[Kabar-indonesia] William F. Buckley Jr: Why a Caning in Indonesia Is Now Everyone's Business

[Joyo at aol.com]

The Houston Chronicle
August 5, 2006

Viewpoints

Why a Caning in Indonesia Is Now Everyone's Business

By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. - nationally syndicated
columnist

THE old injunction about minding your own business has
always been a little problematic, because carried to
formal lengths it distresses other laws, laws that
have to do with being one's brother's keeper.

>From large-scale national perspectives, there are the
laws that translate into maintaining balances of
power. You can try to ignore it when you hear that
Hitler has ultimate solutions about how to deal with
Germany's Jews, but meanwhile it makes sense to
maintain your fleet in good condition, never mind if
regulating German Jews is other people's business.

Itchy stuff. In the 19th century, moral realities
hardened on the subject of slavery. That too had been
thought of as other people's business for a long time,
even when the "other people" were your neighbors.
After a while, it was felt that slavery was other
people's business only if the practice of it was
removed at least by regional boundaries. And then
after a couple of generations, it was resolved that
slavery was not a
business to be tolerated anywhere within the nation's
territory; and so on.

The problem of which communities' practices continue
to be sheltered as other people's business is lightly
touched on in a huge story in The New York Times on
Tuesday about what they are taking to be their own
business in a province of Indonesia. Aceh is a
straitlaced part of the Muslim community. The big
photo shows a man standing in a long white shirt
looking down. On his left is a man dressed in black
whose face is shrouded by a mask. He is holding what
looks like a long stick. In fact it is a rattan cane,
about a meter long and 0.75 centimeter thick.

The photo depicts one stroke laid on by the "executor"
— that is what the Wilayatul Hisbah are called, the
enforcers of Shariah, or Muslim law. The camera caught
the swing of the cane because the prisoner was
still standing. The story says that on the seventh
stroke, he fell down in a faint. His sentence was 40
lashes of the cane, and the eager crowd was promised
that when the man came back to life, he would receive
the balance due of his sentence, another 33 strokes.

One is permitted to pause in cosmopolitan surprise
that seven strokes of the rattan cane, inflicted on a
man's back, would cause him to pass out. Old Etonians
must be especially skeptical, though their own
Wilayatul Hisbahs aimed at buttocks, not backs, but
often went on past a seventh stroke, with not much
evidence of students fainting.

But the point here being made is that there is in Aceh
a revival of Muslim fundamentalism. "Aceh," the
reporter tells us, "is undergoing a profound
transformation that is likely to have considerable
impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia, the most
populous Muslim country."
We learn that there are more than 40 prisoners
arrested for thievery, and it is being deliberated
whether to chop off their hands. We are reminded that
this remains the practice in Saudi Arabia, and one is
left to suppose that it is routine. If it were
spectacularly unusual, it would presumably have rated
a photo and a story in The New York Times. But engines
of the news cannot be alert to mundane torture. If
somebody is going to be hanged every morning at
Tyburn, after a while one loses interest, and that,
really, is the point of this essay.

Much hangs on the development of Muslim practice in
the 21st century. It can't remain somebody else's
business exclusively if organized communities take to
chopping off people's hands. The Times article
describes the arrest of three women in Aceh. Their
crime? They were sitting in a secluded section of a
hotel corridor without their head scarves. Inasmuch as
the Shariah is being developed, restored, revived,
evolved, it matters greatly in what direction it is
developing. We know that cheek by jowl in the Middle
East we have had developments along the lines of the
Taliban, with torture and death, and along different
lines, as in Turkey and Egypt. It is precisely an
urgent moral concern what practices will govern life
and law enforcement in Iraq — and Lebanon and Syria.

It has been a matter of huge reluctance even to think
of, let alone refer to, a great religious-moral
collision approaching, setting Islam against the
Judaeo-Christian world. The old counsel is to be
permissive about what other people do, especially if
they are self-governing. But in present circumstances,
these do not consolidate as purely local matters. What
happens in Aceh, when fundamentalist Islam is reviving
throughout Indonesia, is exactly as reported, a matter
of profound international concern.

Buckley is a nationally syndicated columnist based in
New York.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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