By Yasir Alimi Ibn Arabi, a great Sufi master, once said: “My heart became an image of every picture; it is the place for a Dervish to dance; it is a monastery for a monk to learn.

“It is a house for all or none to worship. It is a Ka’ba to make the pilgrimage. It is the ten commitments of Thora, it is the holy Koran — my religion is the religion of love. Wherever I direct my face it is love to God.”

By: Sudarto Murtaufiq Ahead of its 32nd congress in Makassar, the Indonesia's  largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), should  ideally introspect itself in addressing various obstacles  facing its followers (Nahdliyin) in such fields as politics,  economy, education, and so forth. In this regard, NU  should consider the importance of rethinking its genuine  values having so far been maintained and preserved in  Islamic boarding schools (pesantren). It is a fact that speaking about NU is inseparable from  speaking about pesantren and its all values and traditions  respectively. Factual-empirically, the majority of pesantren  are gathered under the Nahdlatul Ulama and of course  some of them have also been managed by  Muhammadiyah. Therefore, in order to know what is the  style and color of pesantren, we may observe them through character of the exponent of pesantren. For example, KH Hasyim Asyari who is also the founder of the Nahdliyin-based organization, or KH Ahmad Dahlan, the founder of  Muhammadiyah. 

By Abdul Kadir Riyadi*

The New Year season has come round again.  For many it is a time for party.  And it has become such a tradition that people in their million in this country –and around the globe- will participate in celebrating this seemingly happy occasion.

In this country the celebration of the New Year has become so popular that it is no longer the preserve of the affluent or of the educated among the intellectuals and civil servants.  The generation of our grandfather would probably not care of the New Year and of participating in its celebration.  But the world has changed and it seems that no one will dare to be left out in celebrating this annual festivity. 

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

“Change” was President Barak Obama's campaign slogan. The seven-million strong American Muslim community, firmly believing in his “change” slogan, voted overwhelmingly for him in the 2008 presidential elections with the hope that his administration would bring an end to their humiliation and sufferings they faced in the Bush era in the name of “war on terror.”

American Muslims were both pleased and surprised by President Obama’s inclusive words in his inaugural address, on January 20th, when he said America is "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers." Such words signaled Obama's recognition that Muslims are an important part of the American fabric.

By Hendrajit

The speech delivered by US President Barack Obama at Cairo University, Egypt, is very attractive, giving an impression that he is able to cultivate relationships with Islamic world. But if his speech is used to be such a means of being optimistic for creating peace in the Middle East, the international world seems to be disappointed.

The conflict between Islamic Arab and Israeli Jewish is a long dispute seeking a neutral stand from a country willing to be mediator or peacemaker to resolve the conflict between Israel and Arab Islamic countries. And US, at this point, is not a true peacemaker or a neutral mediator. US, in its history, has always sided with Israeli Jewish.

By David Miliband

A speech that was delivered May 21, 2009 at  Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies

Everybody is talking about reform in British politics. Rightly so. The integrity of our democratic institutions has been badly undermined. The need for renewal is urgent. It is, for that very reason, all the more ironic that my case today rests on the importance of politics. I want to argue that the foreign policy questions that unite this country and Muslim majority countries turn on the idea of mutual respect conducted through politics.

Many learned people have stood in this hall and spoken of the values that are shared between the Abrahamic faiths. That is not my purpose today. I am a politician not a preacher or a religious scholar. I want to talk, I hope in a spirit of humility and respect, from my perspective as Foreign Secretary, about the political process of building coalitions and winning consent overseas for foreign policy goals. This question does not only arise in respect of our relations with Muslim majority countries, but today I want to explore how we, the British government, work with those, in Muslim countries, governments and people, whose values we may not entirely share.  This speech does not address how we approach these issues at home.

By Fikrul Umam MS

It has constitutionally been stated that the state of Indonesia is based on religion. It means that Indonesia protects and respects religious life of its entire citizens. Based on socio-cultural aspects, it seems that Indonesia is the state which is based on the belief in the one and only God. Indonesian socio-cultural life has strongly been influenced and colored by religious values. At this point the religious life is almost inseparable from Indonesian life.

As a state basing itself on religion, religious education can not be put aside within the national education implementation. Religious adherents along with various religious institutions in Indonesia constitute a nation potential to address the Indonesian physical and material developments. All this is appropriate with the national development goals, namely achieving total human development and a just and prosperous society based on Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution. That is why, religion is again inseparable from the implementation of the national education.

By Ismatillah A. Nu’ad

The political advertisement on television launched by the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) to commemorate the Youth Pledge Day last October was considered by the followers of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah to have stained the reputation and the dignity of the religious organizations' founding fathers, namely KH Hasyim Asy'ari and KH Ahmad Dahlan. In this regard, the ad was really to political interest in nature. Ideally, if the PKS has a good willingness for showing photographs of the prominent men as the source of inspiration for young generations, it should not base its ad on the figures in the name of party. As consequence the ad was fully littered with political interest.

Since their establishment or by referring to their initial principles (Khittah), NU and Muhammadiyah, the Indonesia's largest Muslim organizations, have not been political organizations. Rather, they have been such mass cultural organizations whose specifically orientation to education and dakwa (preaching). Sine the beginning, both Hadrotus Sheikh KH Hasyim Asy'ari and KH Ahmad Dahlan have had no such political orientations except in dealing with education and preaching. (Nakamura 1989, Bowen 1985)

By Sudarto Murtaufiq

Peace for the whole world in the post cold war era has not been materialized despite the fact that ‘the freedom from and the freedom to’ jargon has always been relentlessly voiced. Hegemonies, hostility, calamity, and the ignorance of humanity which are the significant factors of world injustice have contributed to the current deteriorating conflicts.

We know that the conflicts are inseparable from human life. Amid the stream of global change, humankind is facing a big challenge, namely, different interests that have always been settled with violence and even war. The conflicts have become common features in many countries. For instance, religious and ethnic conflict in Sudan and US invasion to Iraq have, admitted or not, claimed lives of more than thousands people and displaced many others.