Dewi was born with a physical impairment and raised by a family who believed she was able to participate fully in the day-to-day activities of the family and the community. With the encouragement and support of her family, Dewi completed her education and is now the leader of the local branch of the Indonesian Association of Women with Disabilities, where she campaigns for the rights of other Indonesians with disability. By creating the conditions for Dewi to be educated and by supporting and encouraging her independence, her family challenged how most Indonesians think of people with disability—as being highly dependent, to be pitied and needing charity.

Stories like Dewi's are part of the reason that disability activists in Indonesia have campaigned so energetically for changes to how disability is conceptualised, legislated and funded by government organisations. For decades, being disabled in Indonesia, as in many other parts of the world, was seen as an impediment, a source of pity and a driver of acts of charity. This ‘welfare’ approach to disability was premised on the understanding that the source of the problem faced by people with disability was their impairments, and that support for people with disability was best delivered in the form of rehabilitation to ‘fix’ their impairments or through payments or other forms of charity. Over the course of the 1990s, the work of disability activists in the global north contributed to a significant shift in how disability was conceptualised, and therefore how support for people with disability was best delivered. The social model of disability, which places the onus of the problem not on the individual living with disability but rather on the social structures that make it difficult for those with disability to participate in society, has become the foundation for how disability is understood globally and, in turn, for how policy related to people with disability is formulated.

Minorities have been a volatile phenomenon in Indonesia's social and political history for centuries. Over time, minority identity has been shaped by the imperatives of trade, by ideas of ritual purity and power, by ethnicity, by national allegiance, by religious affiliation and by lack of access to the full privileges of citizenship. Older forms of identity have existed alongside, and have sometimes intersected with, newer forms.

In today's world, we are accustomed to seeing minorities as disadvantaged. To belong to a minority is to have less than full acceptance as a citizen in the state where one belongs. It is to be treated, at least in some respects, as being alien in one's own country. The consequences of minority status range from neglect, social marginalisation and legal discrimination to forced assimilation, exclusion, expulsion and even extermination. In understanding minorities as communities under siege by their host societies, we quite correctly invoke the language of human rights and we propose remedies underpinned by law and education. If we are to chart a way forward, however, we need to understand that, historically, minority status has sometimes delivered advantage to the minorities themselves and to the host community. Minority status in Indonesia has been the product of complex social and political forces that have shifted over time. Minorities change character and sometimes disappear as historical circumstances change. We are now in the midst of a major change in the configuration of Indonesia's minorities.

Two categories of minority—trading minorities and ritual minorities (that is, minorities defined by perceived ritual ‘impurity’)—were known in the Indonesian archipelago in early times. The more important were the foreign trading minorities. Living as small communities in the trading cities and towns of the archipelago, they prospered above all when their shared identity provided a basis for trust within the community and among similar communities elsewhere, permitting the exchange of credit and information that was crucial to commercial success (Cohen 1971). Social distance from the host community, and consequent immunity from broader social obligations, was also important. Max Weber, focusing on the example of the Jews in Europe, called such minorities ‘pariahs’, implying that they were driven into commerce by hatred and contempt on the part of host communities, but more recent research has highlighted the positive consequences of ethnic solidarity, not only in commerce but also in other occupations (Dobbin 1996; Light and Karageorgis 2005).

This chapter aims to provide a brief overview of aspects of the complex legal framework regulating the treatment of minorities in Indonesia. It shows that there is, in fact, no coherent framework for the protection of minorities. Instead, a range of laws apply different rules to different groups, sometimes conferring rights, sometimes denying them. Coverage is patchy and some minorities are ignored. Some of these laws are very new, some far too old. Overlap and inconsistency between them is common, and most minorities are left vulnerable to discriminatory treatment and abuse.

In fact, overall, the law regulating minorities reflects an all-too-common pattern of post-Suharto law reform. This began with aspirational, and often impressive, constitutional reform between 1999 and 2002, drawing on international conventions and norms. That was followed by detailed, and often heated, policy debate, usually led by civil society, which produced models for reform. These were often sophisticated, and in many cases were based on global standards. However, the laws and regulations eventually produced by the government or by the national legislature, the People's Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), were typically flawed or incomplete. They were often characterised by a lack of compliance measures and sanctions, and the key institutions given responsibility to administer the schemes created by the new laws were frequently weak.

The enforcement of these laws was then made still more problematic by a wicked mix of factors, including poor socialisation by the government of new laws and institutions, which too often left intact widespread ignorance and apathy about the law; covert (sometimes overt) resistance by parts of government and the bureaucracy to the policies that underpinned the new laws; absent, inadequate or fiercely contested budgets; incompetent or uninformed police, prosecutors and judges; and, of course, outright rent-seeking by government officials charged with implementing the new laws, across all levels of central and regional government.

In recent years, a growing culture of intolerant Muslim majoritarianism has created further problems, especially because of the hugely increased influence of the Indonesian Council of Religious Scholars (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI).

Indonesia's ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011 and the introduction of Law No. 8/2016 on People with Disabilities in 2016 require the government to shift its policy on people with disabilities from a medical- and charity-based approach to a rights-based approach. Among the many rights that are guaranteed by the Disability Law is the right for people with disabilities to receive an education (Article 5(1) and Article 10). The law requires the national government and local governments to provide accessible and inclusive education for all students from the primary through to the tertiary level. Three years after the adoption of the Disability Law, however, the education sector still awaited passage of the crucial government regulations (peraturan pemerintah) needed to guide its implementation. At the time of writing, the government had given no clear timeline for introducing those regulations.

In this chapter I will discuss Indonesia's efforts to include people with disabilities in education. I will focus in particular on the Islamic education sector, which constitutes about 30 per cent of the total education sector. Among other things, I will examine practices of inclusion, how Islamic higher-education institutions are working to increase participation for people with disabilities and how Muslims are exploring their faith to promote inclusion.

I began this research in 2015, looking at societal attitudes and processes of disability inclusion in Muslim communities. This research was prompted by the realisation that in a society where discrimination and exclusion are deeply entrenched, it is important to understand people's views on disability, because these can be a significant barrier to inclusive policies. A study by Miles (2002), for example, found that religious teachings can contribute to negative societal attitudes towards people with disabilities and be an impediment to inclusion. Research on disability inclusion in Islamic educational institutions may help us to identify the areas in need of improvement and to gain insights that can transform societal attitudes towards disability. The aim is to explore religious thought as a source of inspiration for societal change.

Looking at the efforts and level of enthusiasm of faith-based educational institutions to include people with disabilities allows us not only to understand policy development but also to learn about social change.

Most academic discussions on ethnic and religious minorities in Indonesia have focused either on the state's unilateral dominance over various minority groups or the resistance of those groups to state power. While revealing key aspects of ethno-religious conflict, such discourses can be misleading as they are based on two assumptions: first, that minority status equals disadvantage, and second, that in order to preserve their identities minorities have to actively confront the state. Although it is true that minorities do often find themselves in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis state power and/or an ethnic and religious majority, assuming that disadvantage is inherent to a minority status is erroneous. Moreover, an approach that focuses solely on active resistance, while ignoring other forms of identity negotiations, presents just a part of the story, albeit a very significant one.

I argue that minority status can signal an advantage, even privilege, over a majority of the country's population. I also argue that disregard of state power, often in the form of disregarding both obligations and rights, can be an effective way to preserve a distinct identity. The story of the Sindhis in Indonesia is precisely about advantage, and in some cases privilege, that has stemmed from ethnic minority status and global power dynamics. It is also a story of the generally neutral relations between the minority and the state when both had very few points of interaction and those rarely turned into pressure points. Overall, the relations between the Sindhi minority and the state do not fit into the commonly used frameworks of forced assimilation or targeted discrimination and marginalisation.

So who are the Sindhis in Indonesia? Originally from Sindh, the former territory of British India and currently part of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Sindhis claim Indian, rather than Pakistani, identity and maintain an exclusionist, endogamous way of life. They see business as the core of life, practise a form of Hinduism that is heavily influenced by Buddhism, Sikhism and Sufism, and constitute one of the wealthiest and most well-connected trading communities in the world, the Sindhayat (Markovits 2000). There are approximately 10,000 Sindhis in Indonesia, making them a tiny minority in a population of around 260 million. With very few conversions to Christianity or Islam, Hindu Sindhis are a ‘double minority’ in a largely Muslim population.

Disputes over places of worship (rumah ibadat) have become an increasingly common type of interreligious conflict in Indonesia in recent years, replacing the sectarian violence that racked areas such as Ambon (in Maluku) and Poso (in Central Sulawesi) during the early reformasi period (Panggabean, Alam and Ali-Fauzi 2010). Although conflict over sites of worship occurs mainly between Muslims and Christians, disputes within faith communities are also common, as when Sunni Muslim groups protested against the presence of Ahmadi mosques in West Java (Crouch 2014: 159). This type of conflict signifies the complexity of relationships between majority and minority religious groups in a plural and democratic Indonesia.

Statistics on disputes over places of worship can be found in the reports of institutions specialising in religious freedom, such as the Wahid Foundation (2017) and the Setara Institute (2018). Although these publications provide valuable data on violations of religious freedom, they seldom delve into how and why such incidents occur. In addition, their main focus is, understandably, on transgressions against religious freedom, such as attacks on houses of worship, rather than on incidents where religious tensions have been managed effectively and conflict has been avoided. Departing radically from these reports, Ali-Fauzi et al. (2012) investigated the factors that gave rise to complex cases involving church construction in the greater Jakarta region. They analysed the variety of influences in different cases, paying particular attention to why some were successfully resolved, resulting in the building of the church, whereas others led to protracted legal, political and sometimes physical conflicts, some of which still continue. Panggabean and Ali-Fauzi (2015), meanwhile, located disputes over places of worship in the context of religious freedom and the role of the state, particularly the police, in protecting the rights of religious minorities. Both of these publications emphasised the need to improve police effectiveness and increase the role of religious leaders and civil society organisations in supporting state agencies to maintain freedom of religion.

Building on these previous publications, in this chapter I will look specifically at the role played by the Interreligious Harmony Forum (Forum Kerukunan Umat Beragama, FKUB) in managing conflict. These forums were established by a joint regulation issued by the ministries of religious affairs and home affairs in 2006.