Hundreds of Indonesian Muslims from Forum Umat Islam (FUI) shout slogans during a protest
Adek Berry / AFP / Getty Images
As Balinese sculptor Nyoman Nuarta reviews a video of his giant sculpture of three women being defaced with spray paint and torn down by a group of angry fundamentalist Muslim activists in west Java last month, a haunting parallel comes to mind. "We need to start developing a way to counter this kind of Talibanization," says the artist, one of the most prominent sculptors in Indonesia. "This is a bad precedent for artists in this country."
The controversial 15-meter statue had been standing for several years at the entrance to a housing complex in Bekasi, on the outskirts of Jakarta, without any kind of protest, until a group calling itself the Forum Umat Islam, or Islamic Community Forum, decried it as a depiction of the Holy Trinity. "They also said it was pornographic," recalls a baffled Nyoman, adding that all the figures were wearing traditional sarongs. "None of the accusations made sense." Maybe not, but on June 18, under intense pressure from the group, who believe a campaign of Christianization is taking place in the town, the local administration dismantled the bronze statue that had taken more than a year to erect. (See TIME's video "Indonesia's Green Gamble.")
Tiga Mojang (Three Women) may not have been standing as long as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the 6th century stone sculptures in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, but the sculpture is not the first work of Indonesian art to have been attacked by religious zealots. In 2004, a work depicting scantily clothed Adam and Eve was condemned by religious groups as pornographic. The subjects that appeared in the mixed-media work, by painter Agus Suwage and photographer Davy Linggar, were intimidated, and it was then removed from an exhibition at the Bank Indonesia Museum in Jakarta. And perhaps the most notorious attack took place in 1985, when extremists bombed Borobudur, the 8th century Buddhist monument in Central Java that is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest architectural wonders.
For Nyoman and other supporters of the arts, the dismantling of the work portends an ominous future for the country, whose Muslim majority is generally regarded as moderate and accepting of other faiths, and another example of fringe groups like the Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI, being allowed to take the law into their own hands. "This is thuggery under the guise of religion," legislator Rieke Diah Pitaloka says bluntly. "And the people in power are just letting it happen." In June, Rieke was leading a small talk with constituents in the province of East Java when it was broken up by a local group of Islamist vigilantes who accused her of holding a meeting with clandestine Communist Party supporters. "They are trying to chip away at Pancasila by passing all of these Shari'a-based bylaws in various provinces," she added. Pancasila is the nation's basic philosophy rooted in five principles espoused by founding father Sukarno. "There is an effort to change the ideology of Indonesia." (See a slideshow on an Indonesian noodle factory.)
Rapid urbanization and widespread unemployment have driven millions from the countryside to seek work in Jakarta and the surrounding suburbs, often changing religious dynamics in the affected communities. Bekasi is just one of the areas around the capital that is becoming more conservative and facing growing demands to pass Shari'a-based legislation to deal with the spread of gambling and prostitution and, in some cases, the perceived threat of Christianization. "In Indonesia we have a majority with a minority complex," explains Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a political analyst at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. "They believe that Islam is being undermined" by a more liberal environment that has allowed greater freedom of expression, including for minorities.
Whatever the underlying causes may be, critics of the latest attacks point to a common thread: the failure of the government to intervene. Indonesia has long had hard-line elements committed to Islamic law, whether it was the Darul Islam movement trying to establish an Islamic state in the 1950s or the Padri movement of the 19th century trying to abolish the matrilineal culture of west Sumatra. "The difference now is that there is an enabling environment," adds Anwar. "There are also political parties that share the same goal."(Read an interview about an Indonesian film on Obama's childhood.)
Rieke, who represents the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, has called on the government and police to take action and stop the momentum building among vigilante groups, whose members already number in the thousands around the country. "A moral movement is not enough," she asserts. "People need to speak up or else they too could become victims." Others are calling on civil society to get involved. "We need to use the incident in Bekasi to build an opposition," proposes Nono Anwar Makarim, a prominent lawyer in Jakarta. "The problem is much bigger than the statue."
With the giant statue still lying in pieces, there is little hope that it will be rebuilt or relocated. Still, few expect the nation's strong arts community to take any hit to their freedom of expression lying down. "Ultimately, Suharto wasn't able to stamp out the artists or controversial art, nor could the economic crisis of 1998," says Mikke Susanto, a lecturer at the Institute of Fine Arts in Yogyakarta, referring to the former authoritarian President of 32 years. "Today's extremists are dangerous but I think our artists will survive them as well."
The Nahdlatul Ulama congress in Makassar arrests the slide away from liberal views but shows the organisation's vulnerability to outside political interference
Martin van Bruinessen
'From the pesantren for Indonesia’
Jeremy Menchik
There was much relief at the outcome of the leadership elections on the final day of Nahdlatul Ulama's 32nd Congress last March. A destructive struggle for the position of Rois Aam, the 'spiritual' leader of the organisation, had threatened to divide the organisation. It had been warded off when the politically ambitious Hasyim Muzadi bowed out at the last moment, leaving this most prestigious position to the incumbent, the venerable Kiai Sahal Mahfudh. The two-stage election of a new chairperson of the executive (the position held by Hasyim Muzadi for the past two terms) had been full of surprises, including the early defeat of the man who had run the best media campaign, Salahuddin Wahid, and the unexpectedly strong showing of Golkar politician Slamet Effendy Yusuf. As a result, the victory of Said Aqil Siradj felt like a victory for the world of the pesantren over outside political interests.
'We had a lot of turbulence, but you see: in the end we made a smooth landing,' one of the senior kiai told me, and at that moment I was inclined to agree with him; NU appeared to have protected itself from too overt political interference. But there were to be a few more surprises before the plane reached the gate.
As Indonesia's largest civil association (and arguably the largest Muslim organisation in the world), Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) remains by its sheer size a force that politicians have to take into account. The major contenders in Indonesia's power struggles generally try to gain its support or at least goodwill. Originally established as an association of traditionalist Islamic scholars (ulama or kiai) who typically lead traditional Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren, NU was, upon Indonesia's independence, transformed into a political party. Later, in 1984, it became a cultural-religious association of moderate views credibly claiming to represent tens of millions of followers.
The dual character of the organisation - an association of ulama and a mass organisation with a large constituency - is reflected in the dual board, in which an ulama council (Syuriyah) led by the Rois Aam is supposed to oversee the chairperson and other managers of the executive (Tanfidziyah). During recent years, the relationship between these two bodies deteriorated as Hasyim Muzadi drew the organisation into political adventures, overriding the objections of Kiai Sahal Mahfudh. The latter's victory at the congress can be interpreted as a strong statement that ulama, not politicians, should hold supreme authority in the organisation and that practical political interests should be kept at a distance. Paradoxically, however, this victory was probably also largely due to outside political interference.
During the past decade, NU had also begun to depart from some of the liberal religious views it had upheld during the 1990s, as part of a general trend towards expression of more 'fundamentalist' religious views that can also be observed in other Muslim organisations. Both Kiai Sahal and Hasyim Muzadi had in fact endorsed this trend, and young NU intellectuals and activists were deeply concerned about the future of liberal and progressive thought in the organisation. In this respect, the congress reaffirmed NU's ability to accommodate widely different views; liberals and progressives found a modest representation in the new board, alongside traditionalists and conservatives.
NU under Hasyim Muzadi
There were good reasons to believe, as many did, that the congress could be decisive for the course of NU in the coming decades, notably its ability to accommodate the expectations and demands of the more highly educated segment of the younger generation. At the previous congress, in 2004, the organisation had moved significantly away from the support for 'liberal' and 'progressive' Islamic thought that had been associated with Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as Gus Dur) during his leadership of the organisation in 1984-1999. Hasyim Muzadi, who had succeeded Abdurrahman in 1999 (with more than a little endorsement by the latter), had soon fallen out with his predecessor and shown himself a very different type of leader: a more effective organiser and fund-raiser perhaps, but socially and religiously conservative.
Hasyim distrusted the young activists who had grown up under Gus Dur's protection and placed his own trusted people in control of the organisation at all levels. He adopted a populist, moderately anti-Western discourse and tended to ally himself with the more conservative factions of the military and political establishment. The 2004 congress, at which he secured his re-election, adopted a firm position of rejecting 'liberal' thought, declaring especially the Jakarta-based Liberal Islam Network (JIL) to be at odds with the NU worldview, and by implication also rejecting many of the other NU-affiliated NGOs that challenged established practices and ideas.
The shift in NU was part of a broader conservative turn in Indonesian Islam taking place around that time
This shift in NU was part of a broader conservative turn in Indonesian Islam taking place around that time. At Muhammadiyah's national congress later in the same year, all bodies and committees of the organisation were similarly purged of 'liberals' (who included highly respected university professors with many years of service to the organisation). The following year, the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI) issued its notorious fatwas against the Ahmadiyah sect and against broadly defined 'secularism, pluralism and liberalism'. The Ministry of Religious Affairs also veered to the right under the new minister, Maftuh Basyuni, a confidant of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono with conservative views.
It may not be accidental that Hasyim Muzadi, Maftuh Basyuni and Muhammadiyah's new chairperson, Din Syamsuddin, all were graduates of the well-known pesantren of Gontor, which had once been known as 'modern' but under the influence of the Muslim World League had increasingly become associated with the more puritan and anti-Western currents of Islamic thought and the rejection of modernist interpretations. (Other Gontor graduates playing conspicuous public roles include the militant preacher Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and several prominent Salafis.)
The 2004 purge of the 'liberals' was not as radical in NU as in Muhammadiyah, and there were quite a few NU ulama who disagreed with the sweeping fatwas of MUI. There remained a few independent and original thinkers on the board, notably Masdar F. Mas'udi, who penned a thoughtful refutation of the MUI's anti-liberal fatwas. But they found themselves increasingly marginalised and cut off from decision-making processes in which they should have been taking part. Most of the young NU activists who had felt stimulated, supported and protected by Abdurrahman Wahid complained of being sidelined under Hasyim Muzadi. Many of the kiai appeared to follow the general conservative trend and to endorse Hasyim's anti-cosmopolitan attitude. Some of the most prominent kiai, however, felt unease about Hasyim's unbridled political ambitions, which they felt could harm NU.
Under his leadership, Hasyim drew the NU organisation more deeply into 'practical politics' than it had been since the Situbondo congress of 1984, where it had decided to withdraw from direct political involvement and to prevent its office holders simultaneously holding positions in any political party. Abdurrahman Wahid had, it is true, initiated the return to politics as early as 1999, when he established the National Awakening Party (PKB), to serve as the vehicle for the interests of the NU constituency and his own ambitions, but he maintained a clear separation between the party and NU organisation.
Hasyim, however, used NU itself as the vehicle for his political ambitions, and he used his political connections to strengthen his position within NU. In the 2004 presidential elections he teamed up with Megawati as her vice presidential candidate, and in 2009 he committed himself strongly to Jusuf Kalla's candidacy. Both forays into electoral politics ended in failure (and, some felt, humiliation for NU) but enabled Hasyim to dispense lavish patronage and buy support. On the eve of the congress, Hasyim appeared to be the strongest of the various contenders, having secured promises of support from most of the larger delegations.
Candidates for the leadership
Hasyim had announced well in advance of the congress that he did not envisage a third term as chairperson but wished to move up from the Tanfidziyah (the executive board) to the Syuriyah, the council of leading ulama. The incumbent Rois Aam, Kiai Sahal Mahfudh, appeared to have no intentions to retire, however; and in fact most of the previous Rois Aam had kept that position until their deaths. At Hasyim's initiative, new by-laws were drafted that would limit the duration of this office, as well as that of chairperson of the executive, to a maximum of two five-year periods and thereby would oblige Kiai Sahal to resign.
Members of the old board at the first session of the congress
Martin van Bruinessen
In response to this manoeuvre, a group of kiai and activists in Central Java appealed to Kiai Sahal to stay in office in order to prevent further politicisation of the organisation. The widely respected and popular kiai, Musthofa Bisri (a.k.a. Gus Mus) was seen by many, especially the younger members, as the ideal person to lead the organisation. None less than Abdurrahman Wahid had, only weeks before his death, attempted to persuade Gus Mus to stand for Rois Aam. However, as long as Kiai Sahal still wanted to continue in that position, Gus Mus did not wish to be a candidate.
Meanwhile, no less than seven men had announced their interest in succeeding Hasyim as chairperson of the Tanfidziyah. Three of them were already members of the executive. Hasyim himself endorsed Ahmad Bagja, a loyal and experienced but otherwise unremarkable bureaucrat of the organisation, who had been Hasyim's campaign manager in his bid for the vice-presidency in 2004. Said Aqil Siradj had run against Hasyim (and ended second) at two previous congresses; Masdar Mas'udi had challenged Hasyim (and come out third) in 2004. Both had been made members of the Tanfidziyah but were kept out of Hasyim's inner circle. A fourth candidate, Ali Maschan Musa, headed the provincial NU executive in East Java.
The other three candidates were relative outsiders. Slamet Effendy Yusuf was a leader of NU's youth movement Ansor in the 1980s but then made a career in Golkar. Salahuddin Wahid, a younger brother of Gus Dur who was educated as an engineer at the Bandung Institute of Technology, had never been active in the organisation, was a consistent and fierce critic of his brother, and was perceived to be close to the conservative wings of reformist Islam. In 2004 he had taken part in the presidential race as Wiranto's running mate, but since that venture into politics he had moved to the family pesantren at Tebuireng and appeared to be emulating his uncle Jusuf Hasjim, who had long been a prominent NU politician (and fierce critic of Gus Dur too).
The most remarkable candidate was Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, the best known member of JIL whose contributions to Muslim discourse had been judged beyond the pale in 2004. It was unlikely that he would stand a serious chance in 2010, but Ulil and his supporters appeared intent on showing that they represented an important voice within NU, with considerable support at the grassroots level, especially among the younger generation.
Money politics
Not only were there more candidates for the position of chairperson than at previous congresses, there was also more talk of vote-buying and attempts by outside interests to influence the outcome of the vote. There had been heavy-handed outside intervention before, notably at the 1994 congress when Suharto attempted to prevent the re-election of Abdurrahman Wahid, but then it had consisted of political pressure and lobbying rather than financial handouts. In 2010, more outside parties were interested in supporting or opposing particular candidates. Another reason why 'money politics' was more conspicuous was the precarious financing of the congress, which made delegates dependent on financial sponsors.
With tens of millions of nominal members - in other words people who feel more or less represented by the organisation - Nahdlatul Ulama is a politically significant entity. But these numbers do not translate into financial strength. Membership dues, paid by only a small minority, constitute an insignificant fraction of the budget, and apart from some real estate the organisation does not control any significant resources. Irregular contributions by various sponsors provided three quarters of the budget over the past five years, which amounted to a modest 40 billion rupiah, about US$ 4.2 million. The single largest sponsor, as Hasyim stated in his report to the congress, had been former vice-president Jusuf Kalla, whose bid for the presidency in 2009 Hasyim had strongly endorsed. It was no accident that the congress was convened in Kalla's home province of South Sulawesi.
In the Suharto era, it had been common for the president and vice-president to pay the bulk of the costs of the large congresses of organisations such as Nahdlatul Ulama. Large companies (among which cigarette manufacturers always were conspicuous) also made significant contributions. Provincial governors commonly contributed to the travel expenses of delegations from their provinces. This time around, there was no such overall funding, and the central board and provincial and local branches had to find their own resources. (In fact, the congress had initially been planned for an earlier date but had been postponed because not sufficient money had been raised.) This opened the door for money politics.
Candidates offered to pay travel expenses and other costs for those delegates who promised to vote for them. Vote buying continued during the congress, as delegates were persuaded to shift their allegiances. A local newspaper reported that votes were sold for 25 million rupiah. This is a ridiculously small sum compared to the amounts that change hands at Golkar congresses but represents a new phenomenon at NU congresses, where other forms of persuasion were previously the norm.
The vote
To all appearances, Hasyim was in firm control of the entire congress. All sessions were chaired by people he could trust; he had in advance dispensed generous patronage to people of influence (which included a well-publicised umrah pilgrimage to Mecca for some regional NU grandees); and a firm majority of the delegates appeared to have pledged their support for his candidacy as the Rois Aam. Many branches in fact seemed to have sent staunch Hasyim loyalists as their delegates - there was a noticeable difference in attitude between the official delegates, who were mostly local organisers, and the other attendees, who included ulama and young NU activists.
However, many of the ulama present thought that Hasyim might be a good manager but lacked the depth of religious learning required of the Rois Aam, and they were scandalised by Hasyim's undisguised attempt to unseat the senior and much more learned Kiai Sahal. Efforts by senior ulama to negotiate a face-saving solution failed because both rivals declined to attend a crucial meeting. The United Development Party (PPP) proposed a senior kiai from its own ranks, Maimun Zubair, as an alternative, and rumours that Hasyim had agreed to endorse this 'political' kiai caused some additional confusion. Behind-the-scene negotiations dragged on and caused the election to be postponed beyond the return flights of some of the delegates.
Tension was high when the voting for the Rois Aam finally began on the fifth and last day of the congress. As usual, there were two rounds: in the first round, the 500-odd delegates put forward names of candidates, and in the second round those who had been proposed by more than 99 delegates and had accepted the candidacy were to compete for the position.
To the surprise of Hasyim and his allies, who had until that moment felt secure of their majority, far more delegates named Kiai Sahal than Hasyim (272 against 179), guaranteeing the former an absolute majority. Visibly shocked and deeply disappointed, Hasyim bowed out and withdrew from the race. His faction pointed the finger at President Yudhoyono, whom they suspected of having orchestrated massive vote-buying in the final days. (Hasyim after all was politically allied with rivals of Yudhoyono, and the latter no doubt had an interest in an NU board that would support him.) Several personalities known to be close to the president could in fact be seen lobbying in the margins of the congress - but so were political operators representing the Golkar, PPP and PKB parties and yet other political interests. No less important was the moral pressure exerted by several senior kiai, who persuaded their peers - and through them many delegates - that it was not 'ethical' to force the incumbent Rois Aam out of office, and that the Syuriah should remain aloof from direct political involvement.
The election of the chairperson of the executive was, if anything, even more politicised. On the eve of the congress, President Yudhoyono had received Said Aqil Siradj and Salahuddin Wahid in his residence at Cikeas, suggesting that out of the seven contenders these were the ones he endorsed. They also appeared to consider themselves the only serious candidates and refused to take part in a televised debate with the other five on their vision for the organisation's future. Salahuddin's supporters had covered the city with hundreds of banners and posters, some representing him as the heir apparent in the dynasty that had dominated NU from its inception (with his grandfather, Hasyim Asy'ari, being a founder and the first Rois Aam, his father, Wahid Hasyim, leading the organisation in the early 1950s, and his elder brother Abdurrahman Wahid the most charismatic recent leader), others with photographs of senior kiai who gave him their blessing. Said's campaign was slightly less exuberant, with banners promising he would take NU 'back to the pesantren'. The other candidates spent less money on this sort of publicity (with the exception of Slamet Effendy Yusuf, who in some huge banners posed as a bureaucrat dressed for Friday prayer, reading an Arabic book), but an overall atmosphere was created that reminded many of a pilkada (an election of a regional government head) rather than of earlier NU congresses.
The televised debate, held on the second day in one of the congress halls in front of an enthusiastic audience, was also a novelty. Slamet and Ulil Abshar-Abdallah used it effectively to present themselves as serious contenders. Slamet could boast he had played a role in preparing the changes adopted at the important Situbondo congress of 1984, and more pragmatically, that he had much experience and many contacts in Golkar (and thereby access to considerable funds). Ulil succeeded in conveying not only that he had deep roots, by family and education, in NU but also that he had reflected more than others about the course NU needed to take to remain significant to its members in a changing world. He appeared to be less isolated in the organisation than the official ban of JIL had suggested.
Ulil's showing in the first round of the vote was low, with 22 delegates putting forward his name, but remarkable under the circumstances. He had had little money to spread around, and the support of only a small but devoted team of friends vetting the delegates. Ahmad Bagja, Hasyim's favoured candidate, ended only slightly ahead of him at 32 votes, and Salahuddin Wahid, who had looked like a potential winner, received only 78, not enough to pass to the second round. The big winners were Said and Slamet, with 178 and 158 votes respectively. In the second round, Said increased his margin and garnered a solid majority of 294 against Slamet's 201. This outcome did not correspond with anyone's calculations based on the prior commitments of delegates, suggesting that many changed their minds during the five days of the congress, or even in the last hours before the voting.
Forming the new board
The Rois Aam and the general chairperson are the only officers of the organisation who are directly elected by the congress. According to the by-laws, both choose their own deputies and together these four, assisted by a number of electors (formatur) 'chosen by the Congress from among those present,' are charged with selecting the other members of the Syuriyah and the Tanfidziyah. Usually care is taken that all factions and groups present at the congress are represented, even if only in some honorary capacity without real influence. Having left little to chance, Hasyim Muzadi had made sure that the final session was chaired by a trusted loyalist, who proposed three electors and had them quickly and without any discussion accepted by acclamation. This enabled Hasyim to continue playing a role, through at least one of these electors, in the final phase, which took place behind closed doors during the weeks that followed the congress.
The trend towards a more fundamentalist and anti-liberal version of traditionalist Islam appears to be reversed
Kiai Sahal chose as his deputy Kiai Musthofa Bisri, who enjoys broad respect within NU as well as outside the organisation. Hasyim Muzadi was also appointed to the Syuriyah, initially even as another deputy Rois Aam, but after some protest as an ordinary member. Said Aqil's choice of a deputy was more controversial: As'ad Said Ali is a well-known NU personality, who wrote an interesting book on the organisation, but he also happens to be a deputy chief of the State Intelligence Agency, BIN. Many NU people used to be proud of having one of their own in a high position in BIN, but the appointment of this high intelligence officer as the deputy chairperson of the organisation gave many others cause for worry over NU's independence. Nor was this the only political appointment: Jusuf Kalla was given an honorary position as a counsellor (mustasyar), as was Jakarta's governor, Fauzi Bowo. A certain Velix Wanggai, who had no prior connection with NU but was a personal assistant to President Yudhoyono, was also named in an advisory position and only later withdrawn after a wave of protest.
Unlike most other contenders, Ulil was not offered a formal position in any section of the board, but another prominent NGO activist, Imam Azis, the founder of LKiS and Syarikat, was appointed to the Tanfidziyah. (Another NGO activist, Hilmy Ali Yafie, was named but resigned out of protest against political interference in the process.) Two other intellectuals commonly identified as 'liberals', Masdar Mas'udi and Mohammad Machasin, retained their positions in the Syuriyah. The composition of the board represents some uneasy compromises and accommodations; various political interests are entrenched in it. Yet the trend towards a more fundamentalist and anti-liberal version of traditionalist Islam appears to be reversed.
Prospects for the progressives
Said Aqil Siradj is himself not close to the liberal and progressive activists of the younger generation, but he has a track record of expressing broad-minded and tolerant views and socialising easily with people of different social and religious backgrounds. Although he obtained a doctorate in Saudi Arabia, he has had good words to say about Shi'ism and has shown an interest in Sufism as well as contemporary philosophical writers. He does not appear to have a grand vision of where to take NU, but he is likely to allow much internal diversity and defend religious tolerance and pluralism.
Kiai Sahal Mahfudh once was heralded by younger activists as the man who could help make traditionalist religious thought relevant to modern social issues, a kiai who was also an intellectual. He was one of a handful of senior kiai who in the 1990s patronised a series of workshops that brought together kiai, NGO activists, and academic experts to speak on contemporary problems and attempt to develop a new religious discourse capable of engaging with such issues. (Masdar had been the driving force and chief creative intellect of these workshops, but it was Kiai Sahal who shielded him against the criticism of more conservative kiai.) Since his election as the Rois Aam in 1999, however, he has not done or said much that was remarkable. He was very critical of Hasyim Muzadi's political ambitions but had stopped short of an open confrontation. Since 2000 he has also been the general chairperson of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia and, though he was not directly involved in its notorious anti-liberal fatwas of 2005, he never made a critical comment on them either.
Given Kiai Sahal's age (72) and apparently poor health, the position of his deputy is potentially crucial. Musthofa Bisri (65) is a colourful person, a poet and amateur painter as well as a kiai, and representative of the most tolerant and broad-minded strand of traditionalist Islam. A lifelong friend of Abdurrahman Wahid, he shared many of the latter's views though not his eccentricities, and he is the man to whom young NU activists look for moral support and inspiration. Moreover, he is Ulil's father-in-law, and appears to generally support his son-in-law even while occasionally disagreeing with him.
With this new board, NU is poised to seek a new balance between the conservatism and politicisation of the past period and the search for a new religious discourse of the 1990s. Various political interests are represented in the board, which may endanger the organisation's independence, but things could have been much worse. The slide towards fundamentalist and anti-liberal religious views is unlikely to continue under the new board and it may even be reversed. Whereas the previous leadership mistrusted the young intellectuals and NGO activists who constituted the progressive vanguard of NU in the 1990s and marginalised them, the new leadership is likely to allow them a larger role. Moreover, the 2010 congress has shown that the younger intellectuals and activists have gained some support among the rank-and-file of the organisation and at various levels of leadership.
Martin van Bruinessen (m.vanbruinessen@uu.nl) is chair for the comparative study of contemporary Muslim societies at the University of Utrecht.
When terrorists in the Middle East attack innocent civilians, observers in the West often ask a pained question: Where's the outrage in the Muslim world? Why don't Islamic religious authorities speak out more forcefully against the terrorists and their wealthy financiers?
It remains a potent issue: Terrorism has damaged the Islamic world far more than the West, and too many Muslims have been cowed and silent. But a powerful and so far largely unreported denunciation of terrorism emerged last month from Saudi Arabia's top religious leadership, known as the Council of Senior Ulema.
The Saudi fatwa is a tough condemnation of terror and of the underground network that finances it. It has impressed senior U.S. military commanders and intelligence officers, who were surprised when it came out. One sent me a translation of the fatwa, and Saudi officials provided some helpful background.
"There is no gray area here," said a senior Saudi official. "Once it has come out like this, from the most senior religious body in the kingdom, it's hard for a lesser religious authority to justify violence."
The fatwa already seems to have had some impact: "Negative reaction from extremists online shows that they see this as a threat that needs to be responded to," says one senior U.S. official.
The fatwa begins with a clear definition of terrorism, which it calls "a crime aiming at destabilizing security" by attacking people or property, public or private. The document goes on to list examples of this criminal activity: "blowing up of dwellings, schools, hospitals, factories, bridges, airplanes (including hijacking), oil and pipelines." It doesn't mention any geographical area where such actions might be permissible.
What's striking is that the fatwa specifically attacks financing of terrorism. The Muslim religious council said that it "regards the financing of such terrorist acts as a form of complicity to those acts . . . to bring a conduit for sustaining and spreading of such evil acts."
The fatwa goes on: "The Council rules that the financing of terrorism, the inception, help or attempt to commit a terrorist act of whatever kind or dimension, is forbidden by Islamic Sharia and constitutes a punishable crime thereby; this includes gathering or providing of finance for that end." The fatwa exempts "legitimate charity to help the poor" from this ban.
"The financier of terrorism is more often than not more dangerous than the actual terrorist, since without funds, schemes fail and things do not take place," Fahd al-Majid, the secretary general of the Senior Ulema Council, said in a May 23 interview with Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic daily.
Given the role that wealthy Saudis have played in financing radical Islamic groups, the fatwa has a significant potential impact. For Muslims in the kingdom, it has the force of law and it will provide a strong religious and legal backing for Saudi and other Arab security services as they track terrorist networks.
It will be harder, too, for renegade clerics to issue rival fatwas that contradict the Saudi Ulema. The signatories are guardians of the conservative Wahhabi school of Islam, which to observers has sometimes seemed to sympathize with the Muslim extremists. The fatwa, dated April 12 but issued publicly in May, was approved unanimously by the 19 members of the council. To implement the fatwa, the Saudi Shura Council is drafting a counterterrorism finance law.
Saudi sources say that King Abdullah initiated the process that led to the fatwa, by asking for a ruling on terrorist financing. His push on the issue contrasts with the royal family's traditional wariness of challenging or offending the clerical establishment, on which its legitimacy rests.
This growing activism partly reflects a recognition that senior members of the House of Saud are themselves prime targets of al-Qaeda. A recent example was the assassination attempt in August against Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi counterterrorism chief.
Events in Saudi Arabia are difficult for outsiders to understand, to put it mildly. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former chief of Saudi intelligence, joked in a recent speech that the kingdom's ministry of information used to be described as the "ministry of denial" because "whenever news about Saudi Arabia was reported, the ministry would deny it the following day."
What matters in Saudi Arabia and most other Muslim countries is what its political and religious leaders say to their own people in Arabic. By that measure, there's a new voice for moderation coming from the Muslim clerical establishment.
The Facebook Fiasco and the Future of Free Speech in Pakistan
Madiha R. Tahir MADIHA R. TAHIR is a freelance journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in The National, Global Post, and Columbia Journalism Review.
More than 30 people have been murdered across Karachi this week in politically motivated violence between Mohajirs and Pashtuns, but it is Facebook -- or rather the controversy raging over its ban in Pakistan -- that draws a crowd. When Facebook hosted a page encouraging users to submit cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in mid-May, many Pakistanis reacted by denouncing the Web site as blasphemous on the grounds that Islam prohibits images of Muhammad as part of a wider edict against idolatry. Some have taken to the streets.
On May 20, my rickshaw puttered alongside a large rally organized by the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami. Hundreds of young male protesters moved in knots behind an overstuffed bus adorned with a banner reading: "To protect our Prophet against blasphemy, we will even sacrifice our lives!" In other times, these young men might have protested the countrywide ban on Facebook, which lasted from May 19 to 31, but last week they were marching resolutely in support of blocking the site. For them, Facebook had insulted their religion and community; for the country's leaders,the ban was political currency. Even as five bomb blasts shook Lahoreand U.S. drones attacked the Federally Administered Tribal Areas last week, Pakistan's Islamist organizations pressed ahead with demonstrations against Facebook.
The Jamaat-e-Islami rally came to a halt outside the gates of the Karachi Press Club. Inside, a press conference was getting rowdy. "Contempt of court!" shouted a rotund reporter interrupting Awab Alvi, a dentist known in the Pakistani blogosphere as Teeth Maestro. Alvi was one of four speakers attempting to reframe the debate about the ban as a question of free speech rather than of blasphemy, but the reporters shouted him down.
At first, the Pakistani journalists who fought mightily during Pervez Musharraf's presidency against curtailments of press freedom seemed the likeliest group to reject the Facebook ban. In late 2007, they had marched in the streets and were physically beaten; many of those who reject the Facebook ban today marched with them. But late this month, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists announced its support for the ban, leaving its former allies feeling betrayed. "Freedom of speech doesn't give anyone a right to play with religious and sacred feelings of others, or to play with the societal norms," PFUJ declared in its press statement.
The journalists assembled at the Karachi Press Club on May 20 did not seem to mind that there had been irregularities in the legal process, such as petitioners misleading the judge to believe that Facebook, rather than its users, had created the competition and that other Muslim countries had also blocked the Web site. They were much more concerned with what they perceived as Facebook's insult to the Muslim community. "Pakistani sentiments are involved, and you're saying that you're siding with them!" bellowed one in Urdu. Alvi's arguments about free speech seemed to confirm what they already believed: anti-ban activists are elitists who care more about poking their friends on Facebook than protecting the honor of their fellow Pakistani Muslims.
Although only a fraction of Pakistan's 170 million people have regular access to the Internet, the ban -- which was repealed here on May 31 -- has exposed the broader battle over how to define the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship in Pakistan. It is a fight that the defenders of individual rights are losing.
The Facebook controversy is no longer a laughing matter, but it actually began as a joke. For its milestone 200th episode on April 14, 2010, Comedy Central's South Park depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a cartoon character. A few days later, the New York-based group Revolution Muslim -- which was founded by an American Jew who converted to Islam after attending rabbinical school in Israel -- published threats against South Park's creators on its Web site. In response, Comedy Central quickly removed all Muhammad references in the sequel. The Seattle artist Molly Norris reacted to the network's move by drawing a Muhammad cartoon dedicated to the co-creators of South Park and declaring May 20 "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." Following her announcement, Facebook user Jon Wellington created a fan page where users began submitting content.
On May 19, the Lahore High Court instituted a blanket ban on Facebook until the end of the month. Government telecommunications regulators took the ban further, widening the censorship to include other social networking sites such as Flickr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Youtube; even Gmail and Google suffered sporadic blocks. Nearly one thousand sites were banned throughout Pakistan until yesterday, when Judge Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry, who was responsible for ordering the ban, asked authorities to lift it. Yet, at the same time, Chaudhry urged the government to institute a "mechanism" for banning blasphemous material in the future, effectively lending further legal cover to government censorship. Mudassir Hussain, the director of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, reportedly volunteered to continue blocking links to blasphemous content associated with the "Draw Muhammad Day" contest.
The issue has pitted those who speak the language of individual rights against those who use religious rhetoric to air community grievances. Pakistan's largest demographic -- the young, urban middle class born during the Islamization campaigns of former General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's U.S.-backed dictatorship -- has in recent years adopted the second narrative. They are bound together by a sense of membership in an aggrieved Muslim community that they feel is under attack from both the West (in the form of drone strikes, the broader U.S. war on terror, and Washington's efforts to influence Pakistani political and military decision-making) and from the militant Islamists who regularly bomb their fellow Pakistanis.
These frustrated youth are not Taliban-style Islamists who want to do battle with the state. They are nationalists with grandiose visions of Pakistan as a potential leader among Muslim nations if it could only be saved from the extreme forces trying to destroy it. This national narrative has found eager supporters, from celebrities such as the televangelist Zaid Hamid to the fashion designer Maria B., who imagine the Pakistani nation not as a community of individuals with inalienable rights and autonomous choices but one that is based on an ideal: Islam. As in France, which banned the burka in the name of French secular republican values, Pakistani critics of Facebook sought to block the site in the name of defending community ideals.
Meanwhile, those who speak about individual rights find themselves dismissed as unpatriotic Pakistanis. It does not help their message that the most prominent faces in the anti-ban camp belong to the largely English-speaking, upper class that appears to be more culturally tied to the West than the Pakistani masses. As one exasperated journalist exclaimed at the May 20 press conference, "We are a roomful of intelligent people, and you can't even explain to us what you mean! How will you explain it to the court?"
The prevalence of a communal narrative that privileges Muslim identity and anti-ban activists' inability to clearly articulate their case in an idiom that the average Pakistani understands explains why none of the usual groups one might expect to reject the ban -- students, journalists, and lawyers -- actually opposes it.
In fact, it was a lawyers group that first invoked the notion of an aggrieved community to demand the ban in court, asserting that Facebook was "insult[ing] the emotions and feelings of Muslims." Shifting between religious justifications and constitutional reasoning, the Islamic Lawyers Movement petition protested "unlawful activities towards the constitution and Islamic injunctions and values."
The Islamic Lawyers' ambiguity is partly the legacy of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a secularist who nevertheless rewrote the constitution in 1973 to appease Islamists. As in Israel, the only other country intended as a secular homeland for a religious group, it is unclear in Pakistan whether the state acts in the name of its citizens or the global Muslim community. The Islamic Lawyers' petition refers repeatedly to "Muslims of the world," on whose behalf they claim to act. "The role of religion in the state and the relationship of Islam with law has never been debated in this country," says the lawyer and newspaper columnist Babar Sattar. "Consequently, the only people speaking in the name of religion are those belonging to the religious right."
And the religious right has been speaking the language of the masses: Urdu. Although opinion in the English-language press has decried the incendiary nature of the "Draw Muhammad" campaign, it opposed the ban for its violation of individual rights. Comments in the Urdu press -- which outstrips English circulation by about seven to one -- have reinforced the idea of an Islamic community expressed in terms of kinship. Aamir Liaquat Hussain, a former minister of religious affairs, a televangelist, and a columnist for the largest Urdu daily, Jang, has employed familial analogies to argue for the ban. If children are expected to make sacrifices on behalf of their parents, he asked in a column, then how can Pakistanis as a community "be unwilling to give up Facebook for our beloved Prophet who taught us how important family is in the first place?" Ban supporters such as Hussain have deftly painted those arguing against censorship as hopelessly self-interested and a threat to the larger Muslim "family."
For their part, political parties have either steered clear of the controversy or openly supported the ban. The secular Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which governs Karachi, faulted the Web site but remained silent about the ban; the party of the former cricket superstar Imran Khan, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which tends to attract younger idealists, supported it; and President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's Party has allowed government regulators to widen censorship beyond the court order. This suggests that the government is interested in tamping down social networking sites, which have been effective organizing tools in the past.
On May 31, the court provided further legal cover to do just that. Even as it struck down the ban, Judge Chaudhry declared that telecommunications authorities could be charged with contempt of court if they do not block blasphemous material in the future, a handy excuse for overeager regulators who have already interpreted the Facebook ban in broad terms. Chaudhry did not institute any judicial oversight or procedural safeguards to govern such censorship, and he legitimized his stance in the name of public opinion. "It is the government's job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets," the judge said. "They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the Internet." Chaudrhy's statement is essentially a bow to the religious right -- the group that has been on the streets in droves -- and consequently, an endorsement of their view that the honor of their imagined Muslim community comes before individual freedoms.
And the legal battle is not over: a second petition has now been filed in court demanding Internet censorship based on Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The Lahore High Court is expected to hear the case on June 15.
The anti-censorship movement has an uphill struggle in Pakistan, and those in the West who claim to believe in individual rights and free speech are not helping. The "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" Facebook page was set up in defense of "freedom of speech," but it misconstrued a concept that refers to government curtailments, not to the actions of private corporations such as Comedy Central, which constantly make editorial judgments for various reasons. The page also quickly became a forum for extremist comments. "There was a lot of calling Muslims 'vermin' and 'savages,'" says Arsalan Khan, a doctoral candidate, who debated with commenters on the site. After attracting more than 85,000 users and precipitating an actual free speech battle in Pakistan, the page was voluntarily shut down by its administrators. Facebook, which, according to one of the page's own administrators had received complaints "like 100,000 times" from users across the globe, did nothing.
Another "Draw Muhammad" page has since surfaced with even more derogatory content; some of its users have cautioned commenters to keep the page clean, "[u]nless of course we want this page to disappear and give Islam another victory?" Like the defenders of the ban in Pakistan, many in the West also imagine a monolithic Islamic community. Incendiary Facebook pages, the French burka ban, and the anti-Islam advertisements placed on New York City buses by the right-wing blogger Pamela Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America campaign are just some of the West's reactions to that community. All of this -- combined with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan -- has led many young Pakistanis to understand that they are being attacked because they are Muslims.
"If we do something they don't like, they kill us. Look what they did in Iraq, look at Pakistani deaths," said a shy teenager who had joined the May 20 Jamaat-e-Islami rally outside the Karachi Press Club. "And you're saying we can't ban them?"
By Thomas Erdbrink Washington Post staff writer Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A07
TEHRAN -- Iranian authorities have begun police patrols in the capital to arrest women wearing clothes deemed improper. The campaign against loose-fitting veils and other signs of modernism comes as government opponents are calling for rallies to mark the anniversary of the disputed presidential election, and critics of the crackdown say it is stoking feelings of discontent.
But hard-liners say that improper veiling is a "security issue" and that "loose morality" threatens the core of the Islamic republic.
Iran's interior minister has promised a "chastity plan" to promote the proper covering "from kindergarten to families," though the details are unclear. Tehran police have been arresting women for wearing short coats or improper veils and even for being too suntanned. Witnesses report fines up to $800 for dress considered immodest.
Some here say the new measures are part of a government campaign of intimidation ahead of the election anniversary this month. The hard-liners have grown more influential since the vote, which led to months of anti-government demonstrations that leaders saw as the biggest threat to the Islamic system in decades.
Iranian women are obliged by law to cover their hair and wear long coats in public. The Islamic veil protects the purity of women, preventing men from viewing them as sex symbols, clerics here say. But the law is imprecise, and interpretations vary.
On a recent day, two young women wearing bright pink lipstick and identical thigh-hugging beige coats strolled down Tehran's affluent Bahonar Street. Their peroxide-blond hair, emphasized by delicately positioned brown scarves, spilled onto their shoulders.
When seminary student Fatemeh Delvari, 24, moved to Tehran from a provincial town eight months ago, she was shocked to see how some women dressed.
"My own veil oppresses my feminine side, so I can be free and active," she said of her black chador, a garment that covers the entire body except the face and hands. "But some women seem to be only interested in looking beautiful."
"They are trampling on social boundaries," Delvari said. "Violence is not good, but they should be punished."
Delvari, a leading member of the Students Justice-Seeking Movement, which aims to revive the values of the Islamic revolution, said authorities should also restrict makeup sales, prohibit jewelry and force women to "spend some nights from their families" in order to counter improper dress.
"Our Islamic system is like a ship; we can't allow some of the passengers to make holes in the hull," she said.
During the reign of Iran's Western-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, bikinis and miniskirts were not uncommon here. But in the first years after the 1979 Islamic revolution, groups of Islamists armed with batons would beat women who were not veiled, shouting such slogans as "Cover up or feel the stick."
In 2006, a year after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power, special moral "guidance" teams attempted to enforce dress codes in what was the most ambitious operation in recent memory. Hundreds of teams patrolled shopping centers and popular squares, stopping and sometimes arresting women they thought were poorly veiled.
Today some say the repetition of such punishments for a few women will have little effect in Tehran, a city of 12 million people.
"My white coat was three inches too short on the sleeves," said Nadia, 15, a high school student who was arrested Tuesday. "It was impounded. The guidance police called my dad to pick me up and gave me a chador to wear on the way home," she said.
"Such patrols come and go," her father said. "But they leave mental scars of intimidation."
Mohammad Hadi Ayyazi, deputy mayor of Tehran and former police commander, said the problem should not be exaggerated. "This is a cultural problem, not something the police can solve," he said in an interview.
Some who tried years ago to get women to uphold the veil now say that force will not work.
"For some women, a different form of wearing the veil is also a protest against those that want them to only wear the chador," Fatemeh Rakaee, a former lawmaker and former Islamic revolutionary, said in an interview. "Violence and patriarchy will never reach any results."
LOS ANGELES As jazz music played, setting a relaxed mood, radio hosts Amir Mertaban and Mohamad Ahmad chatted casually with guest Isaac Yerushalmi.
The show could have dissolved into a heated argument between two Muslims and a Jew, but during the inaugural run of "Boiling Point" on what's billed as the nation's first Muslim talk-radio station, Mertaban was absorbed with more mundane matters.
Still wearing his burgundy Fairplex shirt from his day job as a manager for the Los Angeles County Fair, Mertaban looked over the show's introduction. He glanced at Yerushalmi's biography and a few reminders he had jotted down.
"Okay, I can't use the word 'freakin,' " he said to no one in particular.
In the control room, Nour Mattar, one of the founders of One Legacy Radio, clicked off some of the banned words. "I mean we're cool, but we still have Islamic character and morals, especially since we have a lot of kids, 16, 17, listening in. We don't want them to think this is okay." The hosts of "Boiling Point" -- a show that purports to take "taboo topics to the boiling point" -- are allowed one "What the heck" a show, said Ahmad, a UCLA law school graduate.
One Legacy Radio is an online broadcast that officially launched on http://www.onelegacyradio.com in November from a nondescript studio in an office park off the 5 Freeway in Irvine, Calif., with four weekly shows. Its three founders -- Muslims in their late 20s and early 30s who grew up in Britain and the United States -- have slowly increased the station's programming while trying to strike a balance between religious sensibilities and a more edgy, youth-driven conversation.
Although some of the programming is conventional, such as a show about converts and one devoted to parenting, "Boiling Point" and the religiously challenging "Face the Faith" are more provocative. The station owners are even working on a Muslim version of "Loveline," the often sexually charged syndicated call-in show.
It's an area the American Muslim media largely avoid and one the station owners' parents have shied away from or deemed un-Islamic.
"One Legacy is the fingerprint of the young Muslim ummah [community] -- it basically personifies the kind of ummah that we have right now," said Yasmin Bhuj, 31, a founder and marketing director who is married to Mattar. "If the generation before us did a radio station, it would be unrecognizable to what One Legacy is." Mattar said the station receives e-mails daily from young Muslims thanking them for tackling issues that are relevant to them.
"These are taboo topics that people don't talk about, but in Islam, you are allowed to talk about it," said Mattar, 32.
Taboo is a word heard often around the studio. The goal of the station and its founders isn't to ruffle religious feathers -- although that might happen -- but to create an outlet for the younger generation of Muslims in the United States whose parents mostly emigrated from parts of the Middle East and South Asia in the 1970s and '80s.
Saeed Khan, a history professor at Wayne State University who specializes in Muslim identity in the West, said many first-generation immigrants believed that Islam would act as a sort of divine shield against such societal ills as drug abuse and infidelity within the Muslim community.
Outlets like One Legacy, he said, have cropped up because of the limits of existing Muslim media.
During a January taping of "Objection!" -- about political issues and civil rights -- Reem Salahi interviewed a man whose brother, a U.S. citizen, has been held for several years in solitary confinement awaiting trial by the U.S. government. In the control room, Mattar and his brother Sami Matar (who spells his last name differently) sat at the console while browsing an online store for better radio equipment.
The studio has a slightly thrown-together look: prayer rugs draped over regular office tables and mismatched chairs. Most of the walls are painted deep purple and covered with sound-absorbing foam. Electric guitars, two ouds (Middle Eastern guitars) and a Middle Eastern drum lean against a rack.
On a wall there's a print by British street artist Banksy of a smiley-faced grim reaper, which with a long black veil pulled over its head resembles a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.
In an adjacent office, Mattar runs his online company, which sells laptop computer parts and funds the station's slim $7,000-a-month budget -- enough to pay for three part-time employees. They hope to begin selling radio ads soon. Someday, they hope, the station will be profitable.
Mattar, Bhuj and Mohammad Harake formed One Legacy Media in 2008 to publish Islamic books, CDs and DVDs, and hold educational seminars, the first of which was about marriage.
That's when they came up with the idea of a Muslim radio station. Years ago, they considered broadcasting from a low-frequency radio station with a maximum radius of 40 miles but then decided it wasn't practical. In early 2009, they decided to take advantage of the rising popularity of online broadcast and cellphone radio apps.
For much of the first year, the station streamed only Koran and religious lectures.
"Seven to 10 listeners a day, max," said Harake, 26, the sales and promotional director.
"A day? A month," Mattar said.
Since then, they have added iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps. Mattar wouldn't disclose listenership numbers but said that the figure has doubled each month and that about 4,000 people have downloaded one of their cellphone apps.
The boldest addition to their lineup is likely to be what Harake likes to call "Muslim Loveline." The show would be far less raunchy that the syndicated show but would address such topics as pornography and premarital sex, both banned by Islam.
The hosts have a laundry list of topics to get their listeners riled up: polygamy, temporary marriages, Shiite and Sunni relations, and finding a spouse.
They had expected listeners to object to their pro-Israeli guest on their first show, but the feedback was entirely positive. The conversation mostly revolved around recent events at the University of California at Irvine between Muslim and Jewish students but ended in a non sequitur.
"Before you go, we talk about all the differences, we took it to the boiling point, the house is burning down right now -- I have to call the fire department, but let's talk about something that is very similar," Ahmad said to Yerushalmi.
"You're not doing this, for crying out loud," interjected Mertaban.
"I am doing this, I am gonna go there," Ahmad said, launching into a long-winded, meandering introduction that ended with a simple question to Yerushalmi: "Is your mother trying to find you a good Jewish girl?"
Mertaban jumped in: "Check it out, actions to words. You should marry a crazy Palestinian woman that is hard-core anti-Israel just to make a statement."
A Christian church is asserting its democratic rights by suing the mayor of Depok
Melissa Crouch
The construction of the church has been on hold
Sukron Hadi
Places of worship are an extremely sensitive subject in contemporary Indonesia. Recent years have seen radical Islamic groups take the law into their own hands as they damage the places of worship of religious minorities, or force others to close by threats of violence. Local government leaders are also becoming more proactive against religious minorities, sometimes cancelling permits for places of worship that have already been granted. One of the first victims was the Christian Batak Protestant Congregation of Cinere, a town in the province of West Java. In May 2009, the mayor of Depok cancelled their permit to build a place of worship, despite the fact that construction of the building had already commenced. In response, the church asserted their democratic rights by filing a legal case in the Administrative Court of Bandung.
This case is significant for two main reasons. First, it is highly symbolic because the church belongs to the largest protestant denomination in Indonesia, with an estimated 3.5 million members across Indonesia. Second, this is one of the first court actions taken by a church against a mayor in relation to a dispute over a permit for a place of worship in Indonesia.
History of the dispute
On 13 June 1998, the mayor of Bogor granted the church a permit to build a place of worship. Four months later, the construction of the church commenced. Throughout 1999, however, large demonstrations by various radical Islamic groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) were held in opposition to the building of the church. In July 2000, the then mayor of Depok, Badrul Kamal, sent a letter to the church recommending that construction cease temporarily until the opposition died down. This effectively caused all construction works to grind to a halt until 2008, when the church decided to recommence building. The church wrote to the mayor of Depok, Nur Mahmudi Ismail, on three separate occasions asking for clarification of the validity of their permit and for protection. They had only completed the foundations and the first level of the building before their plans were again thwarted by demonstrations held in opposition to the church.
Then on 27 March 2009, with no prior warning to the church, the mayor issued a decision which cancelled the church’s original permit. Betty Sitorus, the current deputy chair of the church building committee, suspects that this decision was made to gain support for the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) in the 2010 local elections in the city of Depok. According to her, when the church questioned the mayor about his decision, he emphasised the fact that he made the decision as a Muslim and as a representative (and former chair) of PKS.
Local groups opposed to the building of the church
Sukron Hadi
The mayor’s decision was based on submissions from various government bodies and community groups, such as the Muslim Community Solidarity Forum, an Islamic group that claims to represent the aspirations of local Muslims in Depok. According to the forum head, they demanded that the church permit be revoked because it had acted unfairly by failing to comply with the Joint Regulation of 2006 on Places of Worship, which outlines the process to obtain a permit.
The mayor also relied on letters from the local branch of the Ministry of Religion and from the newly-established Inter-religious Harmony Forum, a body established by the reforms introduced by the 2006 joint regulation at the provincial and city/district level to facilitate the application process for permits for establishing places of worship and to assist in the prevention and resolution of disputes. In fact, the ministry’s brief letter simply recommended that it was the responsibility of the mayor to take action to resolve the conflict. Similarly, the Inter-religious Harmony Forum of Depok in fact did not suggest that the mayor cancel the existing permit, as explained by Dr Lodewijk Gultom, one of the forum’s two Protestant representatives. According to Gultom, the forum has been unable to prevent escalating tensions and, through a misinterpretation of its recommendation, was used by the mayor to legitimise his decision. This eventually led the church to take court action.
Resistance through the courts
The church, represented by its current national leader, Reverend Bonar Napitupulu, and the Cinere church pastor, Reverend Mori Sihombing, filed a lawsuit in the State Administrative Court of Bandung on 6 May 2009 challenging the decision of the mayor to cancel the building permit. Represented by lawyer Junimart, they argued that the church had obtained the permit legally and had fulfilled the conditions of both national and local building laws. They claimed that the mayor had no legal basis on which to cancel their permit, and that his decision was against the right to freedom of religion under Indonesia’s constitution. Junimart pointed out that the church had obtained the signatures of over 100 local residents as evidence of local support for the court – more than is required under Joint Regulation of 2006.
The mayor tells a different story. In responding to the church’s allegations, he referred to the changes that have taken place since decentralisation and the introduction of the joint regulation. He points out that the village of Cinere was only formed in 1999 as part of the process of decentralisation, and that the permit was obtained before this time. This means the head of the village of Cinere never had the opportunity to consider the application. Further, he argues that the original permit could no longer be valid because it was issued under an old regulation concerning places of worship that is no longer in operation.
However, Joint Regulation of 2006 confirms that permits issued prior to 2006 are still valid and legal. According to Fatmawati Djugo, lawyer for the Indonesian Christian Church of Bogor in a similar case in 2008, this provision clarifies that a place of worship which holds a permit under the old system does not need to obtain another permit. In addition, she emphasised that a mayor or district head does not have the power to cancel permits merely because there is opposition from the local community. A clear dispute resolution process is set out under the Joint Regulation. If there is dispute over a proposal for a place of worship, a meeting must first be held by the local community. If that fails to resolve the dispute, consultations are to be arranged with the local division of the Ministry of Religion and the local Inter-religious Harmony Forum. If that is not successful, the case can then be taken to court.
The Cinere case is among the first examples of a church congregation taking its case to court
In the Depok court case, the evidence was inconclusive at best. Both sides produced local Muslim residents as witnesses. Those for the plaintiff testified that they did not have any objections to the construction of the church, while the witnesses for the defence testified to the history of opposition to the church. Large crowds of people turned up in force at the court hearings demanding the closure of the church, many wearing clothes bearing the words ‘Front Pembela Islam’ (Islamic Defenders Front), the name of a radical Islamic group infamous for its use of violence.
After ten years of uncertainty, the court stepped in. On 29 October 2009, the court found that the church had obtained the permit legally under the old regulation and that the building fulfilled the requirements of national and local building laws. The court found that the church was not misusing the permit, which is the only ground on which a mayor could legitimately cancel a permit. On this basis, the court ruled in favour of the church. The mayor has since appealed the decision.
Regulating places of worship
As this incident suggests, local authorities continue to use conflict over places of worship as opportunities for political gain in the highly competitive political atmosphere that has developed since the downfall of Suharto in 1998. The church in Cinere is not the only example. The permit of the Indonesian Christian Church of Bogor was cancelled in 2008, as was the permit of the Santa Maria Catholic church of Purwakarta in October 2009. Both of these incidents occurred in the province of West Java, which has a high rate of church closures by radical Islamic groups. According to the Indonesian Christian Communication Forum, 70 of the 400 churches closed under the New Order (1966-98) occurred in West Java. In 2005 alone, the National Indonesian Communion of Churches recorded that about 50 churches were destroyed or forced to close in the province. Against this background, this case is notable because a religious minority turned to the legal process to assert their newly-found democratic rights. It is even more significant that they won the case.
Regulating the construction of places of worship and containing conflicts arising in the process remains a significant challenge for the national government. As these cases show, the Joint Regulation introduced in 2006 has largely failed to prevent attacks or closures on the places of worship of religious minorities. The outcome of the mayor’s appeal against the church in Cinere is a significant test case in this regard – even if the church is successful, the real issue is whether the court decision will have any effect in practice.
Melissa Crouch (m.crouch@unimelb.edu.au) is writing a PhD at the University of Melbourne’s Law School. She is a research assistant on Professor Tim Lindsey’s Federation Fellowship project, ‘Islam and Modernity’ in the same faculty.
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