Indonesian Islamic Students’ Fear of Demographic Changes: The Nexus of Arabic Education, Religiosity, and Political Preferences
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article does not make clear enough how the hypothesis with the Arabic language comes about. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand the logic bij the examples and the hypothesis.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
RESPONSE PAPER
Reviewer’s note: The article does not make clear enough how the hypothesis with the Arabic language comes about. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand the logic by the examples and the hypothesis.
Authors’ Response: We have read the attached pdf document containing the detail of your corrections. We thank you for the detailed comments on our manuscript. We have made several additions or rewritings as in:
- The abstract is slightly altered to accommodate simple reasonings of our study
- Your comment on page 1, paragraph 2 regarding the Arabic course in Islamic science is slightly different in Indonesia Islamic university. The Islamic state university in Indonesia embraces Islamic teaching and modern science integration. Thus, all faculties are given mandatory Islamic courses, e.g., Arabic, fiqh, hadith, etc., alongside the conventional teachings like pharmacy, business, politics. This policy marks the effort to knowledge Islamization in the context of Indonesia.
- We have revised hypothesis 3 and added an extra paragraph to justify it.
- As for hypotheses 6-9, we have added an extra paragraph to justify the prepositions.
- We have deleted the repeated writings in the discussion section, paragraph 5.
- Your concerns regarding the logical structures of paragraph 6 in the discussion section are correct. We have altered the writings with a more focus on the corresponding hypothesis.
- Other potential confusing words have also been revised, with several paragraphs.
We wish these revisions could meet your requirements. We wish you good health.
Kind regards,
Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The level of English is so low that the effort required to follow the presentation prevents a fair evaluation of the potential value of the research in your article.
Please clarify the relationship between learning (standard?) Arabic (how much?) and the "mastery" of Arabic the understanding of the Holy Qur'an. Just a few words may indeed contribute to strengthen Islamic identity, something that could potentially be different from understanding the holy scriptures.
The issue of pluralisme is of course fundamental. Please clarify if and how learning some Arabic contributes to pluralism.
Author Response
RESPONSE PAPER
The reviewer's comments:
The level of English is so low that the effort required to follow the presentation prevents a fair evaluation of the potential value of the research in your article.
The authors' response:
We admit that our proposal required extensive language corrections. Thus, we proofread our paper and revised potentially-confusing sentences and paragraphs to flow the readings better. For example, we revise the abstract to present a better argument for the study's objectives. We added an extra paragraph highlighting the mandatory Islamic teaching in the Islamic state universities in Indonesia as on pages 2, paragraphs 2 & 3.
The reviewer's comments:
Please clarify the relationship between learning (standard?) Arabic (how much?) and the "mastery" of Arabic the understanding of the Holy Qur'an. Just a few words may indeed contribute to strengthening Islamic identity, which could be different from understanding the holy scriptures.
The authors' response:
We have added an extra paragraph before presenting hypotheses 1-3. These additions highlight the potential conversation between translating the Quran and the science of interpretations. We have added the potential problems of hardliner interpretations. We wish this revision could meet your comments.
The reviewer's comments:
The issue of pluralism is of course fundamental. Please clarify if and how learning some Arabic contributes to pluralism.
The authors' response:
We have added the conversation of pluralism in the Islamic agenda as in the discussion section, page 10, paragraphs 3 & 4. We wish these revisions could meet your requirements.
We thank you for your comments on our paper. We wish these changes could increase our paper's readability.
Kind regards,
Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
No further comments.
It remains difficult to relate knowledge of a language to attidue. It is more about how the text/language is read and interpreted
Author Response
RESPONSE PAPER
Reviewer’s note: It remains difficult to relate knowledge of a language to attidue. It is more about how the text/language is read and interpreted
Authors’ Response: We thank you for your comments. As Indonesian Islamic Universities are given the Arabic mandatory course, the resulting knowledge may result in the formation of further text interpretations, compared to the normally-provided translations. This specific link prompts us to undertake this study. Otherwise, we slightly alter the paragraph 2 in the page 1, introduction section to accommodate the knowledge, attitude, and interpretations conversation.
We wish these revisions could meet your requirements. We wish you good health.
Kind regards,
Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The new version has sorted some problems but the improvements are not devoid of English infelicities.
For instance at p. 3:
“As a religion’s identity, the Arabic language..” now is “As a religion identity, the Arabic language...”. I suppose what is meant is that, “As the expression of Islam, the Arabic language contributes to the diffusion of social-political differentiation...” whatever these last words mean in practice.
“Moroccon” should be “Moroccans”
Scandinavia is not a country by countries
“The revivalism of the purist with the selection over a strict interpretation in the scriptures has led to the emergence of the hardline movement”. Unclear but one gets the general idea.
Page 9:
“A cross-country study reports that people with a tendency toward social conservatism would instead maximize the use of nouns, as evidenced in Poland, Arabic, or English speakers” What nouns?
Unless I am mistaken (always a possibility), the new version seems to argue that the acquisition of Arabic opens the possibility for Indonesian students to read radical Islamic literature that is not available in translation in their native or national languages (pages 4 and 9). As this literature is against LGBT, abortion and foreigners, this (obviously) affects their attitudes and political stances in favor of social conservatism.
So this is what I could figure out from page 10:
high conservatism = more fear
more Arabic = less fear of foreigners?
But then, I read “The pluralistic view in the Islamic expression in Indonesia may become the reason for how being religious decreases the tendency to fear demographic changes. Thus, this finding supports the role of Islamic religiosity as the constraining factor over the excessive use of the Arabic language in the negative propaganda.”
Here it is not the mastery of the Arabic language but religiosity that decreases fear, whereas mastery of Arabic allows exposure to radical propaganda and thus increases fear or at least the desire to resist liberal views.
If so the question is the correlation between Arabic acquisition and religiosity.
The major issue then is not so much the acquisition of the Arabic language but the access it opens to radical Islamic ideas, to which the authors oppose Islamic religiosity.
I am not qualified to evaluate the statistical part of the study, but maybe there are just too many hypotheses and the study might gain clarity by reducing that number and formulate them in sharper way, for instance Hypothesis 6 (not Hypotheses) to 9.
Author Response
RESPONSE PAPER
The reviewer's comments:
The new version has sorted some problems but the improvements are not devoid of English infelicities.
For instance at p. 3:
“As a religion’s identity, the Arabic language..” now is “As a religion identity, the Arabic language...”. I suppose what is meant is that, “As the expression of Islam, the Arabic language contributes to the diffusion of social-political differentiation...” whatever these last words mean in practice.
“Moroccon” should be “Moroccans”
Scandinavia is not a country by countries.
The authors' response:
We thank you for the raised flags against our language. We have submitted our paper to get further polishing from the proof-reader. We wish this effort could minimize the potential problems from language delivery in the manuscript.
The reviewer's comments:
“The revivalism of the purist with the selection over a strict interpretation in the scriptures has led to the emergence of the hardline movement”. Unclear but one gets the general idea.
Page 9:
“A cross-country study reports that people with a tendency toward social conservatism would instead maximize the use of nouns, as evidenced in Poland, Arabic, or English speakers” What nouns?
The authors' response:
We have rearranged the paper structure to minimize the potential confusion from our arguments. We have also added further examples of the “nouns” as evident in the Chicocka et al. (2016). We wish this addition could meet your points.
The reviewer's comments:
Unless I am mistaken (always a possibility), the new version seems to argue that the acquisition of Arabic opens the possibility for Indonesian students to read radical Islamic literature that is not available in translation in their native or national languages (pages 4 and 9). As this literature is against LGBT, abortion and foreigners, this (obviously) affects their attitudes and political stances in favor of social conservatism.
So this is what I could figure out from page 10:
high conservatism = more fear
more Arabic = less fear of foreigners?
But then, I read “The pluralistic view in the Islamic expression in Indonesia may become the reason for how being religious decreases the tendency to fear demographic changes. Thus, this finding supports the role of Islamic religiosity as the constraining factor over the excessive use of the Arabic language in the negative propaganda.”
Here it is not the mastery of the Arabic language but religiosity that decreases fear, whereas mastery of Arabic allows exposure to radical propaganda and thus increases fear or at least the desire to resist liberal views.
If so the question is the correlation between Arabic acquisition and religiosity.
The major issue then is not so much the acquisition of the Arabic language but the access it opens to radical Islamic ideas, to which the authors oppose Islamic religiosity..
The authors' response:
Thank you for giving us a further look on our paper’s argument. Our recently-revised paper is being presented on the condition that while learning something anew is excellent, by this case the Arabic language, it exposes the students toward the tendency to use the newly-acquired language to stress their religious identity. This is evident by the extensive use of words, e.g., ikhwan, akhwat, mumtaz, sister-fillah, jazakallahu khairan katsira, and so forth in the conversation. Some salafy-based groups even create the posts in the Instagram, highlighting the higher stance of this word acquisition than the traditional language.
Thus, our paper clearly divides the language and the religiosity itself, with an argument, that a complete understanding of the message in the Al-Hujurat 13, that being different is a God-given gift is a foundation to the expected religiosity. The emphasizes over exclusivity is against the spirit of the Islam; thus, being religious may render the fear attitude toward changes lower, per our statistical finding. We wish this argument may meet you agenda.
The reviewer's comments:
I am not qualified to evaluate the statistical part of the study, but maybe there are just too many hypotheses and the study might gain clarity by reducing that number and formulate them in sharper way, for instance Hypothesis 6 (not Hypotheses) to 9.
The authors' response:
We followed your recommendation by deleting the hypothesis 7-9. We did not delete the hypothesis 6, given its critical position in our statistical test, and the supports of previous articles discussing the said relationships. We hope these changes may meet your raised points. We wish you a good health.
Kind regards,
Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
In the discussion section (4.), it would be very helpful to repeat the hypothesis formulation instead of merely pointing to its number. Otherwise the reader has to go back to pages 3-4.
Author Response
The Reviewer's comment:
In the discussion section (4.), it would be very helpful to repeat the hypothesis formulation instead of merely pointing to its number. Otherwise the reader has to go back to pages 3-4.
The authors' comment.
Thank you for the raised points. We have slightly modified our discussion section by mentioning each hypothesis formulation accordingly, per your recommendation. We wish you good health.
Authors.
