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How Indonesian School System Segregates Believers

The article was originally published in Magdalene, written by Amrina R. Wijaya.

I used to attend an all-Muslim school in my early years. There we did many things “Islamic”: the girls were obliged to cover their hair and once a week we were taught about the history of the Prophet and the glory of the Islamic civilizations.

Since everyone was of the same faith, I had never seen anyone at school making gesture in the shape of a cross across their chest before the class started. It was also a foreign idea for me back then to imagine that there were people in this world who are actually prohibited from savoring beef-based dish. Islam is the only religion we understood.

Attending a religious school was a good thing to some extent, because it exposed me, as a believer, to good Islamic values at such early age, which laid the foundation for me to later develop and rethink them as I grew older. But, on the other hand, being surrounded by people of the same faith has blinded me, and others, to religious multiculturalism we encounter in real life.

We were told over and over again that our religion was the truest of all that some of us became very disdainful and irrationally scared of getting dirty, whenever encountering a term not in our religious dictionary. The word Christianity used to be akin to the F-word for us, and making fun of Jesus would be considered appropriate.

Later I found out from my other friends who attended more heterogonous public schools that faith-related mockery also existed outside the walls of religious schools. One time, a friend of mine was told that she would burn in hell unless she converted.

In reality, diversity should not be a foreign concept for most Indonesians. People as young as schoolchildren have been exposed to diversity, from their neighborhood and from schoolbooks. This raises the question: why do the schoolchildren – who are supposedly pure hearted and innocent – treat other adherents like they were aliens, and declare that hellfire awaits them?

One of the main reasons, I believe, lies in an education system with a curriculum that focuses on “knowing the what’s” instead of “understanding the why’s and how’s”. When it comes to religious diversity, schoolchildren know that there are Muslims and Christians and Buddhists, they know the name of other religions’ houses of worship, but they have no idea why their followers wear different religious symbols, or how all faiths believe in respecting men of all kind.

Religious subjects are still taught exclusively to its adherents – thanks to our constitution on national education system – keeping “the others” outside their reach and creating an even bigger gap among different believers.

The perpetuation of this segregation of believers is (unintendedly) supported by the local school system (in which ironically only reflects the fact that is a “normal” practice in society!). We see how most state schools in Indonesia are very Muslim-dominated, that prayers are often led in the Islamic way – rather than a universal one – to which the minority groups have to conform.

This condition would likely justify the dominance of a certain faith and perpetuate the underrepresentation of minorities. Today we also see that there are many faith-based groups in junior and senior high schools, and despite the common ground of love and peace they all agree upon, the discourse of tolerance is only taught and spoken of within their walls.

These groups create many religious events whose participation is restricted to a certain faith – retreat night for Christians and prayer gathering for Muslims, for example – but, strangely, no faith-based events open for all believers as an arena to understand each other. In practice, they are never seen to be “in contact” with other faith-based club members in promoting interreligious tolerance.

Being so used to be segregated by beliefs, it is no wonder that schoolchildren tend to magnify the theological differences each other has than to pose similarities such as on the ideas love, respect, and peace – aspects that are way more important in creating an inclusive social life. This “us-versus-them” point of view is what catalyzes intolerance that later leads to “othering” and faith-based mockery.

In her article “A Case for Pluralism in the Schools”, published in The Phi Delta Kappan magazine, social scientist and professor in multicultural education Christine Bennett wrote: “… we are greatly in need of a curriculum that builds understanding of each of our cultural orientations and fosters intercultural understanding.”

The implementation of the curriculum she argued for can take many forms: from reducing the dominance of a certain faith in schools, arranging school trips to different religions’ houses of worship, or engaging believers of different faiths in an interfaith event.

Nevertheless, this idea of interfaith understanding among schoolchildren, of course, still faces many criticisms. Many claim that introducing the values of one faith to another is never a good idea, fearing it would erode “religious purity”. People are afraid that by being tolerant and exposed to other beliefs, children will stray too far from their own religious teaching.

But refusal to understand other beliefs creates a mental state that the late Gus Dur calls “mental banteng” (the bull mentality). It’s a condition in which believers of a faith build walls around them and are very defensive of foreign ideas. People with this mental state are highly reactive to any kind of new ideas, and their close-mindedness is a peril to social integration. This is not what we expect from our young generations.

To deny multiculturalism in Indonesia is to deny fact. Instead of constantly being told about the differences between religions, children should hear more about how they are more alike. Focusing too much on religious differences only fosters and strengthens the sense of “other” between believers. Religious multiculturalism and pluralism should be cherished and embraced with love by children, like the colors of the paper rainbows on their classroom windows.

The journey of Lies Marcoes looking for women narrating their fight against poverty

Ini adalah tulisan Prof Karel Steenbrink, mantan dosen Lies Marcoes di IAIN Jakarta sebagaimana dimuat dalam web Prof Karel, Relindonesia, 15 Januari 2015.

Lies Marcoes was one of my first students in Jakarta, 1981-1983. She was at that time a close friend of Yvonne Sutaredjo, a Chinese-Javanese student from Surinam. The two were quite exceptional. They were the only female students who went swimming in Sawangan, Not only for sport, but also as a protest against rules for the female students in the boarding house at the Islamic Academy, IAIN in Ciputat.

Lies was very keen on field research and she took for her final thesis the practices of a Libyan brotherhood in West Java. She became the first assistant to Martin van Bruinessen in the project on the ‘culture of poverty’ in the Sukapakir district of Bandung, one square km with about 100,000 citizens living or rather surviving. Lies and Martin wrote a special issue for the weekly Tempo that was no a report of poverty in statistics, but in lifestyle and personal portraits.

That was in 1984. Nearly thirty years later, and in a kind of sabbatical (although officially as ‘early retirement’ from the work at various NGO), she has given us another fight against poverty or at least how to survive in extreme poverty in a book written with the Australian Anne Lockley and beautiful pictures by Armin Hari.

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I received a copy of the book from Lies during our ‘tribute conference’ of  18-19 November 2014. In fact, it was not really a gift for me, but rather for my wife. We read it together, watched the photographs and told again stories about the many places she visited for this journey. Most places are known to us: Ende and Maumere in Flores, Makassar and Ambon, Pontianak and of course places in West Java. Lies has made many friends in Aceh and my wife Paule never joined me to a trip there.

This is not a book with statistics (although in the last of the five sections it is underlined that hard figures can be useful in the fight for justice. Its major goal is to give concrete examples that picture in a representative way how women and their children manage to survive, grow up, give help to children and older people. There are abundantly stories of women who are KK, Kepala Keluarga of ‘Head of a Family’ because they earn also the living for their husband, whether he is simply a loser, a too pious preacher earning nothing, or simply sick and disabled.

There are also quite a few pages about borrowing money (chapter 5, 112-122). It will be a good and critical appendix to the (too) positive words I wrote in Catholics in Indonesia vol 3 about credit union as the most important welfare activity of the Catholic Church, and other religious institutions, in Indonesia.

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This author with Lies Marcoes in our hotel during the Tribute conference of 18-19 November last year.

The book reminded me in several respects of the funny, sometimes also sad book by Elisabeth Pisani, Indonesia etc. Both women have a good connection with people really below the poverty line. They are not too easy with remedies and know that external help can be very good, but does not help quickly and often not at all. Pisani is very critical about formal religion. Lies did professional study of Islam, but is also very critical about traditional (adat) and religious institutions. She has, like Pisani, a special chapter 10 on religion. I read that of course with more than usual interest. The chapter begins with some nice words about religion: ‘Religious organisations are often among the many institutions that try to overcome poverty…’ (187). But following this beginning there is criticism because religious activities like collecting funds for Dompet Dhuafa often lacks an analysis of the roots of poverty. Religions often only want to remove female from the dangers of globalisation, but do not stimulate them to become active.

Six concrete examples are given of this negative influence of religion: 1. a young woman, Sum, who lost her job because she was dressing in a ‘fundamentalist way’.  Birth control was impossible for her. 2. Fira was a qualified pharmacist who had good jobs, but then married a pious preacher who did not earn the money himself, but still wanted her to leave her job. 3. Many criticism about the application of shari’a law in Aceh; very young children, pre-school, are not allowed to dance. 4. Prof. Alyasa Abubakar, one of the architects of the introduction of Shari’a in Aceh has consented that children of women who experienced the punishment of caning also feel stigmatised; 5. in not-recognised sects like Sunda Wiwitan and Ahmadiyah children do not have a birth certificate and they cannot inherit legally from their parents; 6. one Anne in Palu (probably a Christian) had a mixed marriage with a Muslim and the difference of religion was a disaster and caused a break in this marriage. Lies also gives some positive examples of prominent Muslims, approaching women. Page 198 is a funny recording of female Muslim leaders who visited prostitutes in Yogyakarta and were shocked to see how these women gave everything for the life and education of the children.

Thank you very much, Lies, for this honest, sincere and vivid book. I will read now in a different way the monthly sold by Utrecht homeless people, also full with their personal stories. Our son Florsi did not marry in a formal way and he had to go the the municipal administration before the birth of his two children, in order to have them formally registered also as his children and to give them a birth certificate, but for him this was an easy thing.