Muslim brotherhood tested while Aceh starts rebuilding
Muslim brotherhood tested while Aceh starts rebuilding
Tomi Soetjipto, Reuters/Banda Aceh
Like many Muslims in tsunami-hit Aceh, M. Yusuf looks to his religion for guidance. But lately he feels empty as he tries to cope with being thrust from shoe seller to Islamic preacher.
When the giant waves razed his suburb of Kaju in the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh six months ago, they also killed its leading Muslim clerics.
Yusuf now is the head of a temporary housing camp for 1,000 refugees in Kaju, and is its unofficial preacher, a role he laments because of the strain of dealing with the loss of his wife, six children and home.
But his main disappointment stems from the fact that no Indonesian Islamic groups from other parts of the world's most populous Muslim nation have come to help his community.
"No. None have come here," said Yusuf, speaking before leading dusk prayers.
The Canadian and Indonesian Red Cross have offered to help fund construction of permanent houses for the refugees, he said.
Finding strength in Islam was natural for Acehnese in the weeks after the Dec. 26 tsunami left 168,000 people dead or missing. The province on the northern tip of Sumatra island is dubbed the "Verandah of Mecca" because it was where Islam first entered Indonesia centuries ago.
But some survivors said they now needed something more practical, like job retraining, and complained they were not getting enough attention from their fellow Muslims in Indonesia.
"They (Indonesian Muslim groups) are concentrating more on reconsolidating their own strength and rebuilding their branches (in Aceh)," said Hasballah M. Saad, an Acehnese figure and former government minister.
That was not the case after the disaster.
Countless Indonesian Muslim groups and individuals rushed to Aceh to help with relief operations.
A Jakarta-based militant group, the Islamic Defenders Front, notorious for trashing nightclubs and bars in the capital, won the hearts of locals for collecting thousands of corpses.
But many of those groups have left Aceh as the region enters A reconstruction phase, a process in which foreign aid agencies, including Christian ones, are playing a leading role.
Some Islamic organizations have expressed fears that Christian groups will try to convert Muslims. At one Islamic boarding school in Banda Aceh, a teacher said Christians were handing out sweets to children and saying: "This is from Jesus."
But Indonesian officials in charge of religious affairs in Aceh said they found no evidence of any proselytizing.
In Thailand, however, an army of Christian volunteers is rebuilding tsunami-devastated Khao Lak and stirring controversy as they win new converts in the mainly Buddhist country.
Amid prayers and singing of hymns, 19 villagers were baptized recently in a jungle waterfall, the latest group to join a new evangelical church in Khao Lak.
"Through the relief, people see the love of Christ and the love of God," said Achara Ratanasopon, a feisty Thai Christian pastor from New York City who led the baptism and oversees aid projects funded by her church.
Indonesia's second largest Muslim group, Muhammadiyah, dismissed suggestions it was out of touch with the Acehnese. A lack of funding had prevented many local organizations from contributing to reconstruction, said Aslam Nur, deputy secretary of Muhammadiyah in Aceh.
"We have come up with a program to reach the community, training and so on, but this depends on funding. The program is there but the money is not," said Nur, whose Muhammadiyah has the strongest local base of any Muslim group in Aceh.
Near Banda Aceh in the village of Sibreh, a small Islamic boarding school -- known as a dayah -- has many tsunami victims. There, U.S.-based Mercy Corps has stepped in with scholarship funding for students. It has done the same for 2,000 pupils at a number of Islamic boarding schools in Aceh.
"The visibility of the dayah are fairly low because they are not in the tsunami area. They were often overlooked so we saw there was a need there to be fulfilled," said Mercy Corps program manager, John Brownlee.
Some tsunami victims have received practical help from their Muslim counterparts abroad.
A U.K-based group, Islamic Relief, has set up a livelihood project, teaching skills from carpentry to business management. "I said to myself, 'I have to do it'. I don't want to go back to the sea so I signed up," said former fisherman, Munir, 28, after sliding a plank of wood through an electric saw.