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very time we hear about an attack on a church, for instance, or an arbitrary ban on the ability of non-Muslims to practice their religion, we hear that such despicable acts were committed by those who do not understand what “being Muslim” is all about.

This argument has expanded to the point where the Muslim perpetrators of those horrendous acts are regarded as not “real Muslims”, because “real Muslims” do not commit violence.

Another response to such tragedies is to say that those evil acts are politically, rather than religiously, motivated.

The proponents of this argument state that seeing only the religious symbols involved in the attacks would result in a superficial analysis that ignored some kind of a pre-election deep-state conspiracy.

I say to both of the arguments that those Muslim perpetrators who attack other religious believers or prohibit them from conducting their worship are indeed real Muslims.

Secondly, even though religion is not the only factor in those tragedies, we cannot deny that religion (in this case, Islam) is present in each one of those horrible acts. Here’s why.

Ever since the Pandora’s box of Indonesian “hardline-Islamist politics” was opened by massive demonstrations known as the 212 movement, a wave of normalization of hard-line Islam has seeped into Indonesian sociopolitical life.

This normalization of violence might not be readily apparent to members of the Sunni Muslim majority.

However, the horrific trend has traumatized minority and marginalized groups all along.

Today, violent acts look “normal.” From the fact that a police officer in Aceh tries to “masculinize” transgender people, to reports that a woman in a TransJakarta bus openly expressed her unwillingness to sit with a non-Muslim, bits of violence have become something palatable in our daily lives, because they come in the seemingly innocent guise of the “practice of Islam”.

This is why a bunch of citizens in a small Tangerang village in Banten felt just fine making a Bikkhu monk sign a contract that would bar him from preaching to his own followers.

This is also why, back in 2016, a Buddha statue in Tanjung Balai in North Sumatra was taken down — because some Muslims said they felt threatened by it. In each case, acts of violence were whitewashed under the guise of religious freedom for the Muslim majority.

In fact, Sunni Muslims are so hegemonic that their normative perspective on sexuality is heavily influencing the latest deliberation on the Criminal Code (KUHP) revision. They are so deep in their religious comfort zone that individuals like Abdul Somad, whose toxic religious preaching comprises no more than hate speech, have become the mainstream.

In addition to the normalization of violence, some Indonesian Sunni Muslims often try to escape from their complicity in those acts of violence by saying that the perpetrators do not understand what Islam is about, or that the tragedies are political propaganda to shake national stability.
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There is no such thing as “peaceful Islam”, as much as there is no “violent Islam”.

While those evil acts might have a political component in them, real Muslims were also there doing the beating.

We can no longer disown the perpetrators of those violence by saying they are not real Muslims, because they justified their acts through violent and mainstream interpretations of Islam.

The Islamic interpretation of those attacks is the same interpretation that makes us believe that non-Muslims, regardless of their merits, will all go to hell.

Those violent interpretations are bolstered by the same black-and-white logic that makes us frightened of any appearance of a cross or of a Buddhist monk.

There is a fear that, if we start a dialogue with the religious others, we compromise our own faith.

So then, based on this fear of the religious others, we have adopted the practice of classifying humanity into medieval categories of “kafir” and “Muslim” and have based our Islam on a political theology of exclusion.

Well, guess what? Not only are those categories heavily contested — to the point that ulema cannot agree on their definitions — they were fully exploited at the time when “Islam” was an empire. Thus, “Muslim” and “kafir” are always political rather than religious categories.

Any religion, including Islam, is a double-edged sword. The famous historian and religious studies scholar, Scott Appleby, called this ambiguity the “ambivalence of the sacred”.

In this case, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir is as much a Muslim as Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president Gus Dur. What differentiates them from each other is that Gus Dur maximized the peaceful potential of Islam, while Ba’asyir utilized Islam to boost the misleading understanding that he is the only “guardian of truth”.

There is no such thing as “peaceful Islam,” as much as there is no “violent Islam.” There are only “peaceful Muslims” and “violent Muslims”, both of whom are as real as the other.

It is really up to us to either read the Qur’an as a scripture of war or as a scripture of compassion. So let’s try to be more like Gus Dur, and let us undermine Abu Bakar Ba’asyir from our ways of living Islam.

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The writer, a PhD student at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, is researching Islamic and
Christian feminist theologies.