Muslim scholar Azyumardi Azra attacked the yoga ban as "excessive" and "counterproductive."
Jakarta, 27 Jan. (AKI/Jakarta Post) - Indonesia's largest Muslim organisation has attacked a move by the country's highest Islamic authority to impose bans on smoking, practising yoga and voting abstention. A 'fatwa' or a religious edict was issued by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) during its two-day national meeting in the West Sumatran town of Padangpanjang at the weekend.
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's biggest Islamic organisation, criticised the religious edicts as "excessive".
NU deputy head Masdar F. Mas'udi said the MUI should not have inserted religion into the three matters. Yoga, as it is practised in Indonesia, he said, was a pastime and must not be seen in the context of religious worship.
He said that the MUI should not use "Islamic law" as a tool to discourage people from smoking.
"What's important is to inform the public of the bad effects of smoking and urge the government to enforce policies to discourage smoking," Masdar told the Indonesian daily The Jakarta Post.
He also said the MUI should "not bring in God and threaten people with hell" if it wanted to encourage Muslims to vote.
Some 700 clerics from the council agreed on Sunday that Muslims were forbidden to abstain from voting in elections if "qualified" candidates existed.
"Islam obliges Muslims to elect their leaders if the latter meet certain criteria," Gusrizal Gazahar, MUI West Sumatra head, said after the meeting.
The criteria include "being Muslim, honest, brilliant and ready to fight for the people", the council said.
It also forbade smoking by children and pregnant women, and in public places.
Muslims are also banned from practising certain aspects of yoga that contained Hindu elements such as chanting and meditation, it said.
But Muslims can continue to perform yoga for purely health reasons, the council added.
Muslim scholar Azyumardi Azra also attacked the yoga ban as "excessive" and "counterproductive".
However, he lauded the edicts against vote abstention and smoking, saying the former was "positive" in strengthening democracy and elected administrations.
Azyumardi, an assistant to vice president Jusuf Kalla, said the MUI had "compromised" and taken "accommodating" measures to partly forbid smoking, considering the fact that the tobacco industry employed so many workers and contributed much to the country's economy.
The edict also included a ban on abortion unless the mother is a rape victim, the pregnancy endangers her life, or the foetus is aged less than five weeks old, as well as a ban on vasectomy because the process is "irreversible".
A ban on marriage with minors, based on a 1974 law that forbids men under 19 and women under 16 years old from marriage was also issued by the council.
The Sumatra meeting will also debate whether abstaining from voting is "haram," or not allowed. Indonesia holds legislative and presidential elections in April and July, respectively.
From the International Herald Tribune: Indonesia's top Islamic body meets at the weekend for what looks set to be a hot theological debate on a range of issues including whether Muslims should be allowed to smoke, abstain from voting or even do yoga.
Officially secular, Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, accounting for roughly 85 percent of the country's 226 million people. Most follow a moderate form of Islam, although there is vocal radical fringe.
About 700 people, including Muslim clerics and theological experts, are due in West Sumatra for the National Edict Commission meeting, which has the power to issue fatwas.
"There will be debate before we reach conclusions. We need to listen to the pros and cons and it's likely to be a hot debate," said Ma'ruf Amin, a chairman of the Ulema Council, known as MUI.
The MUI has carved a key role for itself in Indonesia and its pronouncements on everything from Islamic banking to halal food can have a big influence on Southeast Asia's top economy.
The fatwas are not legally binding but place pressure on Muslims to adhere to them and can influence government policy.
A call from some ulema, or religious councils, for a ban on smoking will be discussed at the meeting in Padang Panjang, around 870 km (540 miles) north west of the capital Jakarta.
The motion has also ready met opposition from councils in parts of east and central Java, where the tobacco industry is a key part of the economy.
Indonesia is the world's No. 5 tobacco market and at around $1 (73 pence) a pack, cigarettes are among the cheapest in the world.
Some cities in Indonesia, including Jakarta, have banned smoking in public places, but the rules are widely flouted.
The Ulema Council was established in 1975 under the influence of former autocratic president Suharto, backing his policy of trying to restrict families to having just two children despite opposition from some Muslims.
It has since reinvented itself in the post-Suharto era, with some members pushing a more radical agenda, including pressing the government to restrict some Muslim sects or liberal groups.
The weekend meeting will also debate whether Muslims should avoid yoga because of the view it uses Hindu prayers that could erode Muslims' faith.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi intervened last year to say that Muslims could carry on doing yoga minus chanting after its National Fatwa Council had issued a ban.
The Sumatra meeting will also debate whether abstaining from voting is "haram," or not allowed. Indonesia holds legislative and presidential elections in April and July, respectively.
Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president and leader of Indonesia's biggest Muslim group, Nahdlatul Ulama, has advised his supporters not to vote amid dissatisfaction with politics.
Underage marriage will also be debated after an Islamic cleric last year incited uproar when he married a 12-year old girl with her parents consent.
Jen'nan Read, professor of sociology at Duke University,said that not only did the whisper campaign about Obama being a closet Muslim fail, but that distribution in closely contested states of a video on Islamic extremism backfired.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - False rumors that Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim or had ties to Islamic extremism angered Muslim-Americans, who overwhelming supported him in Tuesday's presidential election, experts said on Thursday.
Unpublished polling data indicated that the Democratic President-elect got somewhere between 67 percent and 90 percent of the Muslim vote, probably nearer the higher end, Ahmed Younis of Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, said in a telephone briefing.
A "watershed" moment for U.S. Muslims occurred in mid-October, he said, when former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican who endorsed Obama, addressed the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors which had circulated for months, and condemned the idea that this would be a slur.
"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" Powell asked on NBC's "Meet the Press." "The answer's no, that's not America ... Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion 'he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.'"
Younis said that for U.S. Muslims Powell's comment capped a decades-long search "to become part and parcel of the nation."
Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though some believe that number is low.
Obama, whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was a white woman from Kansas, has the middle name Hussein, and lived for part of his childhood in predominantly Muslim Indonesia. He is a Christian.
Jen'nan Read, professor of sociology at Duke University, told the same briefing that not only did the whisper campaign about Obama being a closet Muslim fail, but that distribution in closely contested states of a video on Islamic extremism backfired.
Video backfired More than 20 million copies of a film called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" were included as advertising supplements in newspapers, distributed by a private group unaffiliated with Republican John McCain's campaign. The film features suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.
Read said the video was a subtle attempt to link Obama to Islamic extremists but many of the states where it was handed out "were strongholds of Muslim American voters" who were prompted to work for Obama.
"It may actually have brought out voters for Obama," she said.
But beyond that issue, she added, Muslim voters looked a lot like many other American voters. They moved away from the Republican party, which they had backed heavily in 2000 but less so in 2004 -- and voted their concerns for issues such as the economy and a desire for a change in leadership.
Mukit Hossain, executive director of the Muslim American Political Action Committee, said at the briefing that support for Obama among Muslims "changed dramatically" in the last three to four weeks of the campaign "when people started calling Obama a terrorist" in the crowds at Republican rallies.
He also said a concern for erosion of civil liberties since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, has driven Muslims away from the Republican party in recent years.
Although hard numbers are difficult to find, Hossain said from 2 million to 3 million Muslims were probably registered to vote in this year's election.
So, as a muslim American you decide to vote with the self-described party of values and patriotism. George Bush stood against all those nasty liberal innovations that offended thine eye. Bill Clinton's sexual peccadillos were vulgar and unseemly. Bush was a simple, man, a person of the book, who prayed and believed in god.
If you consider yourself a moral, spiritual muslim and you cast a vote for Bush, you voted against yourself, didn't you, since Bush is neither and has applied his true moral darkness to the work of the government with the consent of you, the governed. You can be consoled by your brothers and sisters in self-deception, the gay Republicans, who voted for a party that made destroying gays a centerpiece of its campaign.
And now comes the George Bush Inflation to further inflict our efforts to enjoin the good and forbid the evil. The Cunning Realist has a wonderfully descriptive bit up on his website now about the spiritual crisis of inflation, and it is well worth a read. CR writes:
