Letter: Ayat-Ayat Cinta, Ahmadiyah and Pancasila

Mon, 05/12/2008 10:51 AM | Reader's Forum

This is a comment on an article titled "Ayat-Ayat Cinta, Ahmadiyah and Pancasila", (The Jakarta Post, May 06, p. 6.)

If you do not let other people practice their beliefs even though their beliefs rob your religion of identity or sources, it is likely you don't appreciate their rights.

If you think your religion is the only true one, and you reflect the views expressed in AAC, then you are not a pluralist. If you consider males to be heroes and females subordinates, people might wonder if you think love is a masculine emotion.

I wonder too, how it would have been had AAC made a female its hero? The point is, and this is predictable, we need no foreign values whatsoever. We have our own indigenous values. Excuse me for asking, but what are they?

I mean the indigenous values? Back home, we have indigenous people who worship spirits. They subsist by planting crops. We, the Muslims, do not embrace nor oppress these indigenous values because we have values of our own recorded in the holy Koran, which says there iscompulsion in religion".

They do not *attack' our belief. They have never cited the Koran as conveying their teachings, like Ahmadiyyah, or some other perpetrator of chaos masked by a blanket of peace and tranquility.

The argument that because of Islam we practice foreign values is reminiscent of Vividhya Naipaul, an anti-Islamist rewarded with a Nobel Prize in literature for his harsh remarks on Islam. To Naipaul, a Muslim is a convert.

Islam, to him, is a foreign religion whose values are strange to indigenous people. Anand Krishn, whose religious background is identical to Naipual's, seems very eager to become his twin.