Protest against Ahok on March 31, 2017.
Image: Cahaya Maulidian / Wikimedia Commons

The southeast Asian country is home to the world’s largest Muslim population and has not allowed Saudi Arabia’s intolerant Wahhabism to take root. It’s not only tolerant and plural, but also a large functioning, stable democracy unlike any other country in the Muslim world. It’s a country whose religious expressions are not a top-down phenomenon.

Under the authoritarian President Suharto’s New Order regime from 1966 to 1998, Indonesia was equally moderate and tolerant but without religious freedom. Islamist groups were not allowed to function. While the process of Reformasi (reformation) that began after the fall of Suharto opened the gates for radicals to preach their versions of Islam and Islamist ideologies, the roughly 250 million people in the archipelago have largely shunned Wahhabism for about two decades.

However, Ahok’s conviction and sentencing based on a video that showed him speaking out of context about a verse in the Quran, could be a turning point for the country. It represents the biggest breakthrough in the ongoing efforts of the Indonesian cleric Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, who mobilised massive protests against Ahok, to turn the country towards conservatism.

It’s not surprising that Shihab, who leads the radical organization Islamic Defenders Front, locally known as FPI, is currently in Saudi Arabia. He fled Indonesia to avoid his arrest after a pornography-related case was filed against him. Ironically, his group has been opposing prostitution, gambling and bars to cleanse Indonesia of “sin.”

The FPI, which targets liberal Muslims, Ahmadiyah and Shia mosques, churches and embassies of countries that it perceives to be hostile towards Islam, was founded in 1998. It has managed to gain about 200,000 members. The number is miniscule compared to the membership of moderate and pluralistic Muslim groups Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, which oppose attempts to spread Wahhabism in Indonesia and claim to have 50 million and 29 million followers respectively. However, the head count estimates or claims are neither a major concern nor any consolation.

Despite being seen as a negligible minority, Islamist groups have been able to flout local laws by physically attacking minorities and collecting protection money from the entertainment industry. More importantly, they have now been able to cause the defeat of a popular official, Ahok, by making his religious and ethnic identity an issue in the recent gubernatorial election. Furthermore, they managed to get the court’s endorsement of their narrative of blasphemy, which includes the assertion that non-Muslims should not be allowed to comment on the Quran’s interpretation. In the verdict against Ahok, a judge quoted a verse from the Quran (Al-Maidah 51) which purports to suggest that Muslims should not elect non-Muslim leaders.

A special report from the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission.

Academics are calling it Europe’s “migrant” crisis, and some sympathetic media are terming it as the continent’s “refugee” crisis, both focusing on the “problem” faced by Europe. Lost in these analyses is the suffering of nearly 600,000 people, some of them Christian, who, fleeing war, persecution and oppression, have crossed the dangerous Mediterranean Sea to reach a region that is unwilling to give them asylum.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that at least 3,100 people have lost their lives in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year, due to bad weather conditions and overcrowded vessels of smugglers and human traffickers they used to cross the sea. And many of the tens of thousands, including women and children, who have made it to Europe are being detained without food or water. Others are being abused or exploited, as they remain without shelter or hope.

The governments of the frontline states of Greece and Italy as well as the European Union are faced with an unusual situation, not knowing what to do with the people who are arriving not only from Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq.

More than 450,000 people have arrived by sea to Greece, of which at least 277,899 are from Syria, 76,620 from Afghanistan, 21,552 from Iraq, and 14,323 from Pakistan. In Italy, the number of arrivals is at least 137,313, of which 35,938 are from Eritrea, 17,886 from Nigeria, 10,050 from Somalia, 8,370 from Sudan, and 7,072 from Syria.

How they are treated depends on how we see them. In international law, which provides for assistance and protection for those fleeing persecution or conflict, an asylum seeker is someone whose claims are yet to be proven, after which they can be called refugee. An economic migrant, on the other hand, is someone who arrives in a foreign land for economic gain.

Given the nationalities of these people, they all appear to be legitimate asylum seekers, and must be treated accordingly.

Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is mindlessly killing civilians in Syria amid a bloody civil war against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and has captured large territories in Iraq. The targeted killings and persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq are nothing less than genocide. More than 700,000 of Syria’s Christian population of 1.1 million have been displaced due to attacks by ISIS. And in Iraq, at least 125,000 Christians have fled their homes in the Nineveh Plains to the autonomous Kurdistan region.

Afghans are fleeing attacks in the wake of insurgencies by the Taliban and Islamic State’s local affiliate. Eritreans are running away from forced lifelong military conscripts by their authoritarian government.

A special report from the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission.

“The world hasn’t seen an evil like this for a generation.” This is how the national spokesman for Iraqi Christians in the United States described atrocities by ISIS terrorists in northern Iraq, which include beheading of children and their mothers and fathers, and forcing almost all Christians in the region to flee. While the United States has resumed military action to deal with the crisis in Iraq, its commitment reflects half-heartedness and fails to match the enormity of suffering and potential threats.

“They are systematically beheading children, and mothers and fathers … There’s actually a park in Mosul that they’ve actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick,” Mark Arabo, the spokesman for Iraqi Christians, told CNN. “This is crimes against humanity. The whole world should come together. This is much broader than a community or faith … They are doing the most horrendous, the most heart-breaking things you can think of.”

The Episcopal Vicar of Iraq, Canon Andrew White, recently visited the town of Qaraqosh, which like many other towns and cities has been captured by the ISIS, to assess the situation. “The majority of the town’s 50,000 people have fled, fearing that, like other Christians in this region, they will be massacred. The militants, in a further act of sacrilege, have established their administrative posts in the abandoned churches,” he said, according to Catholic Online.

Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako of Baghdad has called for “international support and a professional, well-equipped army,” saying the situation is “going from bad to worse.”

U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement last week about the American military involvement in Iraq acknowledged the suffering of minorities. “These terrorists have been especially barbaric toward religious minorities, including Christians and Yazidis,” Obama said, but while carefully underlining the humanitarian nature of the intervention. He said it was meant only to prevent the likely advancement of ISIS terrorists toward the U.S. embassy in Baghdad or the U.S. consulate in Arbil, and to help save Iraqi civilians stranded in the Mount Sinjar region.

Obama referred to the more than 50,000 people from the Yazidi ethnic minority, who like Christians were forced to flee their villages and are now trapped on the Sinjar mountains with ISIS men surrounding them. The subtext of his statement was a promise only of a short-term, limited involvement.

It is, of course, a moral obligation of Washington not to leave Iraq in the lurch after its 2003 invasion and subsequent pull-out of its forces. But in fulfilment of this moral obligation also lie America’s interests.

The U.S. took on al-Qaeda and its former leader Osama bin Laden, but now its offshoot, the ISIS, which is also known as the Islamic State, has emerged as far more brutal and powerful – and therefore a likely threat to America in the days to come.