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ndonesia should incorporate world religions studies into the national curriculum as a first step to open dialog and strengthen relations between faiths, religious leaders and experts agree.

The country’s educational system currently requires elementary and secondary school students to be taught only about their individual faiths. The practice meant that children would not learn about other religions and that might undermine interfaith cooperation, according to one Islamologist.

Emilio Platti, a Roman Catholic priest and Islamologist from Cairo, Egypt, said that current Indonesian policy would never benefit the nation and would instead breed religious fundamentalism and fanaticism.

Platti, who visited the country with his fellow priest and Islamologist, Jean Jacques, spoke in Jakarta on Wednesday at a two-day international conference on interfaith dialog for prosperity.

Early education in religion and pluralism in family and school environments would help students accept other religions and their adherents and enable them to build relationships, he said.

Platti, while speaking on relations between Islam and Christianity, the world’s two largest religions, criticized the use of religion to support personal identity, which he said had brought a permanent separation into religious communities and did not prevented them from communicating.

“A religion brings not a personal identity to its adherents but a structure of religious identity which enables people to open relations humanely,” he said.

According to Platti, Indonesian people should strengthen nationalism in its true sense and learn more about the culture of Islam and of Christianity to avoid communication gaps and polarization that might sow hatred and trigger sectarian conflicts.

Solahuddin Wahid, a younger brother of former Indonesian president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, called on Indonesian Muslims and non-Muslims to forget past conflicts, such as the Crusades and other bloody conflicts between the faiths and open a new era of tolerance.

He criticized the use of religion to support political and economic interests, citing the US invasions of Iraq and of Afghanistan, which were perceived by many as a war between Islam and the Christianity

Indonesia has had its own sectarian conflicts in Ambon, Poso and North Maluku. But Solahuddin said they were triggered by political instability, a widening gap between the rich and the poor and the absence of tough measures from the authorities.

“It is not too late to push for religious education and promote local wisdom to heal past wounds and begin a new era of religious tolerance,” he said, citing Tebuireng, the boarding school that he headed, which has several times received church ministers researching Islam.

Jacques, who has researched Islam and Christianity while at Al Azhar University in Cairo, agreed, saying that healing past wounds would enable religious communities to continue the interfaith dialog and build relations based on true brotherhood to help world peace and prosperity.

He also said the media had an important role in religious education and campaigning for the tolerance. “Media people should have religious tolerance and pluralism in their mindset in writing down their articles.”