Archive for category: News

An alliance of insurgent groups, including Al Nusra Front, attacked Al Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province bordering Turkey and mostly held by insurgents after rebel advances this year.

Thousands of innocent civilians have been living under siege in the two villages. Fierce clashes raged between government forces and insurgents of the ‘Army of Conquest’, a coalition of terrorist groups that includes Al Nusra Front and Ahrar Al Sham.

The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

Warring sides agreed to a brief ceasefire last month in the two villages and in Zabadani, a rebel-held town near the Lebanese border under siege by government forces and Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, a Damascus ally.

But the two-day ceasefire, the second that month, collapsed before wounded people could be evacuated from both areas.

Government forces have intensified assault on Zabadani and say they are on the verge of seizing the town, where insurgents are holed up in its centre.

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The major theme of the MUI meeting was “moderate Islam” (Islam Wasathi). With these two roles, Ma’ruf will be one of the most responsible figures in determining where Indonesian religious life will be heading.

The good news is that the narrative of an Indonesian Islam promoting religious tolerance and moderatism is now on the rise. After the NU’s “Islam Nusantara” and Muhammadiyah’s “progressive Islam”, the major themes of their respective congresses last month, the MUI was willing to use the term “moderate Islam”, which means, as Din said, “rejecting all forms of radicalism”.

The term clearly negates the idea that there is only one Islam, as advocated by some Muslims who rejected the notion of Islam Nusantara. The term implies that Islam has many interpretations, whether moderate, progressive, reformist, radical, or even liberal.

Regardless of the validity of ascribing such terms to the word “Islam”, recognition of its diversity is crucial, particularly to oppose those sticking to a strict definition and simplistic understanding of the religion.

As for the MUI, which kind of moderate Islam is it claiming to be, as representative of almost all Indonesian Muslim organizations? The MUI has often been criticized for constituting conservative trends and for issuing edicts that were used as justification by Muslims to discriminate against groups like the Ahmadis and Shiites.
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The MUI tends to shun responsibility regarding persecutions against those considered deviant.

While the Ahmadis have been declared deviant or even kafir, some branches of the MUI issued an edict stating that Shiites are heretic. The MUI’s branch in East Java has long persuaded the MUI’s national center to issue a specific edict representing all the MUI’s branches declaring that Shiites are heretic.

Such developments should be among the priorities of the new MUI under Ma’ruf, given the increasingly heated sectarianism in the last decade within Islam itself, and this will be the touchstone for the new MUI to prove its commitment to moderation, at least not to further fuel sectarianism. Or, if necessary, the new MUI should dismiss or revoke some of its sectarian edicts or publications.

Earlier, some MUI published a book concerning the deviance of Shiites, written in the name of MUI, and many of the books were freely distributed.

This is a problem, as many people perceive the MUI as representing all Indonesian Muslim organizations, while this is not the case.

Ma’ruf said just hours after his election that, “We will not tolerate any persecution [of minority religious groups in Indonesia]; the new MUI will try its best to prohibit and even to prevent [any form of persecution].” This statement is surprising, coming from Ma’ruf, whose views are deemed by many as conservative especially as the former head of the MUI edict division. Hopefully this statement will become true.

Therefore the MUI under his leadership should revise or repeal its sectarian edicts. If this option is too hard given likely political resistance from its members and some Muslim organizations, touching the boundaries of Sunni “orthodoxy” that the MUI seeks to maintain, the second option is to issue an edict condemning any acts of discrimination against those considered deviant.

The latter option is extremely important for two reasons. First, the MUI tends to shun responsibility regarding persecutions against those considered deviant, whose perpetrators cite relevant MUI’s edicts as justification.

In 2012, Ma’ruf wrote an article in a national newspaper concerning the East Java MUI’s edict against Shiites and said the fatwa functions as a declarative explanation for Muslims to be aware of the deviance of Shia. Sadly, there was no commentary on the persecution that was partly caused by the fatwa.

Second, the MUI must focus on actions rather than beliefs. Shiites and Ahmadis may not share the exact same beliefs on certain theological issues and most ordinary Muslims do not really know the details of Islamic theology, let alone sectarian divides within Islam.

The discriminatory actions manifested in public policy and civil violence should be among the MUI’s primary concerns. Expelling innocent people from their homes, as experienced by Shiites and Ahmadis in various areas, is against the very teaching of Islam and thus is much more deviant than the Shiite belief that the successor of the Prophet Muhammad must have been his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib — which is actually a legitimate opinion within Islam.

Now is the moment for the MUI to review its fatwa and its proper role in Indonesian religious life. Unlike the two largest Indonesian Muslim organizations, NU and Muhammadiyah, the MUI is not a mass organization.

Nor is it a state institution, although its funds come partly from the state. Its legitimacy of issuing a fatwa can actually be challenged by the NU and Muhammadiyah. A fatwa is no more than a legal opinion and it is not binding unless for those voluntarily conceding to the authority of the MUI.

The main problem is when its fatwa are abused to justify criminal acts. Maybe the MUI should issue a specific fatwa concerning the use of its fatwa. Yes, a fatwa about fatwa!
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By: Azis Anwar Fachrudin, Yogyakarta

The writer is a graduate student at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. 2T.dpuf

The Turkish captives appeared in a video days after their abduction, apparently held by an armed group that used a familiar Shiite Muslim slogan and threatened to attack Turkish interests in Iraq if its demands were not met.

It is not clear if the gunmen belong to an established group. Iraqi security forces investigating the Turks’ abduction raided the Baghdad headquarters of Kataib Hezbollah, another Shi’ite militia, but without result.

Qais al-Khazali, head of Asaib, said the group was not behind the kidnapping, but he echoed demands made of Ankara in the ransom video to stop the passage of militants from Turkey to Iraq, cut the flow of oil from Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, and order the lifting of a siege on two Shi’ite villages in northwest Syria.

“The Turks – the Turkish intelligence – are the ones who ease the entrance of large numbers of Daesh (so-called Islamic State), including suicide bombers, from Turkey to Syria and from Syria to Iraq, killing Iraqis by hundreds and thousands,” he said in an interview with Iraqi state television.

Thousands of foreign fighters have crossed through Turkey to join self-proclaimed Islamic State over the past few years, fuelling accusations from the government’s opponents that it was turning a blind eye.

“The biggest enemy of Iraq now is Turkey, and this enemy is the first and one of the biggest benefactors of Iraq’s riches,” Khazali said, apparently referencing oil smuggled by Islamic State or sold by the Kurdistan Regional Government via a pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

He said Turkey played a more negative role in the region than Saudi Arabia or Qatar, Sunni Gulf Arab states which Iraqi Shi’ite politicians have accused of funding ISIS insurgents.

Two of the 18 Turkish hostages were released in good health on Tuesday in the southern city of Basra, but the others remain missing.

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Saudi jets pummeled the Yemeni capital Sana’a over Friday and Saturday, killing 35 people and injuring more than 120 others. Yemen’s Saba Net news agency said the number of the victims could rise due to the intensity of the attacks, P.TV reported.

The aircraft targeted the Yemeni Interior Ministry building, public services facilities and residential buildings in the city.

Al-Manar correspondent in Yemen said the preliminary toll from the Saudi aggression on homes in Old Sanaa was six women and four children.

Striking the Sirwah district in the Ma’rib province in west-central Yemen, Saudi planes killed four civilians and left a number of people wounded.

The kingdom’s warplanes attacked the Al Bayda province in southern Yemen, slaying a child and wounding two of the victim’s family members.

As many as 21 people were killed and two others wounded after the planes attacked a village in the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada. Saudi attacks also claimed the lives of 15 people and injured five others, targeting the province’s Bagim district.

On March 26, Saudi Arabia began its aggression against Yemen – without a UN mandate – in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to the country’s fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.

The conflict has so far left about 5,200 people dead and thousands of others wounded, the UN says. Local Yemeni sources, however, say the fatality figure is much higher.

The Yemeni al-Masirah TV network, meanwhile, reported that Yemen’s Army and popular committees had struck two Saudi military vehicles in Jizan, killing six Saudi military personnel and injuring a number of others.

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