Slamet Susanto and Bambang Muryanto, Yogyakarta – Religious conflict in Indonesia has begun to show a rising trend during the last five years in terms of the nature of the conflicts, according to a report by the Center for Religious and Cross Cultural Studies (CRCS) at Gadjah Mada University's (UGM) post-graduate school.

"Our report focuses on the nature and methods as opposed to the quantity [of conflicts]," CRCS director Zainal Abidin Bagir said at a presentation of the report on Thursday. Most conflicts generally related to two things: blasphemy and houses of worship.

"These have been recurring issues since the start of the 2000s and such conflicts have continued to increase through 2012, with some being marked by extreme violence, claiming lives," said Zainal, adding that religious conflicts claimed at least four lives in 2012.

Nine blasphemy cases were brought to court in the same year and were dominated by intra-Islamic cases. The scale of such conflicts also expanded to larger groups within communities regardless of location, such as the driving out of Shiite Muslims from Sampang, Madura.

On conflicts relating to houses of worship, Zainal suggested that mediation measures should be applied rather than due process as the latter allowed for wider interpretation.

Citing an example, Zainal said that in the case of the Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) Taman Yasmin in Bogor, West Java, the church could not be built despite winning a court ruling. "The question is, what were the years of legal wrangling for if, in the end, the ruling was not carried out?" he asked.

Researcher Rizal Panggabean from UGM's Center for Peace and Security Studies said that third-party mediation had so far been carried out in a haphazard manner without a clear mechanism on how to select the third party.

"Sometimes the third party has been a community figure, or someone from the local administration or police who knew nothing about the conflict," Rizal said.

He also blamed the government for some of these conflicts, citing the GKI Yasmin case as an example, which won its case in the courts all the way to the Supreme Court. He said the President only "urged" while ministers only reminded the administration that the decision should be carried out. "This is bad governance," he said.

He expressed his fear that religious conflicts were actually ethnic issues that could lead to larger conflicts. He cited two cases, one of which saw people in West Java rejecting the presence of a Batak church, while in Tapanuli, North Sumatra, locals refused a request by Muslims from Java to build a mosque.

"Is this a case of Tapanuli people rejecting the mosque or rejecting the Javanese? Is it Bekasi people refusing the church or refusing Batak people?" Rizal asked.

Separately, Islam researcher Martin Van Bruinessen said the development of contemporary Islam in Indonesia had shifted from a predominately "smiling" Islam that supported modernism, openness and tolerance to what was now far more conservative. With the rise in conservatism, he said on Thursday, various religious conflicts, jihadist movements and terrorist groups had emerged.

"Islamic development as represented by liberal Muslim thinkers like Nurcholis Madjid has begun to change. What we are seeing now is far from Islamic intellectualism," Bruinessen told a seminar at the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University (UIN) in Yogyakarta.

The seminar was held to mark the launch of a book edited by Bruinessen entitled Contemporary Development in Indonesian Islam: Explaining The Conservative Turn.

Bruinessen, however, said that Indonesian Islam could not yet be considered conservative as it was so diverse. Some Muslims were conservative while others were tolerant, he explained.

He added that conservatism began to emerge in 2005 following the issuance of an edict by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) declaring pluralism, secularism and religious liberalism as haram.

Bruinessen also maintained that conservatism had begun to emerge in the country's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which had returned to the political arena since 1999, abandoning its discourses on daily problems.

Meanwhile, CRCS director Zainal who also spoke at the seminar, disagreed with Bruinessen's view that the face of the contemporary Indonesian Islam was conservative. "It's diverse but not conservative," he said.

He added that Islam in Indonesia had not in fact changed and that even in the past, conservatism existed. He argued that conservatives merely appeared more prevalent today as, since the reform era, they had the opportunity to express their opinions more openly.