Ahmadiya, police and society: clash

Indonesian police have clashed with about 200 people trying to attack a mosque used by a minority Islamic sect known as Ahmadiya.

The mob hurled stones at the mosque in Manislor village in Kuningan district in West Java, prompting an hour-long confrontation with police, a local Ahmadiya official said.

"About 200 people pelted stones at our mosque and clashed with the police for about an hour. It is not clear yet who was the organiser of the mob," Nurahim, the local general secretary of the sect, told the AFP news agency.

"The police were able to secure the mosque and handle the people. The situation, however, is still tense now."

Nurahim said the village's 3,000 Ahmadiyah followers were ready to help the police if needed but would not respond to the violence.

"We had a similar experience before in 2007, in which our mosque and houses were attacked. A house was burned and several were damaged at the time," he said.

The Ahmadiyah sect, which claims 500,000 followers in Indonesia, believes that its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was the final prophet and not Mohammad, contradicting a central tenet of mainstream Islam.

Ahmad claimed to be a reincarnation of Prophet Mohammad, a claim rejected by Muslim authorities and scholars.

He also claimed to to be the Christian messiah. His sect believes that Jesus did not die on the cross, but he moved to India where he died at the age of 120.

Indonesia's top Islamic body issued a fatwa in 2008 describing the sect as "deviant".

Ahmadiyah has had a presence in the country since the 1920s.

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