by JOE COCHRANE
St. Paul’s Church in Jakarta, Indonesia. About 90 percent of Indonesia’s 260 million people are identified as Muslim, but the country has a small, influential Christian population. PHOTO/Kemal Jufri/The New York Times
On a tree-lined side street in the Indonesian capital sits a colonial-era Protestant church with rustic wooden pews and stained-glass windows, and an antique pipe organ built into a large wall behind the altar.
Across the street is a modern, 100,000-square-foot mosque with towering arches at its entrances and a cavernous prayer area laid wall-to-wall with red carpet.
Despite their different faiths, the two houses of worship are friendly, helpful neighbors — and an example of pluralism in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation at a time of heightened fears over religious intolerance.
“We respect each other,” said Nur Alam, an imam at the Sunda Kelapa Grand Mosque, which opened in 1971. “If we never offend other people, then we will be respected.”
Across the street, Adriaan Pitoy is a pastor at St. Paul’s Church, which was built in 1936 under the Dutch colonial administration. “Our relationship is just one of many steps we take,” he said of the neighbors at the mosque. “We also go to other mosques to promote dialogue. Our relationship with our friends next door is normal.”
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For the two houses of worship, normal means sharing parking spaces during busier services: Friday Prayer for the mosque, Sunday service for the church. They also host interfaith dialogue sessions, and even volleyball tournaments. During Ramadan, the Muslim holy fasting month, the staff at St. Paul’s, some of whom are Muslim, carry boxes of food to the mosque for worshipers there to break their fast.
This type of religious harmony among neighboring houses of worship is evident not just in Jakarta, but across the Indonesian archipelago. About 90 percent of Indonesia’s 260 million people are identified as Muslim, but the country also has small but influential Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian populations.
Yet these friendly relations are regularly overshadowed by international news reports and social media posts about racial intolerance and fears of the “Islamization” of Indonesia.
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