Editorial: Peace dialog, a panacea

Wed, 06/25/2008 10:32 AM  |  Opinion

Every dialog for peace is commendable. This week religious leaders and scholars from various countries are gathering in Jakarta for the second World Peace Forum.

Hosted by Indonesia's second largest Muslim organization, Muhammadiyah, the conference brings together current and former presidents and others to discuss violence and what can be done about it.

Our readers have poured in their own ideas related to this issue through emails, text messages and letters on many occasions when violence hit us in the face, mainly when perpetrators have invoked the name of the Almighty. Despite differing views collected in our online and print editions of the Readers' Forum, the messages suggest that most of you are clearly sick and tired of violence with religious overtones.

The conference stems from the initiative of the Foreign Ministry to position one of Indonesia's largest moderate and mainstream Muslim organizations as the key facilitator in an interfaith dialog for peace.

The last peace dialog in 2006 resulted in the "Jakarta Peace Declaration," another positive gesture among many others globally following the Sept. 11 2001 terrorist attacks.

Such dialogs started with loud assertions that perpetrators of violence are an extreme few among Muslims, glossing over that it only takes a few to do a lot of harm.

Critics say such dialogues and talk shops preach only to the converted. But they had more impact when religious leaders and scholars acknowledged the most sensitive issue -- that religious teachings and history do suggest some endorsement of violence.

So rarely has this issue been touched on that the leaking of Pope Benedict XVI's controversial lecture on Islam at the University of Regensburg in Germany on Sept. 12, 2006, was shocking to Muslims, many of whom had never heard interpretations of teachings, including the Prophet's words, justifying violence.

Many of us were also caught up in the uproar over the film by Netherlands' member of parliament Geert Wilders. It could be considered inflammatory, but the clear portrayal of ignorance of what Islam is mainly about will probably continue unless balanced by more open discussion of the issues.

Simplistic readers of the holy books of various faiths may refer only to the texts justifying violence; wiser ones will remind us of their historical context.

We no longer live in an age of holy wars. So as the forum aims to address "facets of violence" we would be eager to see how far participating scholars and leaders can help the layman to essentially take the violence out of religion -- rather than simply denying that it's there -- then focusing on the remaining universal message of peace.

This is the age in which we have learned the hard way that we need each other in a globalized world, like it or not. Members of a community may think they are the "chosen ones" and that no one else can live on the land, but then they may realize that the water they need comes from a river that crisscrosses borders.

The presence of leaders and learned people from many countries this week will hopefully give us a chance to see how other countries manage, or fail to manage, their differences.

In the past we swept all sorts of differences under the carpet, wondering how best to manage them after the events.

Foreign participants will be able to learn how different groups in local communities here coexist peacefully, also how and why apparent harmony broke down in some of these areas.

Indonesia is an appropriate host for this conference, where delegates can learn from us, and vice versa, precisely, perhaps, because we are not the perfect model of harmony in a pluralist society.

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