Progress in Indonesia

Women are overcoming their shyness and taking up positions of power in Aceh province:
Here, public whipping remains a common punishment for scores of offenders for a range of charges including gambling, adultery, drinking alcohol, and having gay or pre-marital sex. But the job has always been done by men. Until now....

But convincing women to participate has been no easy task, and it's taken years to assemble the first female squad, according to Safriadi, who heads provincial capital Banda Aceh's Sharia Implementation Unit.

Eight women -- all Sharia officers -- agreed to be floggers and were trained in the appropriate technique and advised how to limit injury.
Aceh is interesting because it's intensely Islamic, but has proven highly resistant to terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. Aceh's particular take on Islam is so deeply held that these foreign groups find their different orthodoxies around Islam aren't acceptable there. They're more successful in the urbane regions of Indonesia, where people are persuadable about what Islam is supposed to mean. Non-Muslims who happen to be there have the option of not being tried under the religious law, too, so to some degree this is inside baseball from a culture that is policing itself. Those standards aren't ours (in particular we object to rape victims being punished for the extramarital sex!), but they are theirs, and they enforce them in a way that holds down on extremism that threatens us. If we were to go and try to interfere with their practices, they'd become enemies rather than somewhat queer and very distant 'neighbors.'

Whether and how to address our objections with them is a difficult question.

2 comments:

  1. Flogging. The only Islamic (Afghan, I think) whip I ever examined had a handle about 10 inch's long, about twenty small chains about 20" long, each chain studded with sharp triangular steel triangles about a 1/2" on a side.
    The word "flog" imply a recoverable punishment. This device was more akin to having a chainsaw lightly run up and down the body, flaying skin and flesh in a horrible raked off mess. Designed for agony, and slow infectious death.
    Torture of course has always been an Afghan creative enterprise. "When wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, just roll to your rifle and blow out yer brains, an go to yer God like a soldier."

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  2. Yeah, I think in Aceh they just use a cane — and beatings are over clothes, which limits the damage somewhat.

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