LETTER FROM BANDA ACEH
Every Friday, in the late morning, Banda Aceh (the capital of the Aceh province in Indonesia) empties and shopkeepers lower their iron shutters. Traffic comes to a standstill and silence falls over this flat city where the buildings can't go any higher than the minaret of the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque. Only the muezzin can be heard, calling the population to the Friday noon public prayer. The Wilayatul Hisbah (Sharia police), made up of women in uniform – as only men are required to pray at the mosque – patrol in small trucks to scold the few uncooperative.
The province of Aceh, which has a population of 5.4 million in the north of the island of Sumatra, is the only one in Indonesia – a country of 260 million inhabitants, 87% of whom are Muslims – to apply Sharia, the Quranic law. Islamic courts punish by caning several "moral offenses," including adultery, rape, sexual harassment, sexual relations outside marriage, homosexuality, illegal gambling and the sale and consumption of alcohol – allowing between 10 to 150, publicly administered, lashes.
In this secular country, which is regularly affected by Islamic surges, the Acehnese are the guardians of the faith: Conservative and pious, they claim a long-standing attachment to Islam – it was through this land of trade between Asian, Indian and Arab traders that the religion of the Prophet Muhammad is said to have penetrated Southeast Asia in the 12th century – and have made Sharia law a marker of their identity.
Aceh obtained the right to implement it in 2001, an olive branch extended by the central government at a time when the army had been fighting an autonomist guerrilla group, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), since 1976. But it was not until the peace accords of August 2005, eight months after the tsunami that devastated the province, that an Islamic penal code was gradually introduced as part of the new autonomous status granted to Aceh.
Not without debate: Aceh's first elected governor, the progressive GAM member Yusuf Irwandi, vetoed stoning in 2009. During his second term, which was cut short in 2018 after a corruption conviction, he tried, unsuccessfully this time, to impose a closed-door system for caning. Opposing him was a rival party, also from the more conservative GAM, which currently has a majority in the local parliament and has tended to strengthen the scope of Islamic law.
Sharia law very much remains a political issue, especially in the run-up to the general elections in February 2024 for the country's president, members of parliament and representatives of local assemblies. In August, the Aceh government issued a memo urging "government employees and members of the opposite sex who are not family-related not to gather in public spaces, quiet places and vehicles."
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