Backlash builds after woman jailed for asking Indonesian mosque to turn down volume of its loudspeakers
The verdict is likely to aggravate concerns that Indonesia’s moderate brand of Islam is coming under threat from increasingly influential radicals
Indonesia’s jailing of a woman for complaining about the volume of a mosque loudspeaker has sparked a wave of criticism, with a petition calling for her release gaining more than 100,000 supporters.
Rights groups and the Muslim-majority country’s biggest religious organisation slammed the 18-month blasphemy sentence handed out on Tuesday to the defendant, an ethnic Chinese Buddhist, in Medan on Sumatra island.
The 44-year-old woman named Meiliana was found guilty of insulting Islam for asking her neighbourhood mosque in 2016 to lower its sound system because it was too loud and “hurt” her ears.
There are hundreds of thousand of mosques across the Southeast Asian archipelago nation, with the five-times-a-day call to prayer heard everywhere in the biggest cities and smallest towns.
An online petition to Indonesian president Joko Widodo calling for the woman’s release had more than 115,000 supporters as of Friday evening.
“Eighteen months in prison for asking people to lower the call to prayer volume? Come on!” wrote one petition supporter.
The verdict is likely to aggravate concerns that Indonesia’s moderate brand of Islam is coming under threat from increasingly influential radicals.