Indonesia: does democracy foster fundamentalism?
Why has a nation noted for its commitment to democracy started to resemble a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, asked Bethany Allen-ebrahimian in Foreign Policy (Washington DC). Every five years since the fall of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998, Indonesia has held national elections. The world’s largest Muslim nation (87% of its 258 million people are Muslim) is a secular state that guarantees freedom of religion and is home to Islam Nusantara, a centuries-old progressive Islamic movement. Its Muslims are known “for being both personally observant and accepting the nonobservance” of others. Yet in the last month alone, Indonesia has seen an Isis suicide bomb in Jakarta, the public flogging of two men caught having sex together, and Jakarta’s popular Christian governor jailed for the crime of blasphemy.
Governor Basuki Purnama, known as Ahok, came unstuck last year when campaigning for re-election, said Bruno Philip in Le Monde (Paris). When he upbraided rivals for invoking a Koranic verse telling Muslims not to show friendship to Jews and Christians as a reason not to vote for him, extremists cried “blasphemy”. Thousands demonstrated – some demanded he be lynched. There was no legal case, but Ahok was sent to trial and convicted anyway, on the grounds he’d shown no signs of guilt and had “hurt Muslims”. It wasn’t his double minority status as a Christian and ethnic Chinese that did for Ahok, said Siauw Tiong Djin in The Jakarta Post: it was his willingness to break with the “rotten political system”. He was a “breakthrough”, a politician with the guts to fight corruption, and the old guard used the corrupt judicial system to nobble him.
The “shariafication” of Indonesia is following a path we’re all too familiar with in Pakistan, said Farooq Sulehria in The News (Karachi). Currently, the only Indonesian province where sharia is officially on the books is Aceh, where alcohol is banned, women must dress modestly and vigilante groups police neighbourhoods to root out immorality. Hundreds of sharia laws have, however, been adopted in provinces and districts across Indonesia. Yet very few have been introduced by Islamist parties – in some 1,000 local elections since 1998, they’ve only won a majority in two districts. No, the harsh truth is that the drive to sharia enforcement comes not from Islamist parties, but from “opportunist Islamisers anchored in secularist parties”. We know the type well in Pakistan, from “the ‘socialist’ Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the capitalist Nawaz Sharif to the celebrity Imran Khan”. Across the Muslim world, democratic candidates from the elite “flirt with religion to gain legitimacy and popularity and to build a social base”. The shariafication of Indonesia is not ideologically driven – it is fuelled by the expediency of electoral politics.