Jural Tradition, Islam, and the Constitutional Clause on the Rights of Religious Minorities in Indonesia: Pitfalls or Congruences?

Indonesia has always witnessed religious tension. With Islam as the majority religion, religion and the state have always gone hand in hand with the social, legal, and political development of the country. In Indonesia, Islam generally relies on jural tradition whereas the state is more concerned with constitutionalism and internationalism. In the last two decades, the constitutionalism of human rights has progressed significantly while the jural tradition displayed the opposite trend. The present article examines the extent to which jural tradition, and the Indonesian Constitution share common grounds concerning the rights of religious minorities and what the role of the state should be in mitigating tensions between the two to protect them. Only scant attention has been paid to the link between jural tradition, Islam, and constitutionalism while jural tradition has become the precedent in the legal and human rights realm in Indonesia.