A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a packed Roman Catholic cathedral on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island during a Palm Sunday Mass, wounding at least 20 people, police said.

A video obtained by the Associated Press showed a burning motorbike at the gates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.

The attack came as Indonesia was on high alert following the arrest of Aris Sumarsono, known as Zulkarnaen, the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, in December.

Wilhelmus Tulak, a Catholic priest who had been leading the Mass when the bomb exploded at about 10.30am, told reporters that a loud bang shocked his congregation, who had just finished the Sunday service marking the beginning of the Holy Week before Easter.

The first batch of churchgoers were walking out of the church while another group was coming in when the blast happened, he said.

He said security guards had suspected two motorists who wanted to enter the church and confronted them.

One then detonated his explosives and died near the gate. The injured included four guards and several churchgoers.

National Police spokesman Argo Yuwono told a news conference in the capital, Jakarta, that police are still trying to identify two attackers on a motorbike who used powerful explosives.

He said officers are investigating whether they were linked to a local affiliate of the banned Jemaah Islamiyah network or were acting independently.

Around 64 suspects had been detained by Indonesia’s counter-terrorism squad, known as Densus 88, in several provinces, including 19 last month in Makassar. The arrests followed a tip-off about possible attacks against police and places of worship.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, has been battling militants since bombings on the resort island of Bali in 2002 killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

Attacks aimed at foreigners have been largely replaced in recent years by smaller, less deadly strikes targeting the government, police and anti-terrorism forces and people militants consider as infidels.

A court banned Jemaah Islamiyah in 2008, and the group was weakened by a sustained crackdown. A new threat has emerged in recent years inspired by the Islamic State group’s attacks abroad.

The country’s last major attack was in May 2018, when two families carried out suicide bombings in the second-largest city of Surabaya, killing a dozen people including two young girls whose parents had involved them in one of the attacks.

Police said the father was the leader of a local affiliate of the Islamic State group known as Jemaah Anshorut Daulah.

Indonesia’s highest Muslim clerical body is expected to issue a halal certification for the experimental Covid-19 vaccine developed by China-based firm Sinovac Biotech.

The certification would be a significant step in immunisation efforts in the world’s most populous Muslim country, should the vaccine be approved for use.

Indonesia’s human development and culture minister Muhadjir Effendy: “A study by the Indonesian Ulema Council Halal Product Guarantee Agency and Institute for the Assessment of Food, Drugs and Cosmetics has been completed and has been submitted to the council for the making of a fatwa and halal certification.”

Over one million doses of the experimental Covid-19 vaccine developed by Sinovac arrived in Indonesia on Sunday evening. The government has no exact schedule for distributing the doses.

Health minister Terawan Agus Putranto said the experimental vaccine needs to successfully complete phase three clinical trials before it can be distributed in Indonesia.

Mr Putranto said: “The government will provide a vaccine that is proven safe and passes clinical trials under World Health Organisation recommendations.”

Hermawan Saputra of the Indonesian Public Health Expert Association said the 1.2 million doses are only enough for an initial group of 600,000 people, since each person must receive two doses.

“It does not really have significant meaning. The government should guarantee that there will be enough to for distribution to the entire country,” Mr Saputra said.

He added that if the experimental vaccine passes the third phase clinical trials, immunisation programmes are expected to begin in the middle of next year.

The government has announced that it plans to use vaccines from several different producers in its effort to vaccinate the world’s fourth most populated country. So far, the Sinovac candidate vaccine is the only one to arrive in the country.

On Monday, the Health Ministry announced 5,754 new Covid-19 cases, bringing the confirmed total to 581,550, including 17,867 deaths, the highest in south-east Asia.

Read more: How a Boarding School in Indonesia Generated a Global Jihad

Indonesian police have shot dead six followers of a firebrand cleric who returned last month from a three-year exile in Saudi Arabia after criminal charges against him were dropped.

Jakarta Police Chief Muhammad Fadil Imran said officers were following a car carrying 10 supporters of Rizieq Shihab, the leader of the Islamic Defenders Front, early on Monday morning. He said the followers attacked the police with guns and swords, threatening the officers’ safety.

“The officers then took firm and measured action so that six died from the group of 10 people,” he said at a news conference. He did not give further details of the violence.

An official of the Islamic Defenders Front, Ahmad Shabri Lubis, gave a different account, saying that Mr Shihab and his family were heading to a place to deliver a sermon and that guards travelling with them had been shot.

“On their way to the sermon location, the group was intercepted by unknown people that we strongly believed were part of an operational group to stalk and harm him. Those unknown people stopped and did the shooting of the family guards,” Mr Lubis said.

Mr Imran said police had been scheduled to interrogate Mr Shihab on Monday morning over an alleged violation of coronavirus health regulations during his daughter’s wedding reception on November 14, and they had received information about plans for a mass mobilisation of his supporters at Jakarta police headquarters during his questioning.

As of Monday evening, Mr Shihab had not appeared for the questioning, his second police summons after an earlier one last Tuesday.

Mr Shihab was welcomed by tens of thousands of followers when he returned to Indonesia from exile on November 10. He had left Indonesia in 2017 to go on an umrah, or minor pilgrimage, to Mecca shortly after police charged him in a pornography case and with allegedly insulting the official state ideology, Pancasila.

Police dropped both charges last year due to weak evidence, but authorities in Saudi Arabia had banned him from leaving the country without any explanation.

His return comes as Islamist forces are gaining political strength in Indonesia.

The Islamic Defenders Front was once on the political fringes and has a long record of vandalising nightspots, hurling stones at Western embassies and attacking rival religious groups. It wants Islamic Shariah law to apply to Indonesia’s 230 million Muslims.

Read more: Indonesia: Buddhist woman imprisoned for blasphemy

Shinta Ratri, the matron of an Indonesian Islamic boarding school, corrects the pronunciation of a group of fellow Muslims as they chant the phrase “only one God” in Arabic and prepare to pray together.

Nothing unusual in that, except that these worshippers, gathered in a cramped residential neighbourhood of the city of Yogyakarta, are all transgender women in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country where hostility against them has surged, forcing many underground.

Rights activists say hardline Islamist groups are fast eroding the country’s long-standing reputation for tolerance of minorities like the “waria” – a portmanteau of the Indonesian words for “woman” and “man” – as the trans community is locally known.

Ratri, 56, and her students and friends witnessed this intimidation first hand in 2016, when vigilante Islamists mobbed the Pesantren Waria Al-Fatah school and forced it to shut down.

Yuni Shara, 51, described how a group of “aggressive” men in white robes and skull caps descended on the school after Friday prayers.

“I felt angry that my freedom, especially my freedom of religion, was being violated,” said Shara, who lives at the school. “… Even the state can’t fully guarantee our safety from these groups,” she added as she took off her wig and make-up before joining the others in prayer.

POCKETS OF OPPOSITION

The school, set up in 2008, was empty for months after the raid but people have gradually begun to return to what is now widely considered a safe space for the waria community.

But while the school is accepted by its immediate neighbours, opposition remains.

“We believe it is our duty as Muslims to prevent this kind of LGBT behaviour and forbid it,” said Umar Said, a senior cleric with the hardline Islamic People’s Forum which forcibly shut down the school two years ago.

While FUI does not “go looking for” waria, the group remains committed to preventing them from promoting their rights. Being transgender is a disease that can be cured through prayer, he said.

Historically, waria and other gender-fluid communities have been an accepted part of Indonesian society. The Bugis ethnic group on Sulawesi island for instance traditionally recognises five genders, including one that is said to “transcend”, or combine, the female and male.

Homosexuality is not regulated by law in Indonesia, except in the ultra-conservative province of Aceh where same-sex relations are banned. But parliament is considering revamping the national criminal code to impose restrictions on consensual sex outside marriage – a move that activists say could be used to target the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community.

“AT PEACE WITH GOD”

Even without legal barriers, many in the LGBT community face ostracism from their families and communities, discrimination in looking for work and, in some cases, violence and humiliation.

Many waria, banished from their homes, end up as sex workers, including some who have slowly started to gather again at Ratri’s boarding school to pray.

For Ustad Arif Nuh Safri, a preacher at the Yogyakarta boarding school, embracing the waria is part of his duty.

During a Koran study session, Safri encourages his congregation to ask candid questions about their sexuality and how it affects their relationship with God.

“As long as we can connect with each other on a human level, we can accept each other the way we are,” Safri said, adding he believes most Indonesians are as “open-minded” as him.

Ratri, dressed in a purple head scarf and bright red eye-shadow and lipstick, says it is this openness that allows the otherwise shunned waria to “make peace with God”.

“As waria, we are already under huge psychological stress,” she said. “Here we can believe we are not sinners for being trans.”

]]> 8015 https://www.faith-matters.org/indonesia-buddhist-woman-imprisoned-for-blasphemy/ Wed, 22 Aug 2018 12:49:23 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7821

An Indonesian court sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy on Tuesday, after she was accused of insulting Islam for complaining that neighbourhood mosque was too loud.

Meiliana, a 44-year old ethnic Chinese Buddhist had complained the Muslim call to prayer, repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra.

Indonesia has the world’s largest population of Muslims and sizable Buddhist, Christian and other religious minorities. Recent years have seen a rise in conservative and hardline interpretations of Islam, prompting fears that the secular nation’s long-standing reputation for tolerance and diversity was being eroded.

“She had said something that insulted religion, in this case Islam,” said Jamaluddin, spokesman of the Medan district court, adding the defendant had “showed remorse and apologised”.

Political activists have said the country’s stringent blasphemy laws are being used to bully minorities and violate religious freedoms.

Last year, the former ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta was tried and jailed for blasphemy after several Muslim groups accused him of insulting Islam when he said his political rivals were using the Koran to deceive voters.

The ruling was widely condemned and believed to be politically motivated. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama also lost his re-election bid because of the accusations.

There are hundreds of thousands of mosques across the vast archipelago and most use loudspeakers to play the ‘azan’ or call to prayer, which lasts a few minutes. But many also play lengthy versions of prayers or sermons lasting over 30 minutes, which has been deemed unnecessary by the Indonesian Mosque Council.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who is also a member of the Council, formed a team in 2015 to review mosques’ use of loudspeakers and regulate their use and volume. He has previously called on mosques to use their public address systems “wisely”.

Kalla’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on Meiliana’s conviction.

Meiliana’s lawyer, Ranto Sibarani, said they would appeal the verdict, according to The Jakarta Post.

]]> 7821 https://www.faith-matters.org/indonesia-president-highlights-nationalism-amid-controversy/ Mon, 13 Aug 2018 09:44:27 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7700

Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, brandished his nationalist and religious credentials on Friday amid reports he had come under pressure from Islamic party allies to accept a conservative cleric as running mate in next year’s election.

In a last-minute decision, Widodo announced on Thursday Ma’ruf Amin, who heads the board of advisers of the country’s biggest mass Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), would be his vice presidential candidate for April’s poll.

The duo will be challenged by the former general Prabowo Subianto and the private equity tycoon and Jakarta deputy governor Sandiaga Uno.

Wearing a crisp white shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Clean. With the people. Real work.”, Widodo told supporters on Friday he would “safeguard national resources”.

He cited as evidence recent policy decisions to nationalise oil and gas assets and seize majority ownership of the huge Grasberg gold and copper mine from the U.S. based Freeport-McMoran.

“It is proof that we are sovereign,” he said.

Amin later led the crowd in prayer, asking God to “give us the capability and spirit to safeguard us against forces that try to destroy, to weaken us and our country.”

The pair left the stage as Islamic singing, rendered in Arabic, played.

The cleric then delivered a sermon at Friday prayers at Jakarta’s biggest mosque.

Prabowo and Uno were to have gone to the mosque before formally registering as candidates at the election commission but changed their plans and prayed at a nearby mosque instead.

‘STAUNCH CONSERVATIVE’

Amin also heads the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), an influential group for clerics that has issued fatwas hostile to minorities, including the Islamic sect Ahmadiyah and the gay community.

He also issued a statement accusing former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama of blasphemy for insulting the Koran, an edict that led hundreds of thousands of protesters to swarm the streets of the Indonesian capital demanding his ouster last year.

Purnama, an ethnic Chinese Christian, lost the election as he divided his time between campaigning and defending himself against blasphemy charges in court. He was later jailed for two years.

Kevin O’Rourke, a political analyst, said Amin was a “staunch conservative” and “adroit manipulator”.

“As VP, he can bolster Islamic groups and perhaps give some other religious conservative a chance to succeed Widodo,” he wrote.

Indonesia politics analyst Marcus Mietzner said Amin’s appointment could neuter attacks on Widodo’s alleged lack of religious conviction and elevate nationalist themes in the election campaign.

“(The Opposition) are probably going to shift their focus onto ultra-nationalist themes: sell-out to China, invasion of foreign workers, evil imports, predatory investors,” he told Reuters in emailed comments.

“These are classic Prabowo themes anyway, but they will become even more pronounced this time.”

Widodo and Prabowo contested the last presidential election in 2014. Widodo won but his popularity slumped mid-campaign after false reports were spread online that he was a Christian and an ethnic Chinese descendent.

After Friday prayers, Prabowo declared himself the candidate for the poor, touching on another central theme of his campaign: inequality.

“Our job as leaders is to eliminate people’s suffering so that nobody is hungry, naked or suffering … no matter what their religion is.”

“Our friends here are sometimes considered radicals, but believe me, there is no radical Islam in Indonesia,” added Prabowo, who has forged close ties with hardline Islamists.

‘DEPENDENT’

According to party officials from the president’s coalition, Widodo had favoured an alternative to Amin, former constitutional court chief justice Mahfud MD.

In a television interview, Mahfud said he was asked “in some detail” to prepare to be the running mate and was on standby to be anointed on Thursday.

Mahfud said it was Widodo’s decision to overlook him.

But, as quoted by the news portal Detik.com, NU board member Robikin Emhas said NU leaders, including Amin, told Widodo that they could not support Mahfud.

Mietzner said Widodo had initially discounted NU’s opposition to Mahfud.

“The implications are that four years into his presidency, Jokowi is still much more dependent on his supporting parties than he cares to admit. (It’s) a demonstration of his continued weakness,” he said, referring to Widodo by his nickname.

A presidential spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

A leader of NU-aligned National Awakening Party (PKB), Muhaimin Iskander, told reporters on Thursday it was a surprise Amin was selected and that Mahfud was Widodo’s initial preference.

“I thought Mahfud was chosen. But it turned out to be Ma’ruf Amin,” he said.

Southeast Asian nations hope to strike a joint agreement on cybersecurity in coming days with Russia, accused by the United States of meddling in its elections, after a series of high-profile hacks in the region.

The draft of a document seen by Reuters discusses formalising an agreement with Russia. It is set to be issued by foreign ministers of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at the close of meetings underway with other global lawmakers in Singapore.

“We welcome the further strengthening [of] our cooperation in cybersecurity with Russia through the issuance of the statement of ASEAN and Russian foreign ministers on cooperation in the field of cybersecurity,” the draft document said, adding the title would be updated depending on negotiations. It is due to be published on Saturday.

The host of the ASEAN meeting, Singapore, recently suffered its worst ever cyberattack when hackers stole the personal information of about 1.5 million people, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, from a government health database. Earlier this year, Malaysia said it had foiled an attempted cyber heist on its central bank.

Neither country has identified the hackers and neither suggested the involvement of Russia.

U.S. intelligence agencies have said a Russian propaganda arm tried to tamper with the 2016 presidential election by posting and buying ads on Facebook. Moscow has denied involvement.

Facebook said on Tuesday it had identified a new co-ordinated political influence campaign to mislead its users and sow dissension among voters ahead of November’s U.S. congressional elections.

Russia last year appointed a dedicated Ambassador to ASEAN based in Jakarta.

Senior officials from ASEAN and Russia met in March in Jakarta for wide-ranging talks on co-operation in political, security and economic fields among others.

]]> 7558 https://www.faith-matters.org/video-of-muslim-hijab-wearing-female-singing-ave-maria-goes-viral/ Sun, 12 Nov 2017 19:32:16 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=6947

The video of a Muslim female in white singing ‘Ave Maria’, has gone viral. 

The Muslim female was seen singing a rendition of the Catholic prayer at the Bogor Cathedral in West Java, Indonesia on Monday November the 6th 2017. The rendition of ‘Ave Maria’ was at a funeral for her friend, Chatarina Suliyanti, according to another attendee at the funeral. 

Several version of the singing have circulated online, with one of the having been viewed more than 1.5 million times. 

We know that specific institutions have on many occasions been the generator for producing radicalised individuals who go onto commit terrorists attacks. Another such institution based in Indonesia which has generated militants from Indonesia to Syria, has been the Ibnu Mas’ud boarding school where Muslim students are provided with boarding facilities, food and religious education. 

Ibnu Mas‘ud is one of about 30,000 Islamic boarding schools, or ‘pesantren’, across Indonesia. Many of these ‘pesantren’ provide much needed care and basic items for young people though Indonesian officials admit that a handful have generated young people who have actively been involved in terrorism and in the promulgation of extremism.

The chart below shows the radical alumni that have graduated from Ibnu Mas’ud. These radical alumni took two routes, one to set up local bases in Indonesia, with a second batch moving onto fighting with Daesh or the Islamic State. 

The radical alumni include individuals present in the Aceh training camp for Indonesian militants which was commanded by an individual called Dulmatin. Implicated in the Bali bombings that killed 202 people, Dulmatin had a bounty of $10 million on his head. Fearing an attack from militants in the Aceh camp against Government buildings and assets, a Government raid was conducted in 2010, leading to the capture of a number of militants who had studied at Ibnu Mas’ud. These included:

• Hari Budiman: Jailed for 5 years for financing the Aceh camp,
• Kamaludin: Jailed for 6 years for bank robberies to fund the militant training camp
• Sofya Tsauri: Jailed for supplying weapons to militants
• Enceng Kurnia: a logistics expert and a militant Islamist
• Agus Kasdianto: Involved in the failed Jakarta bomb plot and for sustaining the terrorist camp.

Graduates of Ibnu Mas’ud who went onto fight for the Islamic State included:

• Hatf Saiful Rasul: A 12 year old who fought and died in Syria for IS
• Umar Jundal Haq: The son of a Bali bomber, who joined IS and who died in Syria
• Didi Resdianto: Who travelled to Syria with his family and whose wife became a cheerleader for the Islamic State online

The Indonesian Government increasingly realises the internal threat to its own population and to the stability of the country by radical and extremist preachers and institutions. The fact that Indonesia remains a possible staging post for such militants to export young men for a global Jihad, will no doubt remain on the minds of Indonesian officials.