Review: Chaedar Alwasilah’s Islam, Culture, and Education: Essays on contemporary Indonesia

Religious radicalism, ethnic clashes, racial slurs, a corrupt mentality and state indifference to a multicultural life has become the banal reality of the modern era, especially in Indonesia.

For the naysayers, these social ailments are considered the symptoms of a failed state — a state resembling Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature” where brutishness always prevails and finds fertile ground.