Word: jakarta
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...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...
...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. So, too, the mayor of Padang city in western Sumatra, who credited mandatory head-to-ankle attire for female students with a reduction in mosquito-borne dengue fever...
...women are serving three-year prison terms for running Christian kindergarten classes also attended by Muslim children. "Sometimes we have to defend the community's morality by force," says Sobri Lubis, spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front (claimed membership: 5 million), which has carried out thuggish antivice raids on Jakarta nightclubs and whose spiritual leader Habib Rizieq said last November that assassinating U.S. President George W. Bush was religiously permissible. "If a soldier kills his enemy," says Lubis, "would you call that violence...
...which are located in traditionally conservative regions like southern Sulawesi or West Java. The moderates admit they face a rhetorical disadvantage in their spiritual battle. "Salafi Islam is attractive because it says that if you are not rewarded in this lifetime, you will be rewarded in the next," says Jakarta scholar Anwar, who as a student leader around the time of the Iranian revolution considered himself radical, then later gravitated toward a more moderate faith. "It's hard to compete against that ideology. Being moderate is more subtle and complex. It's harder to sell...
...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 and alleged jihadis in the central Sulawesi city of Poso resulted in 16 deaths...