Yayasan Wakaf PARAMADINA

Amid widespread acts of violence by hard-line religious groups in different parts of the country against minorities, three young writers have received the Ahmad Wahib award for their essays on religion diversity.

Indonesia Institute of Sciences (LIPI) researcher Fahd Pahdepie won first prize while freelance writer Sunlie Thomas Alexander and Yogyakarta State Islamic University student Muhammad Takdir Ilahi won the second and third place respectively.

The annual award ceremony, organized for the third time by Paramadina University with funding from Hivos, a Dutch based organization, took place Wednesday night.

Sunlie said he wrote essays as a weapon to fight for pluralism in the country, expressing his concern about bombings and other acts of violence committed in the name of religion.

“It is a shameful fact that many people now relate terrorism with Islam. [In Prophet Mohammad’s sayings and deeds] the Prophet never instructed us to bring swords and slaughter other humans so that we could earn a ticket to heaven,” he said.

Sunlie, who was born in a Chinese-Catholic family and later converted to Islam, underlined that choosing a religion without any pressure from others was a universal human right.

Fahd, who received Rp 20 million (US$2,200), said all acts of violence were a form of fear. “The hard-liners believe pluralism is related to relativism and syncretism,” he wrote in his essay.

Relativism is the philosophical view that all beliefs can be true or false, while syncretism is the creation of a new religion by handpicking and combining elements and aspects of the existing ones.

Fahd said, “Pluralism can be defined as a person’s presence of mind to accept the truth in other religions without denying their own religion’s fidelity.”

The judging panel included Paramadina post-graduate professor Ihzan Ali-Fauzi, Asia Foundation senior program officer Lies Marcoes Natsir, Kompas daily senior journalist Maria Hartiningsih and Driyarkara Philosophy University professor Budhy Munawar-Rachman.

The award is named in honor of Ahmad Wahib. Born in an ulema family in Madura, East Java, he worked as journalist for Tempo magazine and wrote many essays about pluralism. He died at the age of 31 in an accident in 1973. (JP/rch)

News source: The Jakarta Post