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The recent rape of a female university student by three members of Aceh’s Shariah Police should serve as a warning to all those who would like to see Shariah law imposed in Indonesia. When the authorities have the right and power to judge people according to their interpretations of Allah’s law, Allah stands robbed of His rights.

Using religious texts that can baffle the layman, scholars often create confusion, mixing that which is clearly evil with the purely good. This practice amounts to a spiritual bullying to create fear among believers and accumulate power. Murder, suicide and violent public punishments — caning, mutilation, public hangings and stoning — are repulsive to most of us, but through the words of scholars they can be twisted into expressions of faith and the love of God. We witness this twisting of values in every society that tries to implement Shariah law: People commit inhumane acts in the belief that they are carrying out God’s will.

State Shariah law grants scholars of Islam a power similar to that wielded by the church in Europe’s Dark Ages — and it conceals the fact that in Islam there is not meant to be a priesthood or clergy. According to the Koran, all of us, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are equal before God, who judges us only by our faith, not by our knowledge of religion or our analytical intelligence or by anything else. Everyone is encouraged to stand, bow, kneel and prostrate before God five times a day without any barrier or intermediary. There were no Islamic scholars or Shariah law in the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Everyone was free to embrace Islam according to their individual capacity, and the prophet passed judgment on issues as they arose, employing revealed verses, common sense and the traditions and sense of justice of the people he was working with.

In this light, Shariah law is an invention and an innovation within Islam that often has more to do with the prejudices and politics of a given time than it does with the substance of the Koran. Sadly, this has for some time been conveniently overlooked in many of the world’s Muslim communities, especially since the strict Wahabi interpretation took over the birthplace of Islam and subsequently discovered the petrodollar.

The kind of rape by men in authority in Aceh is not uncommon in communities that employ Shariah law. In Indonesia, it is not uncommon for a migrant worker to return home from working as a maid in Saudi Arabia only to give birth to an Arab-looking baby. If a maid is raped by her boss in Saudi Arabia the best thing she can hope for is to get home alive, because under that nation’s form of Shariah law, she could be sentenced to death for adultery.

In the light of atrocities committed in the name of God under Shariah law, it is curious that many Muslim communities, including here in Indonesia, support the idea. One might imagine that the rape in Aceh would put us off the idea, but unfortunately this is probably not going to happen. Although Islamists are a minority in Indonesia, they are a vocal and militant group. Islamists the world over have a habit of condemning secular law as being the cause of all evil in society; but notice that when bad things happen in Muslim communities, Shariah law never gets blamed.

Many people continue to blindly believe that if Shariah were the norm throughout the world, mankind’s ills would be cured. This is why it is important that the media and scholars take cases like the recent Aceh rape and employ them as illustrations of how the absolute moral and legal power that Shariah law gives authorities is corrupted and abused.

Muslims need not be apologetic and pretend that it is the people implementing Shariah law who are at fault rather than the law itself. Shariah is a man-made concept, and compared to current secular law, Shariah is positively barbaric, particularly its criminal code. The idea of four male witnesses proving adultery, for example, is laughable — all the more true when we set it side by side with modern forensic science.

With Aceh’s Islamists proposing that adulterers be punished by stoning, one hopes that the Aceh rape case will cause lawmakers there to step back and think about what they are dragging their people into. Authorities in Aceh and elsewhere should be careful to avoid usurping the rights of God for themselves. If this is allowed to continue, the stage will be set for the root of all evil to take hold: corruption of the heart. And corrupted hearts can no longer differentiate right from wrong or good from evil.



Bramantyo Prijosusilo is an artist, poet and organic farmer in Ngawi, East Java.