President Joko Widodo’s decision to retain Lukman Hakim Saifuddin as minister of religious affairs may have been a concession to the minister’s party, as some have argued, but it appears to be paying off in a big way for the people.
Lukman has taken the unprecedented step of starting work on legislation that will afford greater protections for minority religious groups — including the Shiite and Ahmadiyyah Islamic groups, who have for years come under increasing persecution from Sunni Muslim hard-liners and local government officials.
Lukman has only been in office since June, when he took over from his corruption-tainted party chairman Suryadharma Ali, but has proved to be more embracing of religious diversity than his predecessor ever was.
Already he has expressed a willingness to grant the Baha’i faith official recognition, and in Ramadan he sat down with Ahmadis and Shiites to break the fast — something that Suryadharma, with his denouncement of the Ahmadis’ “heresy,” would never have deigned to do.
In purely practical terms, Lukman’s proposed legislation would try to undo the damage done by a joint religious and home affairs ministerial decree on building houses of worship, which hard-liners have consistently cited to justify their attacks and opposition to churches and minority mosques being built in their neighborhoods.
Categories: Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Anti Islam act by Muslims, Anti-Islam Attitude, Asia, Indonesia