In Aceh, a province in the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, the only province run by Sharia law, women are now being recruited for flogging/caning jobs. “If the perpetrator is a woman, the flogger should be a woman too.”
Officials—mostly men—from the Sharia police are gathered at Taman Sari, a popular public park at the heart of the city. Among the scant crowd is a group of college girls and photojournalists jostling to get the perfect shot. In the middle of the park’s arena, a woman cloaked in a white jilbab with her face covered with a mask, is seated on her knees on a carpet. She’s accused of a crime that wouldn’t even be considered a crime anywhere else in Indonesia: meeting a man in public who is not her husband.
As an officer reads out the crime, another woman, dressed head-to-toe in a brown jilbab with her face covered, gets ready with a cane next to her. On cue, the woman in brown delivers swift blows on the accused’s back 22 times. Three more floggings of men by men for other crimes follow.
Public floggings are business as usual in Aceh, a uniquely conservative province in a country that has the world’s largest Muslim population. Floggings are highly publicized and usually well attended by the public. What’s uncommon, though, is flogging delivered by a woman, a contract employee of the Sharia police.
n 2020, just before the pandemic gripped the world, Aceh’s Sharia police officially unveiled an all-women flogging squad—a first in the country where the punishment has drawn international attention, and criticism, for years.
Aceh’s Sharia law was formalised in 2003 when Jakarta granted it special authourisation. The semi-autonomous status allows Aceh to pass its own laws and, over time, hundreds of Sharia-based ordinances have come to dominate public life—from clothing restrictions, to banning women to sit astride motorcycles, to intermingling of opposite sexes, playing live music and drinking. One study found 442 local Sharia regulations enacted between 1999 and 2012.
Two homosexual men in Indonesia’s Aceh province have been publicly caned 77 times each, after neighbors reported them to the Islamic religious police for having sex.
In case you don’t remember, it was Hillary Clinton, who, on her first trip to Indonesia as Secretary of State, remarked to the American media: “As I travel around the world over the next years, I will be saying to people: ‘If you want to know whether Islam can co-exist with freedom, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights, then you must come to Indonesia – a shining example of a modern, tolerant Muslim country.”
Jack Rider says
How do you know if it is really a woman under the burka? What about transgender rights? Can a biological man who identifies as a woman get the job? Does a biological woman who takes such employment outsie her home require the accompaniment of a male family member in order to adminsiter the flogging/caning? And if a woman’s testimony in an islamic court is only worth that of half a man, then wouldn’t you really need two muslim women to adminsiter the flogging/caning? What if in doing the flogging they accidently hit each other rather than the intended “flogee,” would that swing count as a “flog” or do the two women floggers get a do over? If they get a do-over then is that justice to flog the “floggee” an additional flog? All this gets very confusing to a rational non-medieval mind. Before the implement this the muslims in Aceh. INdonesia ought to assemble a grand counsel to discuss all its ramifications. (I think that is called a Jerkah, at least in Afghanistan. Or maybe it is just a circle Jerkah.
Az gal says
A male flogger could probably kill. Female floggies should have female floggers. Especially since the male Muslums would get a turn on beating them. We know how warped their minds are.
Ziggysue says
This is why I didn’t give any money or indeed a fuck after the earthquake and tsunami.
It’s a shame it wasn’t wiped off the planet.
Scum.
Backward filth