Indonesia: Sunni Islam, IS and return to extremism

Indonesians joined Islamic State in Syria, with some returning to carry out attacks in Jakarta in January 2016, killing two civilians.

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The Interpreter
By Bobby Anderson | December 13, 2017

[Excerpt]

In a trend that began under then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's first term, intolerant strains of Sunni Islam have increasingly been used as electoral tools. Politicians across the Sunni Muslim-majority areas of the archipelago have campaign on Islamic piety, and numerous sharia-inspired local regulations and bylaws passed, most of them contradicting Indonesia's constitution and secular identity.

This radicalisation has been accompanied by demands that Indonesia 'return' to the originally proposed 1945 constitution, which would apply Sharia to Muslims. Through Yudhoyono's second term, churches in Muslim areas of Jakarta were shuttered, and in the national curriculum, science ceded ground to religion.

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