Political Discrimination against Non-Muslims in Contemporary Indonesia

DOI

10.2991/iclj-17.2018.16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Political discrimination; Non-Muslim Minorities; God's Authority; Jakarta Charter.

Abstract

This article charts the political discourse amongst Islamic leaders regarding political discrimination against non-Muslim minorities in contemporary Indonesia. The focus is about the possibility of a non-Muslim to become political leaders such as president, head of parliament, governor, and other prominent positions in Indonesia, the world's most populated Muslim state. Recently, classical Islamic discourse on this issue, which has generally rejected this possibility, had tended to be trapped in a normative model of analysis which today seems intolerant and rigid. This article contends that this discourse, to some extent, does not properly appreciate the complex social, cultural, historical and political realities of the Muslim community today. Indeed, many other contemporary scholars view this mode of discourse as failing to respond to the current social-political dynamic, especially those scholars coming at it from a multicultural democratic perspective. Perhaps most importantly, the legal reality, even though there is a reasonable degree of controversy surrounding it, which is that there is no criterion that the President has to be Muslim, is also rejected by this discourse. The result reveals that theoretically, there is no political discrimination against non-Muslim in Republic of Indonesia because the rights for political participation in Indonesia had been equally granted for Muslims and non-Muslims and had become a basis of the democratic mechanism of electing political leaders such as president, head of parliament and other prominent positions.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Mujar Ibnu Syarif
PY  - 2017/11
DA  - 2017/11
TI  - Political Discrimination against Non-Muslims in Contemporary Indonesia
BT  - Proceedings of 1st International Conference of Law and Justice - Good Governance and Human Rights in Muslim Countries: Experiences and Challenges (ICLJ 2017)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 69
EP  - 72
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iclj-17.2018.16
DO  - 10.2991/iclj-17.2018.16
ID  - IbnuSyarif2017/11
ER  -