INDONESIA A NEWS

Karina is an atheist, but her friends jokingly call her “the prophet.” That is because she is helping nurture a community for unbelievers in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, where trumpeting one’s disbelief in God can lead to abuse, ostracism and even prison.  “It’s very normal for atheists to be paranoid because the environment does not support them,” said Ms. Karina, 26, who uses only one name. But, she said, “in this group people don’t need to be afraid.”  Indonesian Atheists was founded with a Facebook page in 2008 and now holds regular gatherings. The Internet has offered its members a safe space to air their opinions, and the feeling of community has made them braver about gathering in public. But recent prosecutions of people who made online comments deemed blasphemous by the country’s courts have stoked fears that they too could come under attack. “Members’ growing outspokenness and courage does not indicate that other people increasingly accept us,” said Karl Kar

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents  By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the nine f

Rights groups urged the Indonesian government yesterday to block a proposed law banning women from sitting astride motorcycles in deeply Islamic Aceh province, where the position is deemed “improper”. The mayor of Lhokseumawe city in Aceh, where sharia law is enforced, circulated a letter Monday explaining the obligation for women to sit side-saddle was “to avoid immoral acts”. “Adult women who are riding on the back of a motorbike… cannot straddle unless in an emergency,” mayor Suaidi Yahya’s letter read, adding that the ban included women straddling female drivers. The official explained last week that women sitting astride motorcycles would “provoke the male driver” and that it would be against Islamic law. The letter also proposed banning men and women from hugging and holding hands while on vehicles, and banning tight or scanty clothing in public. The move comes after leaders from Aceh, the country’s only province ruled by strict sharia law, drafted a series of new

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the winners o

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from organizin

I'm almost packed and about to get on the plane for the Middle East, so I've been thinking a lot about Hizbullah. No, not the Shiite militia and political party that runs much of Lebanon; the Hizbullah here, in Indonesia.   It was a Muslim militia created by the Japanese to fight the Allies in World War II. Now, you're probably familiar with the thread winding from al-Qaeda's attacks on America in 2001, back to the CIA's (Central Intelligence Agency) funding for the Mujahedeen who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But that's just part of a broader story about outsiders oppressing, fostering and flirting with local Muslim forces. And it stretches from the battle scarred streets of Beirut and Baghdad, across the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, all the way to Bali. The most important name in this Indonesian chapter of the story is Kartosuwiryo. He was an Islamist leader who first got involved in politics in the 1920s and, to this day, he's an