European legislators warned Monday that Islamic-based laws limiting the rights of women in some part of Indonesia could scare off investors and damage international relations.Indonesia is a secular, democratic state. In recent years, so-called bylaws have been adopted in one province and some districts implementing conservative views. Some fear the change could pressure the central government to follow.German lawmaker Hartmut Nassauer, speaking at the end of a five-day visit by European politicians to southeast Asia, said that while Indonesia is a democracy, the passing of Shariah, or Islamic law, "could burden international relationships. ""If a state introduces religious laws it automatically separates itself from other states where we are free to practice faith, but not obliged to," he said, speaking on behalf of a group of nine lawmakers."Such a development has an impact on relationships with other countries," he said, referring to European economic interests in Indonesia.Around 90 percent of Indonesia's 220 million residents are Muslim, the vast majority of them moderate.Around two-thirds of the population disagrees with harsh Islamic laws that punish women for not covering their heads or allow for convicted thieves to have their hands amputated, a recent opinion poll showed.In the strictly devout Aceh province, where the Shariah police enforce laws governing religious morality, a woman can be punished for not wearing a head scarf in public or going out after an evening curfew.A bill was recently submitted to parliament to make non-Muslims comply with Shariah law in Aceh, raising alarm among the nation's minority Christians, Buddhists and Hindus.The nine lawmakers said in a statement they were also concerned about corruption in the judiciary and suggested Jakarta follow the example of other Southeast Asian countries that have already or are considering abolishing the death penalty.
http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...
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