The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (31 page)

“If we’re going to jail women for not wearing
jilbabs
[head scarves] it’s about identity, not religion,” said Shadia Marhaban, a journalist and activist involved in Aceh’s long
struggle for autonomy. Marhaban had only recently returned to Aceh after fleeing to the United States as a political refugee in 2003. Yet the Aceh she returned to after the tsunami was extremely different. The tidal wave had changed the soil itself, and now the air seemed hotter. An entire society had been leveled by water and war. Yet this opportunity to make the world new in so many more essential
ways—including education, welfare, and jobs—was vanishing under the shroud of religion. This turn of events disappointed Marhaban, who had risked so much for a chance to build a new, free Aceh—a chance, paradoxically, that the storm had provided. “We have so much to do,” she said. “Why stop boys from chasing girls?”

At eight one Saturday evening in May 2006, in the capital city of Banda Aceh,
two young Vice and Virtue officers were playing a fierce game of Ping-Pong before heading out for the night patrol. The table was brand-new,
and the office smelled of fresh paint. Both wore dark green uniforms and black baseball hats decorated with gold braid, like a forestry unit on dress parade.

The men smacked the hollow ball across the net. Febbe Orida, my twenty-one-year-old interpreter,
usually overbrimming with chatter, looked on in silence. Her full, soft mouth, typically tucked into a grin, had flat-lined; she looked very uncomfortable. The day before, when she I and visited the Way-Hah office to secure our places on this patrol, the officers had scolded Orida for wearing too-tight jeans. I had never seen her balk before; Febbe Orida was ebullient, and also brave. When the tsunami
struck, she and her family fled the wall of water, which flattened their village. In the tidal wave’s aftermath, as foreign aid workers and journalists overran Aceh, Orida leaped at the chance to work with Americans. Already fluent in English by virtue of watching American films, Orida became a crack interpreter. Punctuated by American slang, her translations could be unusual. The day before,
she had lifted her long-sleeve shirt in the privacy of our car to reveal some baby fat on her hips. “I’ve got to get rid of these muffin tops,” she sighed. I had never heard the expression before. A photographer from Southern California had recently taught it to her. (He also taught her to use
bank
for “money,” a translation I found perpetually confusing in conversations about aid dollars.)

The officers began to talk to us about the evening’s patrol. “We’re going to roads where girls don’t wear veils and telling them to wear their veils,” one officer told Orida. Preventing
khalwat
, or “fraternization between unmarried men and women,” was their primary objective. “We’ve seen some squeezing. It gets worse at night. There are a lot of flamers in Aceh,” she translated. I stopped her.
“Do you mean homosexuals?” I asked. She looked at me impatiently, “Yes, but what he said is ‘flamer,’ not ‘homosexual.’ ” Orida was determined to capture nuance—and prejudice.

Before we left, the squad offered us paper plates of rice. Orida did not want to eat with the police. Something was wrong. “Can we eat in the car?” she asked, eager to escape as soon as possible. Outside police headquarters,
the force’s black pickup truck was already thrumming; in its open bed, two park benches were bolted back to back. One of the new officers, a thirty-year-old former kindergarten teacher, Nur Amina, stood in the driveway waiting to climb aboard. She was wearing candy pink lipstick, which seemed incongruous with the task at hand. The police had come under criticism for targeting women, she said,
but that was a
malicious rumor. “We’ve heard women say we’re against women, but we protect women. Bad things can happen when they’re alone with men.”

Orida stared at the exposed park benches and pulled me off to the side. “Do we have to go in their car? It’s social suicide,” she said. (“Social suicide” was another of her newly acquired phrases.) I thought she was simply afraid her friends would
see us, but she meant something more. Her anxiety was unusual, so we took Nur Amina along with us to ride in our SUV behind the pickups. As the officers climbed into the truck, men in a nearby barbershop taunted them, calling out
yip yip yip
. Knowing that Nur Amina could not understand English, Orida murmured to me, “It must suck to be Way-Hah. People are laughing at them.” Yet Nur Amina had heard
the men’s taunting as the moral police squad approached. “Most people run from us,” she said.

My notes for the night read like the blotter from a bumbling police squad—more Keystone Kops than Taliban Vice and Virtue, but unsettling just the same.

7:00 p.m.: Two housewives wearing slippers and housecoats pump water from an outdoor well. Looking harried from chores, and only outside for a moment
to fetch water, they have left their glossy black heads bare in the fading daylight. The Vice and Virtue pickup screeches to a halt before them, and they begin to run. “Stop!” the officers yell. Seven officers clamber down from the park benches, and Nur Amina leaps nimbly out of our car and advances. “Where’s your veil?” she shouts at one. The booming voice, coming from her four-and-a-half-foot
frame, startles them. “My house is there.” An old woman passing by on a bicycle shrieks, “Oh, they’re going to cut your hair!”

7:05 p.m.: A young couple astride a motorbike has pulled off the road onto a patch of stubbled grass. The truck stops again. The eight officers march toward the bike’s red taillight, winking against the deepening darkness. “Why are you stopped here?” Nur Amina demands.
“Only to answer a text message,” the boy says, quickly proffering his cellular phone. “And who’s he to you?” she asked the sheepish girl. “He’s my cousin,” the girl answers. “Don’t lie; it will make it worse. He’s not your husband.” The kids fumble in their pockets for their ID cards. Nur Amina jots down their names. Then Vice and Virtue speeds toward the beach—a notorious lovers’ lane.

8:00
p.m.: After driving around for a while harassing minor targets, at dusk we arrive at the beach, where couples are gathered. Our gang of
eight officers and two reporters wades unstealthily through the deep sand toward couples sitting a little ways from one another. I am beginning to feel ridiculous and mean. So, I’d bet, is Orida, who lags behind and watches waves crest to catch the last bit of
orange light. Two young people sit with their heads together facing west, watching the sunset over the Indian Ocean. They don’t see us coming until our gang is on top of them, and now it is too late for them to run. “Why are you wearing that shirt?” Officer Amina shouts at the young woman, who is wearing a slightly diaphanous long-sleeve shirt. Orida looks down at the sand as she interprets for me.
Then we grimace at each other. The officers—especially Nur Amina—seem always to yell at the women.

“We’re newly engaged,” the boy answers.

“You think engaged people are allowed to do that? Tell your wife to wear proper clothes. A husband is responsible for his wife.”

The last slice of tangerine sun is dropping into the Indian Ocean, and the Vice and Virtue Squad orders the beach cleared, commanding
that all couples go pray now at the beachside mosque. It is almost time for
maghrib
, evening prayer. In a moment the muezzin will clear his throat and begin the call.
Maghrib
in Arabic also means “west”—the place of the setting sun—and the western part of Muslim North Africa, including Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia. If I were a crow (or, more likely, a cormorant) and took off
from the beach to fly west at this latitude, once I reached Africa I would fly straight over Somalia, where, at this hour, the midday heat would be rising in shreds off the desert. If I kept pumping my wings, pushing west against the trade wind’s eastward flow, eventually southern Sudan would appear below me, its canopy like a field of broccoli crosshatched with the fresh grids of oil excavation.
And if I kept going, the broccoli would thin to pale grassland white-veined with rivers—Nigeria—and I would see the morning breeze ruffling the bur grass.

Instead, I am standing on Banda Aceh’s darkening beach, where an officer’s mobile phone buzzes as a text message arrives. Orida reads it over his shoulder:
“Salam aleikum, informasi
: there are two foreigners, one white one, one black, with
local girls. I think they’re prostitutes. They are in a hotel and it’s clear they’re going to spend the night there.”

“For that kind of case, we can’t do anything,” the officer said. When the patrol ends, and we are finally alone together, Orida tells me that some months earlier she had a run-in with the Vice and Virtue Squad in a nearby town. She had gone to a beach hotel with her boyfriend
for the night, and
someone pounded on the door. It was the religious police, and the two narrowly escaped arrest. It was just dumb luck they got off, since young people like them were usually made examples of, while the children of government ministers were allowed to do as they pleased. As an activist told me later, “Sharia doesn’t apply to anyone with power.”

In the next town, Jantho, a poor
couple was about to be caned for committing adultery. One Friday that May, Orida and I drove sixty miles east from Banda Aceh to Jantho Prison to try to see them. We arrived just before the Friday midday prayer, the week’s most important. The warden had gone, and our driver needed to pray, so he dropped us off at an outdoor café, its blue-and-white-checked tablecloths fluttering in the wind, and
went to find the local mosque. The café owner emerged from the cook shack carrying, in one hand, an umbrella to shield herself from the sun, and shooing us out of her café with the other.

“I can’t feed you now. I’ll get caught by the religious police,” she said. For the past five months, a group of girls had been patrolling during Friday prayer to make sure all the men in town were at the mosque.
Women were allowed to pray at home, but not to work or conduct business. So, for a couple of sleepy hours each Friday, Jantho became a women’s town.

The first caning had taken place a month and a half earlier, the café proprietress said. “People yelled, and it was so exciting,” she said, her face contorting, half a grimace, half gleeful. Her interest in the subject, it seemed, outweighed her
fear of breaking the law, and she led us to the back of the restaurant, where no one would see us. She and her husband had rebuilt the place since the tsunami, in which she had lost thirteen family members and her husband lost his entire family. “The tsunami happened because Acehnese people are sinners,” she said. “It makes sense to me that the ocean would get angry.”

In response, she had become
a more devout Muslim. “I cover my head even alone in my house,” she said. “When I go to the market and see girls in tight clothes laughing too loud, I tell them to be quiet. I like to warn people. I do it every day and I tell them, ‘Please don’t do this. The tsunami will happen again!’ ” The girls laughed at her, but she did not care; as she explained, “The world is about to end.”

_____

After
finishing our clandestine chicken-and-rice lunch, we returned to the prison. The guards had decided that it would be no problem to allow us, two women, to speak to the prisoners in the warden’s office.

The woman was first. When Anisa, twenty-four—who, like her boyfriend, preferred I use only her first name—was ushered into the office, her pimply face was white as flour. She and her boyfriend,
Zulfikar, twenty-eight, had been summoned to the jail the day before, after being granted their freedom for the past few weeks, and then summarily locked up. She’d had no idea the police were going to detain them, so she was clad in embroidered jeans from her date. Then Zulfikar, whey-faced and wearing a yellow-and-blue baseball shirt, appeared at the door. This was Anisa’s first glimpse of him since
the arrest.

“When will they do it?” she asked him.

“Next Friday,” he said.

“Can’t we pay anyone? We can pay two million,” Anisa pleaded.

Two million rupiah meant two hundred American dollars. The man played with the cellophane on his cigarette pack and said nothing. An L-shaped gash ran across his head and up his scalp, left by the mob that had beaten him. The cigarettes and chocolate bars
we had brought as gifts for them now seemed ridiculous, obscene. Neither of them ate the candy; they saved it for their cellmates—Zulfikar kept his for a particularly evil thug who would beat him if he was gone too long from his cell. He kept watching the door, all muscles taut, as if someone might burst through the door and grab him.

“I swear on the Holy Quran nothing happened,” Anisa said.

The couple had met about six months earlier, when Anisa took a bus Zulfikar was driving to the capital, from her village twelve hours away. They started to text each other, one thing led to another, and she came for a visit. Zulfikar took Anisa to a friend’s house. It got late, then later. His minibike broke down, so they had to spend the night—on opposite sides of the room. Anisa insisted, “I won’t
deny that he hugged me. I won’t deny that he tried to kiss me, but I told him to stop.” Before dawn, the door burst open and a mob of villagers armed with knives stormed the room. Zulfikar escaped through a window. “They would have killed him,” Anisa said. Instead, the mob shaved Anisa’s head, poured “holy” water over her scalp, and made her swear nothing had happened.

“You’ll cause another tsunami!”
they yelled. The worst part of the social policing wasn’t the whipping; it was this kind of mob violence. Interrupting,
Zulfikar said, “I have to go. My cellmate will beat me.” He filled his pockets with cigarettes and candy so the guards wouldn’t see. Once he’d left, Anisa sat forward and began to plead with us: this was her last chance to save herself.

“I am not a virgin,” she whispered hoarsely.
She had been married before, but her soldier husband had left her and she had never told Zulfikar. Again and again, she asked us questions we could not answer: How soon after the whipping would they be free to marry? Could they marry quickly? Could they pay someone to let them marry that very night? More frightening to her than the pain was the shame. In practical terms, the day’s momentary
sting was nothing compared to the stigma, which might cast her out of this shining new society forever.