Militant Muslims seek ban on Ahmadi sect

SUKABUMI, Indonesia (AP) | The Muslim hard-liners arrived just before midnight, armed with stones, clubs and flammable liquid. Townspeople cowering in fear heard chants of “Destroy! Destroy!” and watched the riotous mob set ablaze the mosque of an offshoot Islamic sect that the attackers view as heretical.

“This time they destroyed our property. If they come back I’m afraid they will target us,” said Rina Nurlinawati, a member of the Ahmadiyah sect who was among witnesses to the burning down of the group’s mosque in Sukabumi, a quiet, hillside town on Indonesia’s main island of Java.

The arson attack was one of several aimed at Ahmadiyah mosques in recent months by an extremist fringe that some Indonesians fear will upset long-held traditions of religious freedom and secularism in the world’s most populous Islamic nation.

The attackers, thought to be followers of the radical Islamic Defenders’ Front, seemed to have been emboldened by a government announcement in April that it might bow to their demands to outlaw the sect, which is accused of putting its own 19th century founder on par with Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

On June 9, the government issued a decree threatening Ahmadiyah followers with five years imprisonment for “activities that are not in accordance with interpretations of the religion of Islam.” It is not clear how strictly the measure will be enforced, but it didn’t satisfy hard-liners who still want an outright ban.

The vast majority of Indonesia’s 235 million people are moderate Sunni Muslims. Most view the roughly 200,000 Ahmadis with suspicion, and the government’s move to restrict the sect is widely seen as a bid by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to shore up support among voters for his run for a second term next year.

“Our state is a weak state that doesn’t dare to enforce the law if it goes against the religious feeling of the majority,” said the Rev. Franz Magnis-Suseno, a Jesuit priest and prominent advocate of interfaith relations. “The state has no right to say you may or may not worship.”

Indonesia’s constitution protects the people’s “right to worship according to their own religion or belief,” though Ahmadiyah opponents argue that the group’s beliefs violate a blasphemy law from the 1960s.

Ahmadiyah came to Indonesia in 1926 from Punjab, a region straddling the India-Pakistan border, and has branches in 190 countries. The group, which stresses nonviolence and tolerance of other faiths, is banned in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Ahmadis identify themselves as Muslims, pray five times a day and follow the teachings of the Koran, Islam’s holy book. But they hail their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a messiah and prophet. That offends Muslims who consider Muhammad the final prophet in a line of dozens of historical figures in the monotheistic religions, including Moses, Abraham and Jesus.

Ahmadiyah first felt the ire of the extremists in 2005, when an influential council of Islamic clerics branded it as “deviant.” The next year, the homes of hundreds of Ahmadi on the eastern island of Lombok were set ablaze. They still live in camps today, too afraid to return home.

“We call on Muslims to fight Ahmadiyah, to kill Ahmadiyah. Kill! Kill! Kill!” a leader of the Islamic Defenders’ Front, Sobri Lubis, told hundreds of supporters in a February speech posted on the Internet. “If they refuse to return to mainstream Islam, kill Ahmadiyah. Clear them out of Indonesia. God is great!”

During the April attack in Sukabumi, Ms. Nurlinawati said she huddled with her mother in a corner of her home when a mob led by a man in a white robe opened the gates to the mosque compound and stoned their house of prayer and school. The attackers took bamboo furniture off her porch to help fuel the blaze at the mosque, she said, and the wooden building was burned down to its concrete base.

Police did not intervene, Ms. Nurlinawati said, but non-Ahmadi neighbors managed to persuade the attackers not to destroy her house, too.

“We were outnumbered,” said Abdurahman, an Ahmadi in the same village who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name. “The police didn’t do anything when they burned down the mosque.”

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