Dessy Sagita – A group of prominent Muslim academics vowed on Thursday to fight the creeping radicalization of university students taking place on campuses across the country.
Ismail Hasani, a researcher at the Setara Institute for Peace and Democracy and a lecturer at Jakarta's Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN), said the academics had formed an association to deal with the threat.
"Radicalization in universities is nothing new," he said. "It's been going on for years, but it was largely ignored and no serious action was taken to curb it."
He said the newly formed group, Academics Guiding the Nation's Pillars (APPi Bangsa), sought to be a national movement, covering not just Islamic universities, but also other private and state universities across Indonesia.
UIN has recently come under the spotlight after one of its graduates, Pepi Fernando, was arrested as the mastermind behind the book bombs sent to prominent figures last month and the foiled Good Friday plot to bomb a church.
Ali Mansur, another lecturer at UIN, said part of the problem was the boarding houses in the vicinity of the university were often used by extremists as bases from which to spread their ideology.
"Stemming radicalism should be a pubic responsibility, because it's impossible for any university to monitor its students 24 hours a day," he said.
Muhammad Hafidz, a UIN graduate and activist with the Human Rights Working Group, suggested that universities offer more activities and host more debates to raise students' awareness about the threat of indoctrination.
"Students involved in on-campus activities tend not to get radicalized, perhaps because they're used to meeting with lots of people and so they're familiar with differences, which makes it more difficult to poison them with doctrines of intolerance," he said.
Ismail said APPi Bangsa would host a series of on-campus programs to spread the message of tolerance, and would also monitor students' off-campus activities.
"We should respect an individual's freedom to be in an organization, but if there's a strong indication that the organization in question has violent tendencies, then the university should intervene," he said.
"Democracy and tolerance are the keys. The stronger the students' understanding of these values, the less chance they will be victimized by the radicals."
Nur Ahmad, a lecturer at STIE Ahmad Dahlan Jakarta, an economics college, said one of the on-campus programs would teach students to be critical of texts, manuscripts or books promoting war in the name of religion.
"We need to prepare our students, teach them to be critical of inflammatory material that spreads hatred and extreme views, but we should not infringe on their freedom to read," Nur said.
Universities were not the only place where radicalization was occurring, he added. Indoctrination sometimes began in high school through the extracurricular class Rohis, which teaches Islamic spirituality.
"These are very exclusive groups where radicalization starts," he said. "Students who take the class graduate from high school already indoctrinated, which makes it much easier for recruiters at universities to turn them into radicals."
Nur Ahmad said that the government should not disband Rohis activities at high school but it has to be guided and monitored to ensure there were no infiltrators spreading intolerance.
UIN's Ali urged the government to review religious classes to ensure they were appropriate. "The government and the public need to realize that radicals recruit new members not just from Islamic universities, but also from regular universities, so anyone can be a victim, even non-religious students," he said.