Islamists and the criminalization of sex outside of marriage
After the rise of Islamist influence, the Indonesian parliament adopted a law on the sixth of this month that “criminalizes” sex outside of marriage for Indonesians and foreigners, so that it is punishable by a prison sentence of up to one year, and in the same package of laws that were adopted, it is punishable by a prison sentence of up to three years who attacks the dignity of the president or vice president and up to six years in prison for anyone who publishes fake news suggesting that Islamists have struck a deal with the political class that includes reducing the margin of democracy and political freedom of expression in exchange for pushing society toward greater social respect.
Previous attempts to pass a law criminalizing sex outside marriage failed in 2019 as a result of widespread popular protests against it, accompanied by clashes between police and students, who saw it as an attack on personal freedom and an affront to democracy. They are 17 years old at marriage if caught alone after 9 p.m.
Human Rights Watch described the decision to criminalize sex outside of marriage, which was recently approved, as a human rights disaster and as laying the groundwork for moral policing, as Indonesia’s constitution recognizes religious freedom and Indonesia’s national motto is “unity through diversity”, but Islamists they work to impose their puritanical vision on the whole society. They ignore Christians, who make up ten percent of the population, and Hindus and Buddhists, who make up five percent. They also ignore Muslims who believe in the separation of religion from the state and who defend the secular constitution, which does not stipulate in any of its articles that Islamic law is the source of legislation.
Because science and medicine agree that love and sex have proven health and psychological benefits, the laws that govern modern societies say that any two adults over the age of eighteen can have consensual sex as they wish, and it seems that the peoples of Southeast Asia, including Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries live normal sex lives that are not much different from the rest of the world, so hardliners are now working to change that.
But their task will not be easy because these countries are historically used to freedom and openness, and it is likely that local communities will try to circumvent Islamist laws when the time comes to implement them because they are not in accordance with human nature, which includes Islamists themselves as well as others, which confirms a series of scandals involving the establishment of relations between Indonesian Islamists Sex and giving money to underage girls. In one of these cases, an adviser to an Islamic leader was arrested after he was caught red-handed in a hotel room with a naked schoolgirl. An investigation revealed that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on 45 women , among whom was a model in a pornographic magazine.
There is the story of lawsuits brought against the preacher and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in European courts by several women, including one they described as “weak and in need of protection.” They accused him of rape and sexually assaulted them, using his religious status, and he claimed that these sexual relations were consensual and that what was happening was an attempt to take revenge on his former lovers! One of the more recent examples is the story of a famous Egyptian Islamic preacher on communication sites, who was told by a woman he met on the Internet that he invited her to the apartment he rented and asked her for sex, justifying it by saying that an oral marriage contract could be concluded between them, and when I asked him about witnesses, he called, he presented people over the phone as witnesses of that “verbal” wedding, then he had casual sex with her, according to her statements, and the case is now in the process. Egyptian courts.
From the previous examples, it is clear that the Islamists themselves bypass what they consider “legal decisions” in order to have sex, and this will certainly be done by many Indonesians who will write marriage contracts on a piece of paper called a customary marriage. among Sunnis and temporary marriage among Shiites, which should be presented to the police when necessary, and this will make the priests the first to benefit from this law, because past experience shows that such laws are not applied in poor countries of the third world except in the poor, while when the story of an extramarital affair of a politician, officer or businessman is exposed in most Islamic countries the investigations end with the claim that there was a “legitimate” marriage contract between the two parties.
The fate of this law is also expected to be no different from that of previous laws that considered prostitution a “crime against disorder and disorder”, which culminated in 2016 with the bulldozing of Jakarta’s largest prostitution districts. these prohibitions were only that prostitution became a source of income for the police through the bribes they receive to ignore what they see, and the practice of this profession has moved from familiar neighborhoods and apartments under the supervision of the government and health to the Internet as the main method of communication between prostitutes and buyers, so that it is no longer possible to impose any control over sex workers, either in terms of exploiting children or in terms of controlling sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS.
Likewise, it is no longer possible to know the actual numbers of sex workers, but it is expected that the numbers did not decrease after these procedures. The United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS estimated the number of prostitutes in Indonesia at about a quarter of a million women, and the International Labor Organization said that seventy percent of them were brought into this profession. Their families and friends, and to make the hypocrisy of the Islamists complete, another type of prostitution has emerged in recent decades that they called “halal sex”, practiced by tourists from the Middle East with Indonesian prostitutes, in which sex takes place after a formal “marriage” contract that sometimes it lasts for several days.Women think it’s just a game to satisfy their sexual desires.
If the Indonesian government or other governments of Islamic countries want to fight the root cause of sex trafficking, they must first fight poverty, which is reported to reach almost half of Indonesia’s population, but religious extremism promoted by Islamists is causing the country to lose its investment climate for foreign companies and threatens tourism sector. Therefore, the head of the Association of Travel Agencies in Indonesia said that the law that criminalizes sex will have a negative impact on tourism, especially on the island of Bali, which annually receives one million tourists from Australia alone, and will also lead to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, and one one of the reasons for distinguishing Bali as a global tourist destination in addition to its charming nature is that its inhabitants are Hindus.
Because it is noticeable that there is no active tourist movement towards extremist Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and even Pakistan despite the media campaigns carried out by the government and despite the presence of areas of beautiful nature, but the tendency of Pakistani society towards extremism made this effort in vain, because for example in 2004 Pakistan was visited by less than one hundred thousand tourists, while India was visited by more than 19 million tourists in 2019 who spent 28 billion dollars. It is also noticeable that tourism in Egypt has fallen recently as a result of the movement of Egyptian society towards extremism.
That is, the religious extremism that Indonesia currently follows and the laws that are being passed will not change much from the spread of emotional and sexual relationships outside of marriage, which extremist Islamists always do in countries whose governments or societies they control.
