Source/Credit: The Jakarta Globe
By Anita Rachman & Nurfika Osman | September 01, 2011
When students at the As-Salam Islamic boarding school got into a quarrel over musical preferences, their principal quoted a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: “ ‘The differences among my followers are [God’s] grace.’ So why should you be against one another over your differences?”
In the end, the students formed a band, playing English songs with traditional Islamic instruments. They also befriended a Chinese-Indonesian boy with access to a recording studio.
Amid the current climate of Islamic radicalism and religious intolerance, the vignette above serves as a refreshing change. At least it would if it had really taken place.
As-Salam and its students are fictional, figures from a comic book series published by the group Search for Common Ground.
The comic books and their inspiring lessons were distributed last month to 3,500 students at nine Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren , and one public school in Madura in East Java, Yogyakarta and Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara. The goal of the program is to encourage the students to apply the lessons from the comic books in their lives.
SFCG, an international NGO focusing on conflict transformation, plans to distribute a total of 60,000 comic books to pesantrens across the country.
The project, supported by the US State Department, is intended to counter troubling signs of growing intolerance in Indonesia, including recent clashes involving radical groups and communities of different faiths and religions. It aims to encourage young people to reflect on their views about people who are different from them.
Dewi Wijayanti, an SFCG project officer, says the comic books are not just for high school students and can also be shared among friends.
As part of the project, students are asked to discuss the key messages in each comic book in a discussion led by teachers.
“The comic book is our second project. Our first was English debate competitions that started in 2009 and ended last year,” Dewi said.
The competitions were designed to strengthen the students’ understanding of tolerance and pluralism by getting them to debate key motions, such as whether the government should ban the Ahmadiyah sect, or if Muslims could vote for non-Muslim leaders.
“One team in each debate would argue for the positive side and the other for the negative,” Dewi said. “Through discussions and building their arguments, they learned about many things, such as the Ahmadiyah and how important tolerance and pluralism are.”
Brian D. Hanley, director of SFCG Asia, said the group was expanding the pesantren program to include community radio and video programming for youths, using the schools as a platform to put out positive messages and counter the radical narrative from other mosques and pesantrens in their communities.
He said SFCG chose to work with Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s biggest Islamic organization, and other mainstream Islamic groups because of the importance of strengthening and empowering moderates to play a more active role in promoting religious tolerance and countering radicalization.
“Right now, hard-liners have the megaphone and they are shouting down the moderates,” Hanley said. “We need to reverse this paradigm and put the megaphone back in the hands of the mass majority of Indonesians who believe that diversity is a strength and who support other people’s rights to worship freely and safely.”
Choirul Fuad Yusuf, director of pesantrens at the Religious Affairs Ministry, said only a handful of the roughly 27,500 pesantrens across the country could be categorized as radical or espousing a rigid understanding of Islam.
“We’ve done many things to curb radicalism through informative and educational approaches, including seminars, workshops and even English debates, just like the SFCG program,” he said.
The growing chorus of accusations that the country’s pesantrens, which teach a combined four million children, are hotbeds of radicalization, Choirul said, are unfounded.
To claim that they are “places for terrorists to grow, that is wrong,” he said, arguing that most pesantrens taught tolerance and pluralism.
But despite the government’s deradicalization programs and similar efforts by NGOs like SFCG, the ministry concedes that it is becoming harder to combat the creeping radicalization that begins in pesantrens.
“There are thousands of unregistered pesantren in the country that have been teaching radicalism to students for years,” said Nuhrison M. Nuh, head of the ministry’s research and development department.
“It’s hard to control them because they’re established by respected local people.”
Most of these shady pesantrens are financed with money raised in the Middle East, where their founders went to school and where they still have friends and teachers with whom they have maintained close ties, he said. These schools are located mainly in Central Java, East Java and West Nusa Tenggara.
In such cases, Nuhrison said, both the Religious Affairs Ministry and the National Education Ministry were powerless to shut the schools down.
“If we do, then we stand accused of violating their right to freedom of expression, which in turn will lead to more conflicts,” he said. “So we can do virtually nothing. We’re in a dilemma because we’re bound by the need to respect freedom of expression.”
Nevertheless, the ministry is still carrying out programs to counter the ideologies being pushed by these pesantrens. Recently, the ministry held discussions on tackling radicalism in 40 such schools in six provinces.
“We asked the schools to cooperate with us so that we could fight radicalism together, and we got a positive response from them,” Nuhrison said.
None of the schools were among those considered overtly radical by the government.
“So far, we have only been able to influence those who want to accept us. It’s impossible for us to have a dialogue with those that don’t accept us in the first place,” Nuhrison said.
He added the government stood by its conviction that education was the best way to combat radicalism since the problem was at its root a lack of understanding and critical thinking.
To that end, the ministry is drawing up a list of the pesantrens that are either unregistered or known to be preaching radicalism, which is expected to be completed next year. “We’re working with officials from Pakistan, Egypt and Iran in compiling this list,” Nuhrison said.
The Education Ministry is also planning to introduce a chapter on counterradicalization into the approved textbooks for religious studies for the 2012-13 school year at the earliest.
However, Umar Abduh, a reformed terrorist, blames the radical tendencies espoused by some of the schools on the government’s previous lack of rapprochement with pesantrens compared to other civil groups.
“When the government fails to embrace pesantrens, they enter a phase in which they no longer trust the government and become reclusive,” he said “This is the fault of the government.”
Umar, a researcher who gained notoriety as a member of the Jihad Command that hijacked a Garuda Indonesia flight in 1981, said it was the government’s lack of attention to Muslims— rather than poverty or social gaps — that pushed people into radicalism and terrorism.
He suggested that the government adopt Islamic values in governing the country, which he said would be preferable to the current national doctrine of Pancasila and the state motto of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which means Unity in Diversity.
“Radicalism flourishes because of the war of politics,” he said. “The government doesn’t want to accept Islamic ideas on how to develop the country. Instead, it goes by Pancasila and Bhinneka Tunggal Ika as ideologies for running the country.”
Read original post here: Comic Books Preach Tolerance at Indonesia's Islamic Schools
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