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Indonesia. Rolling out laws based on Islamic values would address the “degradation of morality among Indonesia’s students,” a leader of the country’s highest Islamic authority has said, despite not providing any evidence of an actual decline in morality in schools.

“The degradation of morality among students in this country has reached a very serious stage ­— from the elementary to the high school level,” Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI) head Amrullah Ahmad said as the organization closed its four-day national congress on Wednesday.

“We have also witnessed the development of culture and arts that impart hedonistic values in Indonesians, which deviates from the true teachings of Islam.”

Amrullah’s warning came on the back of a Tuesday decision by the MUI to declare infotainment television programs as forbidden to Muslims in one of seven fatwas, or religious edicts.

“Gossip involves exposing embarrassing details of someone’s private life to the public, and this is haram,” said Ma’ruf Amin, head of the MUI’s fatwa body. “Profiting from broadcasting that news to the public is haram.”

The fatwa comes amid a debate over infotainment after the recent decision by the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) to classify such shows as “non-factual,” which means they are not journalistic and can therefore be censored.

That debate and a number of other morality story lines have dominated newspaper headlines in the country since a celebrity sex video scandal received extensive coverage by infotainment shows.

Critics of the shows claim that their wholesale coverage of the scandal prompted people to download copies of the sex tapes alledgedly featuring a pop star and two television presenters.

Amrullah also spoke on Wednesday of a need to empower women and children, without going into detail about how to accomplish these goals.

“Women play strategic roles in the development of the nation and we urge the government to empower women at the grassroots level,” he said. “Every party must be able to protect women from domestic violence, human trafficking and acts of intimidation and exploitation.”

The MUI also called for more to be done to fight poverty.