Iran Arrests Religious Leader

Iran has arrested a religious leader and some of his followers who advocate separating religion and politics after clashes with police, Iranian news agencies reported yesterday.Hundreds of supporters of Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Borujerdi had gathered on Saturday around his house in Tehran to protest the arrest of a number of Borujerdi's followers and restrictions imposed on him, press reports said.

"The ones behind Saturday's unrest were arrested. All including, Borujerdi, have been handed over to judiciary officials," said a security official in Tehran governor's office, identified only by his last name, Roshan.

Roshan said the police had previously sought to contain these "sectarian elements" but yesterday "they were carrying Molotov cocktails, knives, swords and clubs to confront the police." "They even (for a time) took members of the force hostage and threw acid on policemen and vandalized public property," he said, adding "calm has been restored" in the crowded neighborhood in downtown Tehran.

A report in reformist Hambastegi daily said the Special Court for Clergy had recently tried to arrest Borujerdi but faced resistance by his supporters. Questioning a pillar of state policy, the ayatollah has said: "We believe people have grown tired of political religion and they want to return to traditional religion. The objective of my followers and me is in defending traditional religion."

But the deputy head of Tehran police, Commander Nasser Shabani, accused the ayatollah of misinterpreting religion. "A person has gathered some naive people around to pledge donations and have their wishes come true, which is a sheer lie and distortion of religion," he told ILNA

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

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 ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog