Word: muslims
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...privacy of their own homes. "Some people say we should just follow our Indonesian traditions, where women wore revealing clothing," says KPPSI's Hasan. "But many of our traditions are not on the true path of Islam. We must correct that." As for southern Sulawesi's non-Muslim minority, who are required to wear headscarves if they want to enter civil service, Hasan says, "It's just like any uniform, where you wear a shirt of a specific color. There's no problem...
...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, even government leaders, accountable," says Muchsin Noor, a cleric who runs a pesantren in West...
...credited mandatory head-to-ankle attire for female students with a reduction in mosquito-borne dengue fever. "If you have people from non-Islamic parties pushing for Shari'a, then it doesn't matter how popular the Islamic parties are," says Hamid Basyaib, program director of the moderate Muslim Freedom Institute in Jakarta. "The radicals have already...
...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...
...There are 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...