Kamilia Hamidah is the Director of Centre for Peace Promotion of the Institute Pesantren Mathali’ul Falah Pati Central Java, Indonesia, which focuses on promoting, educating, and training peaceful values. Over the last two years, she has been a trainer and programme coordinator for several peacebuilding trainings, capacity building trainings and training of trainers for peace facilitators – all with the important shared component of teaching the value of understanding religious differences.

For more than ten years she has served as one of the board members of www.pesantrenvirtual.com, which has more than 100,000 daily visitors. She has been invited to speak at several conferences and forums on gender, human rights and Islamic Sharia. Recently, she was a speaker at the International Seminar on Sharia and Human Rights, Conflict and Coexistence in the Contemporary Muslim Society hosted by the Department of Sharia and Law of the State Islamic University Jakarta. She was one of the authors of the book “Konflik Intra dan Antar Agama” (Inter-intra Religious Conflict).

In addition, she speaks on community development, including community economic development planning, social development and policy planning, sociology of the rural and paradigm and theories of social change. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in theology and comparative religions and her master’s degree in politics and international relations from the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan. Her motto is “transcendental piety should go hand in hand with social piety and sincerity is the essence to keep the balance between the two.”