Word: clericalism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...they represent a Muslim majority that was never well served by the capital's secularized-and often corrupt-political ?lite. "People in Jakarta may not understand this, but Shari'a is the aspiration of the people, because it makes everyone, even government leaders, accountable," says Muchsin Noor, a cleric who runs a pesantren in West Java's Cianjur regency, where Shari'a bylaws were officially implemented last year. But it is precisely the scattered nature of the bylaws' propagation that has made a concerted defense by moderate Muslims so difficult. "Because this conservatism is creeping in at the local level...
...Those who have the most to lose are the millions of Indonesians who are either non-Muslim or belong to heterodox Islamic sects. In 2005, the nation's ruling clerics prohibited interfaith marriage and prayer. The Indonesia Ulema Council also renewed an edict deeming heretical the Islamic sect Ahmadiyah, which claims up to 500,000 members. In the past year, several Ahmadiyah mosques have been forcibly closed or destroyed by mobs, as have dozens of Christian house churches. Separately, a Muslim cleric in East Java was jailed for preaching in Indonesian, as opposed to the normal Arabic. In West Java...
...some signs, moreover, that the drift toward radicalism is, at last, prompting action by the nation's central institutions. Last year, the Indonesian parliament quietly shelved a controversial antipornography bill that could have criminalized public kissing and forms of traditional dance. And in December, after a popular Muslim cleric announced that he had joined a growing trend of flouting national law by taking a second wife, President Yudhoyono spoke out against polygamy-even though the Koran permits it in certain circumstances. The President surely knows the risks of radicalism. Foreign direct investment fell 46% year-on-year between January...
...there are clear signs that Iraq's malice has an echo in other parts of the Middle East, exacerbating existing tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ites and reanimating long-dormant ones. In Lebanon, some Hizballah supporters seeking to topple the government in Beirut chant the name of radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is blamed for thousands of Sunni deaths. In Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, sympathy for Sunnis in Iraq is spiked with the fear, notably in official circles, of a Shi'ite tide rising across the Middle East, instigated and underwritten...
...himself and several of his top commanders are believed to have left for Iran. But few in Baghdad doubt that he will be back. "He is just bending to the wind because he knows his fighters can't face the Americans," says Hussain al-Moed, a rival Shi'ite cleric. "But he also knows that the Americans will leave. The Mahdi Army can afford to wait." Sunni jihadis have kept up their bombing campaign despite the security operation--and if they continue to strike against Shi'ite neighborhoods, the Mahdi Army may return to the fight...