Menchik in NYT: Tolerance in Indonesia
Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that Indonesian Muslim organizations could set an example for religious tolerance in the devout nation.
Menchik made the argument in a Dec. 22 article in the New York Times entitled “Transgender Muslims Find a Home for Prayer in Indonesia.”
From the text of the article:
Jeremy Menchik, an assistant professor in the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and the author of “Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance Without Liberalism,” says that Indonesia challenges common assumptions about where tolerance comes from. “The general idea is the more tolerant individuals will be the more urban, educated, liberal and secular,” he said. “What’s interesting about Indonesia is among the organizations I study, NU, the traditionalist one, the rural one, the conservative one, is the most tolerant.”
You can read the entire article here.
Menchik’s research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. His book Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press and explains the meaning of tolerance to the leaders of the world’s largest Islamic organizations in order to understand how their values shape politics in a Muslim-majority democracy. Learn more about him here.