Democracy and Islam

Vice President Jusuf Kalla said democracy is a way to attain a country's prosperity. Islamic teachings are expected to support the implementation of democracy in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Democracy in every country is determined by its system, its culture and historical back ground.

"The objective of a country is to achieve prosperity," Kalla said at the official opening of the second meeting of the Southeast Asian Forum on Islam and Democracy at the vice president's office, today (13/8).According to Kalla, democracy is a system found in many countries such as Indonesia, the United States, Europe, and Korea. Moslems in ASEAN, must respect democracy and diversity. Kalla further said that the Moslem community is currently the biggest population in Indonesia. "However, quantity is not more important than the values they hold," he said. He believes that Islam and democracy have always been interesting topics of discussion, especially when Indonesian leaders refers to democracy in their leadership. He cited Soekarno, known for his guided democracy, and Suharto with his Pancasila democracy.

"Today we have an open democracy," he said.Kalla praised the international meeting, which was attended by intellectuals, and hoped that it can create conformity. International Center for Islam and Pluralism executive-director, M. Syafi'i Anwar, said the meeting was aimed at strengthening the NGOs' network and Moslem intellectuals in ASEAN. The first meeting was held in Manila, the Philippines. According to him, Islam teaches peace and justice, therefore Moslems in ASEAN must be friendly and respect other faiths, despite the diversity. "Moslems must respect human rights and the existing regulations, " he said.

The meeting was attended by participants from seven ASEAN countries, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Filipina, Thailand, Myanmar, Singapore, and Timor Leste.

Comments

child sex workers in Bandung

A policeman, right, watches over two masseuses and their customers during a raid on suspected prostitution activities at a hotel in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province The Bandung authority is at loss to uncover cases of covert prostitution involving junior and senior high school students, whose number continues to rise in the West Java capital. Eli, a sex worker advocacy program mentor from the Rumah Cemara Group in Bandung, said it was hard to provide advocacy to teenagers involved in covert prostitution since most were not receptive. The number of those involved in covert prostitution is believed to be higher compared to commercial sex on the streets, she added. Eli has been providing support to more than 200 housewives and child sex workers over the past two years, around 20 of who are senior high school students between the ages of 15 and 16. "They are psychologically unstable at those ages. They are hard to handle due to their strong motivation to ea

Bricklaying in Aceh

Refleksi: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid= 20070405. F07&irec= 6 Bricklaying in Aceh I was looking back the other day at a letter in the British newspaper The Times as written by Professor H. H. Turner in January 1925, who was challenging the government's statement that a good British bricklayer would lay 500 bricks per day which made him the best in the world.The professor claimed to have found one bricklayer who dealt with 2000 bricks in eight hours and another one who laid 890 bricks in just one hour -- one presumes the brickie ran out of steam after a while. It made me wonder just how many bricks were being laid in Aceh province, bearing in mind the climatic differences between gloomy old England and sun-drenched Indonesia. The heat factor alone could well in fact reduce the work rate by up to fifty percent, and then of course there are the incentive factors of salary and working conditions. An English bricklayer in 1925 would have earned about one

Debate Islam in Indonesia

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 winners o

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog