Response paper to Religious community and Peacebuilding (Peace and Violence in Religion )

Religious community has important role for Peacebuilding because of the power of their understanding about non-violence teaching and location in the whole world and teaching that contain much violence from the understandings until practices of religious teaching they do.

The power of understanding non-violence religious teaching can be traced from the text or tradition they have. I do believe that there is no violence teaching which would be basis of violence action. For instance, Islam understands Jihad more as an internal struggle from our own desire (in Arabic word: nafs), not for killing each other. When Islam command us for killing, it must be a reaction for the injustice condition we get from the other, and still that it is a final action, not a first reaction. This teaching can manifest in the tradition of the history of Islamic community when they always do non-violence as first choice and do violence of the last choice.

The location of religious community also contributes to the importance of religious community’s role. This location as defined by Heather Dubois on Religion and Peacebuilding plays in the two areas: first is in the religious teaching itself, second is from the geographic place. The religious actor has a special access for their teaching of religion, such as official understanding, ritual or community’s segregation. We have to realize when we believe that religious violence arises from the understanding of religious teaching so the most important solution must emerge from the value of religion itself. It is impossible to use another word from another “location” as a source for resolving this problem. Religious beliefs and understanding must be encountered by other religious of that itself, because actually religion always gives the basis of truth and belief.

Geographic location can be seen as the advantage of religious community because many religions have spread on most of areas in the whole world. It is potential chance for spreading the von-violence action. This will ease the efforts of peacebuilding by three categories: in internal religious actor who has same religion, in building relationship between two different religions, and the last is between religious community and other group of society or state.

Although the terminology of peacebuilding is still debatable between scholars, peacebuilding is more important to be a practical things then academic debates. The religious community as one of the group of society which is more related to violence must take place for especially resolving non-violence based on understanding of religious teaching. Based on my limited understanding about many papers, we will never doubt that religious actor or community can play the important role of peacebuilding.