Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
Indonesia stands out among the world’s 20 biggest economies on the back of the stability it has maintained through harmony among its myriad ethnicities and linguistic groups decades after its crony-capitalist system collapsed in the face of the 1997 Asian financial crisis
Nahdlatul Ulama has cited ISIS’s attempt to create a so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria and argued it will inevitably be disastrous and contrary to the basic purposes of Sharia—the protection of religion, human life, sound reasoning, family, and property
The stories with compassion as the moral that people like me grew up on as children need to be told and retold for a peaceful future of co-existence that growing Islamophobia threatens
A statue of Hindu Goddess Saraswati was installed at the embassy of the world's most populous Muslim country in 2013 in Washington DC as a symbol of religious freedom in Indonesia, which is governed by principles of humanitarianism and democracy
Scholar Abdallah bin Mahfudh ibn Bayyah crafted the legal framework that inspired the declaration connecting early Islamic sources and the Prophet Muhammad's Charter of Medina with international human rights law for a model of equal, contractual citizenship as an Islamic principle
Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s biggest Islamic organisation, is an antithesis of the Taliban but it is hardly known perhaps because its progressive ideas do not fit into the dominant narrative about Islam particularly when Islamophobia is lucrative and many demagogues globally have tapped into it for political power
The secular Muslim-majority nations include Indonesia, which embodies pluralism in every sense and refutes the wilful inaccuracies perpetuated to fuel Islamophobia
The Indonesian state promotes the coexistence and diversity needed to keep together a country of multiple languages, geographies, and faiths
The Prophet Muhammad is quoted to have said God loves those who offer charity but remain anonymous and uncelebrated given the importance of secrecy in Islam for protecting the dignity of recipients
