Muslim clerics for the banning of the Ahmadiyah sect. An alliance, including the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), demanded on Tuesday that the government outlaw the Ahmadiyahs, warning that any delay would result in conflict. While falling short of calling for attacks on the group's mosques or followers - many of whom are now in hiding - the clerics threatened to enlist the help of other Muslim countries to pressure Jakarta into issuing an official decree forbidding Ahmadiyah followers from calling themselves Muslims. "They...
...19th century. Although they consider themselves Muslims, mainstream Sunni and Shi'ite Islam do not recognize them as such, because of a series of Ahmadiyah beliefs deemed contradictory to the basic tenets of Islam - Ahmadiyahs believe, for example, that Muhammad was not Islam's last prophet, and that the sect's founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was the Mahdi or Messiah. The sect is banned in Pakistan, although it has coexisted peacefully with Indonesian Muslims since being established in the country in 1925. The group is estimated to have around 200,000 adherents in Indonesia today...
...further violence if the group continued to defy the April 16 ministerial recommendation that the group be outlawed. Similar attacks, with few casualties thus far, have taken place in Sumatra and other parts of West Java, home to tens of thousands of followers. Since the attacks, members of the sect have stayed away from their schools and mosques for fear of further violence...
...Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s - a decree that was accompanied by the slaughter of an estimated 500,000 communists and suspected communists. While violence against Ahmadiyah followers has reached nowhere near those levels, some fear that government legislative action could provoke a wider torrent of violence against the sect. "It was a joint ministerial recommendation that triggered this latest violence," notes Hendardi. "Imagine what would happen if it became an official decree...
...government calls it a matter of child welfare; the sect calls it religious persecution. Caught in the middle is Texas judge Barbara Walther, who was asked to weigh requests from the parents to hold twice-daily prayer meetings with the children and to reunite nursing mothers with the 77 kids who are under age 2. Prosecutors worried that the prayer meetings might be used to influence the children "in a way to impede the ongoing investigation," but Walther's suggestion that mainstream Mormons might serve as neutral monitors was turned down flat by the official church. Church spokesman Scott Trotter...