Jennie M. Xue

Conscientiasclerosis and legalized persecution

by Jennie S. Bev

I love Indonesia and Indonesians, but I have some reservations whenever it comes to acknowledging a particular government. I had high hopes for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, for he is the first president of Indonesia directly elected in a fair, square and honest democratic election process.

But today, by failing neither to reverse nor to nullify the joint decree restricting Ahmadiyya followers from freely practicing their religion within the terms that they believe, he and his staff have failed the Ahmadis, the peaceful moderate majority, and other non-Muslim minorities. Above all, he has failed humanity and the human race.

And for this to occur in Indonesia, which is an elected member of the United Nations Human Rights Council among 47 members out of 63 contenders, is a real disgrace.

The Indonesian government's "bad habit" of legally persecuting minorities has not ceased after 10 years of the reformasi movement. Rewind 10 to 30 years and we can clearly recall how those who belong to the Chinese ethnic minority were culturally castrated, as a result of which their language, character, surnames, and traditions were considered "illegal" and "unlawful."

Islamic view on jurisprudence and compassion

by Jennie S. Bev

When I was pursuing a law degree at the University of Indonesia, I became fascinated by Islam as the one and only religion of laws approved in Indonesia out of only a few “official” religions. At the time, I did not learn much about Islamic notions of compassion, as if it merely existed at the periphery, while fiqh or jurisprudence was the poster child.

On the contrary, which I later found out, compassion is actually the heart and core of Islam, and for some reasons is not popular nor popularized, especially in politicized "hijacked" versions of Islam that we have been encountering recently.