P

eace education given to Islamic boarding school students significantly reduces negative stereotyping and stigmatization of Western ideas such as pluralism and multiculturalism, an expert says.

International Center for Islam and Pluralism (ICIP) executive director M. Syafi’i Anwar said that based on his five years of experience, peace education helps open the minds of students at Islamic boarding schools (pesantren).

“In many cases, intolerance among traditional pesantren in the country happens because of a lack of understanding and information on so-called ‘others’,” Syafii told The Jakarta Post at the third World Peace Forum in Yogyakarta on Thursday.

The three-day World Peace Forum will be held in conjunction with the centennial congress of the country’s largest Muslim organization, Muhammadiyah, on Saturday.

The forum will bring together more than 100 religious and political leaders, academics and journalists from 31 countries. People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) Speaker Taufik Kiemas officially opened the forum Wednesday evening.

Syafi’i said tolerance and religious subjectivity had been taught and widely understood in the country’s 30,000 pesantren — especially since those values were taught in the Koran.

There has been stereotyping and stigmatization by students who feel that everything that comes from the west is not good and opposes Islamic teachings — something which is not always true, he said.

“Through peace education we try to open their minds by, for example, providing them with the opportunity to directly communicate and interact with foreign people,” he said.

Students are also exposed to stories which tell how Muslims can live peacefully and practice their religion freely in some western countries, he added

“They eventually gain an awareness that not all western people are like the way they understood previously,” Syafi’i said.

Another participant, Australian Rabbi Zalman Kastel, national director of the Together for Humanity Foundation, has a similar experience.

“Peace education is helping to induce prejudice,” Kastel said.

The Together for Humanity Foundation, an interfaith organization for Christians, Jews and Muslims, has visited schools as a team since 2002 and become role models for students to help reduce prejudices among people of different faiths.

The foundation’s strategies include putting the students together in the same activity, emphasizing common values and having them perform collective community service.

“The activity was completed in only two days. Yet when we came back after nine months laterwe found that their attitudes had improved despite the fact that nine months elapsed without contact,” he said.

“The bad assumptions about each other decreased significantly from 90-100 percent to only 30-40 percent,” he said.