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.

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.

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.

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

The 30th volume of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion consists of two special sections, as well as two separate empirical studies on attachment and daily spiritual practices. The first special section deals with the social scientific study of religion in Indonesia. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country whose history and contemporary involvement in the study of religion is explored from both sociological and psychological perspectives. The second special section is on the Pope Francis effect: the challenges of modernization in the Catholic church and the global impact of Pope Francis. While its focus is mainly on the Catholic religion, the internal dynamics and geopolitics explored apply more broadly.

"This is an excellent and rare exploration of a sensitive religious issue from many perspectives _ legal, cultural and political. The case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand portray the important and exciting, yet very difficult, negotiation of Islamic teachings in the changing realities of Southeast Asia, home to the majority of Muslims in the world. Interreligious marriage is an important indicator of good relations between communities in religiously diverse countries. This book will also be of great interest to students and scholars of religious pluralism in a Southeast Asian context, which has not been studied adequately." - Zainal Abidin Bagir, Executive Director, Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia "The issue of Muslim-non-Muslim marriages has different connotations in the different Southeast Asian states. For example, in Thailand it is more a fluid cultural issue but in Malaysia it reflects great racial schisms with severe legal implications. This book is a welcome one as it examines the issue not only from the perspectives of various Southeast Asian nations but also from so many angles; the legal, historical, social, cultural, anthropological and philosophical. The work is scholarly, yet accessible. Underlying it, there is a vital streak of humanism." - Azmi Sharom, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Malaya

Shah uncovers the complex interaction between constitutional law, religion and politics in three key plural societies in Asia.

Examines how law regulates religion and explores the influence of world religions on the legal systems in Asia, including how religion responds to such regulations. It looks at underlying norms influencing state regulation of religion, and the challenges emerging from such regulation.

This book explains how the leaders of the world's largest Islamic organizations understand tolerance, explicating how politics works in a Muslim-majority democracy.

Annotation Religious and ethnic violence between Indonesia's Muslims and Christians escalated dramatically just before and after President Suharto resigned in 1998. In this first major ethnographic study of Christianization in Indonesia, Lorraine Aragon delineates colonial and postcolonial circumstances contributing to the dynamics of these contemporary conflicts. Aragon's ethnography of Indonesian Christian minorities in Sulawesi combines a political economy of colonial missionization with a microanalysis of shifting religious ideology and practice. Fields of the Lord challenges much comparative religion scholarship by contending that religions, like contemporary cultural groups, be located in their spheres of interaction rather than as the abstracted cognitive and behavioral systems conceived by many adherents, modernist states, and Western scholars. Through its careful documentation of colonial missionary tactics, unexpected postcolonial upheavals, and contemporary Christian narratives, Fields of the Lord analyzes the historical and institutional links between state rule and individuals' religious choices.