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Don't deny it: Real Muslims attacked non Muslims
There is no such thing as “peaceful Islam”, as much as there is no “violent Islam”.
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Chinese style: A Muslim woman looks inside Santa Maria de Fatima Church in Glodok. (JP/A. Kurniawan Ulung)
E
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.
