On 10 November, almost a month ago, Rizieq Shihab, one of the country’s best-known and most radical religious, returned to Indonesia after three and a half years of self-exile in Saudi Arabia. Waiting for him at the international airport of Jakarta, the capital, were tens of thousands of people, who had gathered in violation of the rules imposed by the government to limit the coronavirus pandemic and causing the delay and cancellation of dozens of flights. The welcome at the airport was unexpected, but not surprising. Rizieq is no ordinary character in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world: despite the last few years spent away from the country, journalist Richard Paddock he defined it “The most formidable enemy of Indonesian President Joko Widodo”.
For decades, Rizieq has attacked the Indonesian secular democratic system thanks to the group he co-founded in the late 1990s, the Front of Islamic Defenders (FPI), a kind of civilian militia that was to help the army maintain control of the country. after the end of the long Suharto dictatorship. Since then, the FPI has been responsible for countless attacks, against bars, opposing groups and events for the rights of gay people, among others.
In recent years the group has progressively transformed into an increasingly influential social and political movement, with the aim of supporting the sharia, Islamic law, is capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people (significant numbers, even though the two largest Islamic organizations in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, together have about 141 million members). In his sermons, Rizieq argued that Indonesia should be united under one god, and that Muslim people should impose their own rules on all minority groups.
Rizieq Shihab (AP Photo / Achmad Ibrahim)
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One of the most well-known recent cases involving FPI was scandal which in 2016 led to the conviction for blasphemy of the then governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian and ally of President Joko. During a rally held in September of that year, Basuki quoted a passage from the Koran which was then used to produce a video in which it appeared that Basuki himself was saying that the Koran had deceived Muslims. The video went viral and the FPI began organizing large demonstrations against Basuki, fueling the hatred of him that already existed within the country’s Islamic fundamentalist groups.
Despite his growing importance in national political circles, Rizieq decided to leave Indonesia due to the dissemination of some of his messages with explicit sexual content directed to a woman who was not his wife. Rizieq was charged with the crime of pornography – contained in a law he himself supported – and left for Saudi Arabia, where he remained until mid-November.
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Since his return, Rizieq has participated in several crowded events to present his “moral revolution”, as he himself called it, which aims to push Indonesia more and more towards a conservative view of Islam (a process that has already been underway for some time). Rizieq’s idea is that the Indonesian government and President Joko are responsible for the crisis that the country is going through, which due to the pandemic is in recession for the first time since the late nineties: his proposal is to make prevail the “moral people”, which in his vision are the people who follow the rules provided by the sharia. Today in Indonesia there is only the province of Aceh, in the northwest, which adopts Sharia law; however, other provinces have integrated some aspects of Islamic law into their own legislation, especially following pressure from groups such as the FPI.
Many observers, however, are not concerned only with the “moral revolution” campaign. During the rallies of the last few weeks, all held in violation of the rules imposed by the government to contain the coronavirus epidemic, Rizieq used extremely violent tones: for example, he claimed that beheadings like that by teacher Samuel Paty, killed on October 16 in France after showing his students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, could also happen in Indonesia, if the police did not adequately prosecute the “blasphemers”. So far no serious action has been taken against the FPI, despite the head of the armed forces in Jakarta, General Dudung Abdurachman, calling for the group to be dissolved.
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