Word: indonesia
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...Padang, while another was kicked out of the village for stealing. "In 2005, we used to have an incidence of theft almost every day, but not anymore," says Abdul Jabbar. Now, village elders are considering barring wedding singers from wearing skimpy clothing and dancing suggestively-a common occurrence at Indonesia's marriage ceremonies. "People can dance with their fingers instead," suggests village cleric Leleng, wiggling his index fingers in demonstration. His wife Wayuni says only 5% of girls wore headscarves in high school when she was growing up. Now it's mandatory, and many women wear the covering even...
...spread of Shari'a laws has come not by diktat from Jakarta but from the grassroots. A series of reforms implemented since 2001 has made Indonesia's regions more autonomous, giving local leaders unprecedented power in what, under Suharto, had been a deeply centralized nation. The bottom-up emergence of the faith-based laws lends legitimacy to those who say 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...
...Local leaders who have implemented the bylaws-a process that does not require public participation-are hardly restricted to members of Indonesia's Islamic political parties. Although these parties only captured 20% of the vote in the 2004 general election, Indonesia's secularized, nationalist parties are careful not to alienate what is believed to be an increasingly influential Islamic vote. The regent of Cianjur comes from a nationalist party, as does the mayor of Tangerang, a Jakarta suburb where women out alone after sunset have been arrested as prostitutes even though they were just commuting home from work...
...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...
...President surely knows the risks of radicalism. Foreign direct investment fell 46% year-on-year between January and November 2006, with one visiting European Parliament legislator blaming the rash of Shari'a bylaws for turning investors off. The specter of violence, too, acts to dampen foreign interest in Indonesia. The indigenous terror group Jemaah Islamiah-an organization linked to al-Qaeda that is blamed for hundreds of bombing deaths in Bali and Jakarta since 2002-doesn't have broad appeal among Indonesians, and its infrastructure has been battered by a number of recent arrests. But in January, clashes between police...