Understanding and managing inter-religious relations, particularly between Muslims and Christians, presents a challenge for states around the world. This book investigates legal disputes between religious communities in the world’s largest majority-Muslim, democratic country, Indonesia. It considers how the interaction between state and religion has influenced relations between religious communities in the transition to democracy. The book presents original case studies based on empirical field research of court disputes in West Java, a majority-Muslim province with a history of radical Islam. These include criminal court cases, as well as cases of judicial review, relating to disputes concerning religious education, permits for religious buildings and the crime of blasphemy. The book argues that the democratic law reform process has been influenced by radical Islamists because of the politicization of religion under democracy and the persistence of fears of Christianization. It finds that disputes have been localized through the decentralization of power and exacerbated by the central government’s ambivalent attitude towards radical Islamists who disregard the rule of law. Examining the challenge facing governments to accommodate minorities and manage religious pluralism, the book furthers understanding of state-religion relations in the Muslim world. This accessible and engaging book is of interest to students and scholars of law and society in Southeast Asia, was well as Islam and the state, and the legal regulation of religious diversity.

Although Indonesia is generally considered to be a Muslim state, and is indeed the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, it has a sizeable Christian minority as a legacy of Dutch colonialism, with Christians often occupying relatively high social positions. This book examines the management of religion in Indonesia. It discusses how Christianity has developed in Indonesia, how the state, though Muslim in outlook and culture, is nevertheless formally secular, and how the principal Christian church, the Java Christian Church, has adapted its practices to fit local circumstances. It examines religious violence and charts the evolution of the state’s religious policies, analysing in particular the impact of the 1974 Marriage Law showing how it enabled extensive state regulation, but how in practice, rather than reinforcing religious divisions, inter-religious marriage, involving the conversion of one party, is widespread. Overall, the book shows how Indonesia is developing its own brand of secularism, neither a full-blooded Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, nor an outright secular state like Turkey.

In 1945, Sukarno declared that the new Indonesian republic would be grounded on monotheism, while also insisting that the new nation would protect diverse religious practice. The essays in Religious Pluralism in Indonesia explore how the state, civil society groups, and individual Indonesians have experienced the attempted integration of minority and majority religious practices and faiths across the archipelagic state over the more than half century since Pancasila. The chapters in Religious Pluralism in Indonesia offer analyses of contemporary phenomena and events; the changing legal and social status of certain minority groups; inter-faith relations; and the role of Islam in Indonesia's foreign policy. Amidst infringements of human rights, officially recognized minorities—Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists and Confucians—have had occasional success advocating for their rights through the Pancasila framework. Others, from Ahmadi and Shi'i groups to atheists and followers of new religious groups, have been left without safeguards, demonstrating the weakness of Indonesia's institutionalized "pluralism." Contributors: Lorraine Aragon, Christopher Duncan, Kikue Hamayotsu, Robert Hefner, James Hoesterey, Sidney Jones, Mona Lohanda, Michele Picard, Evi Sutrisno, Silvia Vignato

Despite its overwhelmingly Muslim majority, Indonesia has always been seen as exceptional for its diversity and pluralism. In recent years, however, there has been a rise in "majoritarianism", with resurgent Islamist groups pushing hard to impose conservative values on public life – in many cases with considerable success. This has sparked growing fears for the future of basic human rights, and, in particular, the rights of women and sexual and ethnic minority groups. There have, in fact, been more prosecutions of unorthodox religious groups since the fall of Soeharto in 1998 than there were under the three decades of his authoritarian rule. Some Indonesians even feel that the pluralism they thought was constitutionally guaranteed by the national ideology, the Pancasila, is now under threat. This book contains essays exploring these issues by prominent scholars, lawyers and activists from within Indonesia and beyond, offering detailed accounts of the political and legal implications of rising resurgent Islamism in Indonesia. Examining particular cases of intolerance and violence against minorities, it also provides an account of the responses offered by a weak state that now seems too often unwilling to intervene to protect vulnerable minorities against rising religious intolerance.

In 1998, Indonesia's military government collapsed, creating a crisis that many believed would derail its democratic transition. Yet the world's most populous Muslim country continues to receive high marks from democracy-ranking organizations. In this volume, political scientists, religious scholars, legal theorists, and anthropologists examine Indonesia's transition compared to Chile, Spain, India, and potentially Tunisia, and democratic failures in Yugoslavia, Egypt, and Iran. Chapters explore religion and politics and Muslims' support for democracy before change.

An original and timely exploration of the continuing Islamization of Indonesian politics despite the electoral decline of Islamist parties.

This book analyses the relation between state and religion in Indonesia, considering both the philosophical underpinning of government intervention on religious life but also cases and regulations related to religious affairs in Indonesia. Examining state regulation of religious affairs, it focuses on understanding its origin, history and consequences on citizens’ religious life in modern Indonesia, arguing that while Indonesian constitutions have preserved religious freedom, they have also tended to construct wide-ranging discretionary powers in the government to control religious life and oversee religious freedom. Over more than four decades, Indonesian governments have constructed a variety of policies on religion based on constitutional legacies interpreted in the light of the norms and values of the existing religious majority group. A cutting edge examination of the tension between religious order and harmony on one hand, and protecting religious freedom for all on the other, this book offers a cutting edge study of how the history of regulating religion has been about the constant negotiation for the boundaries of authority between the state and the religious majority group.

This book examines the legal conundrum of reconciling international human rights law in a Muslim majority country and identifies a trajectory for negotiating the protection of religious minorities within Islam. The work explores the history of religious minorities within Islam in Indonesia, which contains the world’s largest Muslim population, as well as the present-day ways by which the government may address issues through reconciling international human rights law and Islamic law. Given the context of multiple sets of religious norms in Indonesia, this is a complicated endeavour. In addition to amending and enacting human rights norms, the government is also negotiating with the long history of Islamisation in Indonesia. Particularly relevant is the practice of customary law, which puts the rights of community over individualism. This practice directly affects the rights of religious minorities within Islam. Readers, especially those conducting research, will also be provided with information and references which are relevant to the field of human rights, especially in relation to religious minorities and international law. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers in the fields of International Human Rights Law, Law and Religion, and Islamic Studies.

This book looks at how Muslims in Indonesia struggle to reconcile radically different sets of social norms and laws.

Using the high-profile 2017 blasphemy trial of the former governor of Jakarta, Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama, as its sole case study, this book assesses whether Indonesia’s liberal democratic human rights legal regime can withstand the rise of growing Islamist majoritarian sentiment. Specifically, this book analyses whether a 2010 decision of Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has rendered the liberal democratic human rights guarantees contained in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution ineffective. Key legal documents, including the indictment issued by the North Jakarta Attorney-General and General Prosecutor, the defence’s ‘Notice of Defence’, and the North Jakarta State Court’s convicting judgment, are examined. The book shows how Islamist majoritarians in Indonesia have hijacked human rights discourse by attributing new, inaccurate meanings to key liberal democratic concepts. This has provided them with a human rights law-based justification for the prioritisation of the religious sensibilities and religious orthodoxy of Indonesia’s Muslim majority over the fundamental rights of the country’s religious minorities. While Ahok’s conviction evidences this, the book cautions that matters pertaining to public religion will remain a site of contestation in contemporary Indonesia for the foreseeable future. A groundbreaking study of the Ahok trial, the blasphemy law, and the contentious politics of religious freedom and cultural citizenship in Indonesia, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of religion, Islamic studies, religious studies, law and society, law and development, law reform, constitutionalism, politics, history and social change, and Southeast Asian studies.