Hundreds of people from the Indonesian Mujahidin Council (MMI) attacked participants attending the book discussion. The mob broke down the door to the office which the organizer had closed for safety reasons.
Participants remained at the conference with some circling the squatting Irshad to cover her. The mob vandalized the publisher’s office and tore sheets of Irshad’s books that were displayed for sale.
The MMI said Irshad’s so-called liberty and lesbianism propaganda was blasphemous toward Islam and that her teachings represented covert atheist propaganda. They also considered all those who facilitated Irshad’s event in Indonesia to be enemies of religion and the state.
Ugandan-born Irshad Manji is an advocate of “reformist and progressive” interpretations of Islamic teachings. In 2008 Irshad Manji visited Jakarta and Yogyakarta to discuss her first book entitled Faith without Fear: The Challenge for Muslims Today. Her newest book, Allah, Liberty and Love, praises Indonesia as an example of a place where pluralistic Islam can be upheld.
“However a lot of things have changed,” she told Tempo on Thursday morning. Manji, her assistant and several participants suffered minor injuries as a result of the physical attacks. Last Friday, the discussion of Manji’s book Allah, Liberty and Love at the Salihara cultural center in Jakarta was disrupted by authorities who questioned the organizer’s permit to invite a foreign national.
Dozens of people protested Irshad's book tour because she is openly gay and believes Islam should accept homosexuality.
On Saturday, Manji successfully attended a discussion hosted by the Alliance of Independence Journalists’s (AJI) Jakarta branch under the protection of Banser NU, a youth wing of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. Before her Salihara speech was interrupted by the police, Manji had mentioned that compared to her last visit in 2008, she felt that there were “more conservative groups in the country this year”. (asa)
