With local hard-line Islamic groups fanning sectarian sentiments in Indonesia’s public sphere and several Muslim majority countries ravaged by bloody conflicts, the youth wing of the nation’s largest Islamic organization is calling on Muslims to reexamine their understanding of their own faith.

GP Ansor, the youth wing of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), has launched what it calls the Humanitarian Islam movement to counter an understanding of Islam that has birthed conflicts, including acts of terrorism.

Yaqut Cholil Qoumas, the organization’s chairman, said the movement aimed to contextualize the basic teachings of Islam to produce an alternative understanding.

“Muslims have been hesitant to examine the elements within Islam that can be a source of conflict,” he said recently.

NU supreme council secretary general Yahya Cholil Staquf, who is one of GP Ansor’s emissaries to promote the Humanitarian Islam movement, said the contextualization of Islam within current conditions was important.

“In the orthodox understanding, it is stated that non-Muslims are enemies, or at least Muslims should distrust them. We cannot live with that kind of understanding because we now live within a diverse society,” Yahya said.

He added that growing Islamic conservatism in several Islamic countries was caused by the absence of an alternative comprehension of Islam.

“We can see that the number of incidents of violence motivated by religion in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan is growing, which can disrupt the future of those countries. It has been caused by a lack of consolidative efforts to build an alternative comprehension of Islam,” Yahya said.

Yaqut further commented that GP Ansor encouraged all concerned parties to stop using religion for purposes other than religious edification. He added that this led people taking Koranic scripture literally, without understanding the initial context, which hampered the efforts to contextualize Islam.

“There is a gap between contemporary reality and certain elements in Islamic orthodoxy,” he said, adding that the most problematic element was the teaching that regulated the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Another emissary of Humanitarian Islam, Charles Holland Taylor, said the term Humanitarian Islam had been adopted by GP Ansor to express the spirit of Islam Nusantara, a principal introduced by NU, which embodies the values of kindness, compassion and humility.

Taylor, who cofounded and chairs the LibForAll Foundation, added that since the 9/11 tragedy in the United States, two narratives about Islam had emerged in societies in the West; people who embraced Islamophobia and those who cared about Muslim minorities.

“We have tended to deny the very real facts underlying the growth of extremism and terrorism, and this is what Humanitarian Islam is designed to address,” he said.

A daughter of former president Abdurrahman Wahid, Alissa Wahid, said that up until recently Indonesia had shown that Muslims could live in harmony within a diverse society.

She added that GP Ansor was working with minority groups, civil society organizations, and the government to solve the current problems that Indonesia was facing. (rdi)