I

ndonesia needs to revive the idea of pluralism formulated by former president and Muslim cleric Abdurrahman '€œGus Dur'€ Wahid, to counter the rise of intolerance, a former senior justice has said.

'€œWe need to see ourselves as people who live in the same house. We can do anything when we are in our own rooms, but when we go to the dining room or the kitchen, we need to respect each other and embrace the differences; that is how Gus Dur formulated pluralism,'€ former Constitutional Court chief justice Mahfud MD said Thursday.

Mahfud is a former member of the National Awakening Party (PKB), which was founded by Gus Dur and who, in turn, appointed Mahfud one of his ministers during his tenure.

'€œIf all of us, who live under the same roof, honor the idea of pluralism and implement it in our lives, radicalism and intolerance will not divide us anymore,'€ he said.

In a 2012 report, the Wahid Institute highlighted the fact that religious intolerance in Indonesia had risen steadily in the past four years. The report showed that the number of religious intolerance cases in 2012 stood at 274, up from 267 in 2011. In 2010, the institute had recorded 184 cases compared to 121 the previous year.

A recent survey by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that 75 percent of its 2,200 respondents from 23 provinces were suspicious of people from different faiths.

Gus Dur'€™s daughter, Alissa Wahid, said her father once warned her that Indonesia could become like Pakistan or Afghanistan in the future if its people failed to embrace ethnic and religious diversity.

She claimed that the rise of intolerance today had been predicted by Gus Dur 30 years ago. '€œHe wrote an open letter to president Soeharto in Tempo magazine in 1982, stating that the number of Islamic groups from many locations in Indonesia was growing. He said the state needed to pay attention to that increase,
otherwise Indonesia would become a new Afghanistan with its own form of Taliban,'€ she added.

In order to prevent the country from reaching an intolerance emergency, she said, every community should conduct more interfaith dialogues and activities to help encourage tolerance and pluralism.

She added that she believed the more people interacted with one another, the more they would open their minds and hearts and, thus, help to reduce conflicts.

Meanwhile, Catholic priest Mudji Sutrisno said that pluralism could grow and touch the hearts of all Indonesians if they learned about different cultures.

He said that if people were keen to study different cultures in depth, they would see that differences had been part of Indonesia for a thousand years.

'€œPluralism can be seen by the presence of domes in churches and mosques. It shows that despite the differences in faith, culturally we are all the same,'€ Mudji said, adding that he had seen the same types of domes in many countries around the world.