JAKARTA (Reuters) – Several hundred Indonesian Muslims rallied on Monday in Jakarta and Surabaya, urging the government to disband the Ahmadiyya sect which many followers of Islam consider heretical.

The government of the world’s most populous Muslim country has come under increasing pressure from hard-line groups in recent months to ban Ahmadiyya, whose followers refuse to accept the Prophet Mohammad as Islam’s final prophet.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s government issued a ministerial decree in June that stopped short of banning the sect, but warned that followers could face five years in jail for tarnishing religion.

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir addressed supporters of the hard-line organization Muslim Forum (FUI), including women and children, at a rally near the presidential palace in Jakarta on Monday.

“Ahmadiyya is not Islam, so Ahmadiyya must be disbanded. Anyone who admits to being Muslim but is still defending Ahmadiyya is an apostate,” Bashir said, adding that Ahmadiyya must not claim to be part of Islam.

Indonesia, a secular nation with a population of 226 million, is predominantly Muslim.

Moderate Muslims have criticized the government for not taking a tougher stance against militant Islamic groups following several incidents in which places of worship were damaged and individuals intimidated.

Ahmadiyya, estimated to have anywhere between 200,000 and 2 million followers in Indonesia, has been a subject of heated controversy after Indonesia’s Ulema Council, the country’s Islamic authority, branded the group “deviant”.

A government team tasked with monitoring religious groups had previously recommended that Ahmadiyya should be banned.

Source: Rueters

Indonesian hardliners rally against’deviant’ sect

JAKARTA (AFP) — Hundreds of white-clad Muslim hardliners took to the streets of the Indonesian capital Monday to demand the government ban a minority Islamic sect branded “deviant” by top clerics.

Firebrand cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was among more than 1,500 protesters from various Islamist groups who chanted slogans, shouted Allahu akbar (God is greater) and waved banners condemning the Ahmadiyah sect.

They blocked the street in front of Jakarta’s presidential palace to demand President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issue a decree to ban the sect, which has been the subject of months of heated debate.

Bashir, who was convicted but subsequently cleared of conspiracy over the deadly Bali bombings of 2002, told the crowd through a loudspeaker that the sect was “the most dangerous enemy of Islam.”

“Ahmadiyah is the enemy of Islam. They are the infidels that have been trying to destroy Islam, not using violence but through their deviant principles,” he said.

“Ahmadiyah must be dissolved as it is more dangerous than communism.”

The controversy has raised questions about tolerance and pluralism in the world’s most populous Muslim country, where religious freedom is a constitutional right.

Calls to ban Ahmadiyah have been mounting since June when the government ordered the sect, which has peacefully practised its faith in Indonesia since the 1920s, to stop spreading its belief that Mohammed was not the last prophet.

The ministerial decree fell short of the ban demanded by Muslim leaders after the country’s top Islamic body issued a fatwa describing the sect as “deviant.”

Ahmadiyah, which claims 500,000 followers in Indonesia, holds that its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was the final prophet and not Mohammed, contradicting a central tenet of mainstream Islam.

Source: AFP