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Youth dismiss violent extremism but are prone to intolerance: Survey
While more Indonesian young people oppose violent extremism, they still show signs of religious intolerance, a recent survey has found.
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Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim spoke out against mandatory hijab rules in schools after a video of a father arguing with a school representative that his non-Muslim daughter should not have to wear a hijab went viral on social media. (AFP/Juni Kriswanto)
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ndonesian youth firmly reject violent religious extremism but remain prone to religious intolerance, a new survey by the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID) and the GusDurian Network has found.
The survey, conducted from November to December 2020 in six cities across the country, defines intolerance as negative or hostile attitudes toward groups with different beliefs and the tendency to create disturbances for them.
While 93 percent of 18- to 30-year-olds who answered the questionnaire agreed with the principle of tolerance, 42 percent of respondents rejected the Shia and Ahmadiyah sects of Islam – considered some of the most discriminated against groups in the country.
Nearly 35 percent of respondents said they would decline to offer congratulatory wishes to people of other faiths, particularly in cases of non-Muslim religious observances, while 37 percent believed Indonesians must follow Islamic values because they lived in a Muslim-majority country.
“These findings strongly indicate that while young people firmly reject any form of religion-based violence, they are still prone to being intolerant,” said Ahmad Zainul Hamdi, GusDurian activist and a lecturer at Sunan Ampel State Islamic University (UIN) in Surabaya, during a webinar on Tuesday.
The survey was conducted in districts of Surabaya, East Java; Surakarta, Central Java; Bandung, West Java; Makassar, South Sulawesi; Yogyakarta; and Pontianak, West Kalimantan, and involved 1,200 respondents.
Religious conservatism pervades much of the Sunni Muslim-majority country, and intolerance and discrimination remain a pebble in the shoe of the multicultural and multiethnic nation.
