By Terry Lacey
It has been front page news in Indonesia and across much of the world`s press that the Aceh provincial parliament has just introduced a shariah by-law on stoning for adultery. Is Indonesia entering a new stone age? No it is not.
With a modern leader, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is backed by modern Islamic coalition allies, Indonesia shows all the signs of entering a boom period of growth and change.
Indonesia will be the seventh largest economy in the world by 2045, bigger than Japan, the UK or Germany, according to a Sept. 2 Standard Chartered Bank Report titled "Indonesia: Asia`s Emerging Powerhouse." Indonesia will probably also have to be a nuclear power by then to meet high volume demand for clean energy.
It is, therefore, perhaps a good thing that an outgoing defeated provincial parliament of yesterday`s men in Aceh made such a stupid decision. They clearly don`t care or are not aware of the impact this will have on the reputation of Indonesia or Islam. But they will create a political backlash to help sweep away the creeping advances of a politicized and backward version of shariah law that does not belong in Indonesia.
In the United Kingdom, Middle East and Indonesia modern interpretations of shariah rules are helping to expand the economic and social vision of Islamic banking. Islamic bonds have been successfully introduced into Indonesian financial markets with resounding success. And in Malaysia many non-Muslims use modern shariah banking services. But Islamic banking must stay true to its ideals and avoid the high-leverage high-risk instruments that led the Western banking system down the path to greed and self-destruction.
A recent report in the British media confirmed that voluntary use of shariah law to resolve family and commercial disputes is increasingly common, with non-Muslims starting to use it to solve business problems in the Muslim community. And earlier reports in the US press indicated that an unexpected by-product of introducing shariah family law in the UK has been to deal equitably with a backlog of divorces demanded by Muslim women previously trapped in bad relationships.
Certainly shariah law is not always perfect and its reputation is terrible in the west, but its achievements are not all by any means bad, and it seems best administered on a voluntary basis, and in a modern or positive social context. Context is everything. And in Aceh as a reaction to the tsunami disaster, civil land registration law is apparently more progressive than in most of Indonesia, giving clearer rights to women.
The underlying reality of what just happened in Aceh is the complete reverse of the flurry of negative press that will follow, because the wrong kind of sharia law, and the conservatives who introduced it, will be seriously weakened by this move. What has happened is a sign of weakness, and that they have lost the political battle.
The provincial governor, a modernizer, and the new modernizing Aceh party, elected by a landslide, backed by the cadres of the previous GAM liberation movement, now reconciled with a reforming Jakarta, will form a new administration in Aceh, and one of their first priorities will have to be to dispense with this awful legacy.
For me, the future of Indonesia is exemplified by a young woman I interviewed last year at the annual conference of the Indonesian Renewable Energy Society in Jakarta. This smart young Muslim woman, all in white with her hijab, or head scarf, looked orthodox, if not conservative. But she was no conservative. She was bright and enthusiastic about the future of clean energy in Indonesia and she is also one of the hundred-plus trained nuclear technologists in the country waiting for the future to catch up with them. She represents the Islam of tomorrow in Indonesia, and not the old-generation politicians of Aceh. Their legacy will be blown away, not by the bombs of terrorists, but by the wind of change.
__________
Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.
Source: http://www.asiasentinel.com
