Indonesian man questions God, lands in prison

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The constitution guarantees freedom of religion and speech, and the country is 16 years into a transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Indian Express / NY Times
By Joe Cochrane | May 13, 2014

More than half of Indonesia’s 491 provincial districts have enacted various bylaws inspired by Islamic law, or Shariah.

Growing up in a conservative Muslim household in rural West Sumatra, Alexander Aan hid a dark secret beginning at age 9: He did not believe in God. His feelings only hardened as he got older and he faked his way through prayers, Islamic holidays and Ramzan.

He stopped praying in 2008, when he was 26, and he finally told his parents and three siblings that he was an atheist — a rare revelation in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. They responded with disappointment and expressions of hope that he would return to Islam.

But Aan didn’t, and he ended up in prison after running afoul of a 2008 law restricting electronic communications. He had joined an atheist Facebook group started by Indonesians living in the Netherlands, and in 2011 he began posting commentaries outlining why he did not think God existed.

“When I saw poor people, people on television caught up in war, people who were hungry or ill, it made me uncomfortable,” Aan, now 32, says. “As a Muslim, I had questioned God —what is the meaning of God?”
He was released on parole on January 27 this year after serving more than 19 months on the charge of inciting religious hatred.

Indonesia’s state ideology, Pancasila, enshrines monotheism, and blasphemy is illegal. However, the constitution guarantees freedom of religion and speech, and the country is 16 years into a transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

But Aan’s case is one of an increasing number of instances of persecution connected to freedom of religion in Indonesia. Although it has influential Christian, Hindu and Buddhist minorities, every year there have been hundreds of episodes, including violent attacks, targeting religious minorities like Christians and Shiite and Ahmadiyah Muslims, as well as dozens of arrests over blasphemy against Islam.

Religious intolerance is on the rise at least partly because of the growing influence of radical Islamic groups.
“Aan’s case very much ties in with that whole trend,” says Benedict Rogers of the Christian Solidarity Worldwide. “Of course there would be religious people who would take offence about someone publicly expressing this view” about atheism, he said. “But if it weren’t for growing Islamism and extremism, Alexander’s case probably wouldn’t have happened.”


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