The mentality behind Aceh’s Qanun Jinayat Iwan Dzulvan Amir  ;   A researcher who has studied Aceh for over two decades and currently resides in Jakarta

JAKARTA POST,  27 September 2014

                                                                                                                       

After years of debates and political tug-of-wars, the Aceh legislative council was scheduled to pass the province’s own Islamic penal code bylaw — the Qanun Jinayat — on Sept. 26, which will upgrade the existing bylaws that regulate morality and daily lifestyles (more the latter than the former). It will further regulate how a good Muslim — and apparently non-Muslim as well — should live in Aceh. The vagueness of the draft is impressive, even as it covers the most personal of daily activities. Are there further derivative regulations being planned? No doubt, human rights activists will be up in arms, repeating concerns over the rights of women, discriminatory implementation, lack of respect of privacy and individual rights and even context-less and superficial interpretation of Islamic teachings. These concerns are well-founded to some extent, but they merely address the symptoms and not the cause of why such laws were passed in the first place. One need only look at the local news to see how the common people of Aceh — mostly younger people — regularly violate sharia law on a daily basis, ranging from petty violations to severe ones. Clearly it demonstrates both the failure of Aceh’s religious leaders in educating or urging the people to follow these religious laws, as well as the failure of political leaders in enforcing them. The cause of sharia implementation in Aceh is often blamed on politics, specifically the central government’s effort to appease separatists in the early 2000s. The effort failed, but its effect remains as nobody has the guts to withdraw Aceh’s authority to issue bylaws based on the interpretation of sharia, as they risk being labeled anti-Islamic. Even today’s president-elect, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, has declared that his administration will stop the proliferation of sharia-inspired bylaws in all regions except in Aceh. The social and cultural reasons for the sharia dilemma in Aceh, however, are more complicated. The leaders and lawmakers that produced these qanun came from an entirely different background than the majority of the Aceh people who are resisting them. The elder generation were less educated, less literate and, more importantly, less connected to the rest of the world. They genuinely believed that Aceh should become a “nanny state”, which partly explained their obsession with creating bylaws that regulate unimportant personal behavior rather than those that address the needs of the general public. It does not necessarily mean that these leaders are less democratic. It simply means they have a different mental construct on what constitutes a good lifestyle for Aceh. To illustrate this mentality: when I was in primary school in Aceh, my class debated whether one-third is larger than two-quarters. Despite rational arguments by some students, the class remain divided and polarized (interestingly, all of the girls were on the right side). Our math teacher “resolved” the controversy by putting the issue to a class vote, which resulted in the number one-third being declared larger than two-quarters. It was wrong, of course, but the class was happy to move on and harmony returned. Setting aside the teacher’s competence, this case can be interpreted in many ways. For me, it demonstrated how Acehnese were taught to value general consensus more than facts and reason (it also taught me that for every local wisdom there is also local stupidity). Aceh was — and in many parts still is — a communalistic-agrarian society where the individual is expected to submit to the will of the community. It was this mentality instilled early on childhood that has shaped the leaders of Aceh today. Populism is not enough to describe this phenomenon as many of these leaders actually believed in the qanun that they created. Ask any random person in Aceh and they would answer that they want sharia implemented in Aceh, but if you ask them how, they will give different answers. None of Aceh’s politicians would admit that in creating these qanun they were actually guessing that it was what the public wanted. None of them wanted to go against the will of their constituents, yet opinion surveys have never been conducted on this important issue. The only reason Qanun Jinayat was rushed (i.e. sneaked in) near the end-of-term of the current legislative council was because they wanted to minimize the public backlash. The efforts to further enforce sharia in Aceh will fail, of course. It is inevitable. History has proven that every time religious fascists gain power and begin to enforce stricter (and sometimes absurd) lifestyle rules, then the people will eventually push back. Whether Aceh leaders want to admit it or not, tourism, businesses and investment have been hurt by the sharia implementation. Current lack of funding and logistics already severely limit the policing of 5 million people that do not want to be told how to lead their lives, especially in a region with a long history of anti-authoritarianism like Aceh. Younger generations in Aceh — who already outnumber the other age brackets — already see the hypocrisy of the sharia implementation in Aceh. Enforcers are selective on who they punish (i.e. only the poor and not the wealthy and powerful). Preachers of sharia-lifestyle regularly spend family weekends outside of Aceh on activities that are otherwise frowned upon in the province. Corruption goes unaddressed, turning Aceh into the second-most corrupt province in the country. Faced with these facts, it is only a matter of time for this young demographic to confront the absurdity of sharia in Aceh. The question is whether the backlash will be an explosion of revolutionary rage where they topple their elders, or a quiet and gradual shrug-off that will send the sharia bylaws into obscurity. I favor the latter. ●