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.