By Zach Hope
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Greetings from Jakarta.
My favourite Christmas carol is O Holy Night, that stirring ballad of almost impossible range.
You don’t hear it around the shopping centres in Australia as much as other carols. Maybe it’s not boppy enough. Maybe the lyrics, which declare Christmas “the night of our dear Saviour’s birth”, are just a little too … Jesusy.
Students sing during a roadside Christmas carol service in Jakarta, Indonesia, last Christmas.Credit: Xinhua via Getty Images
Australia likes a culture skirmish about the appropriateness of Christmas songs in public places – carols are inherently Christian and therefore, according to some, exclusionary. Sure. But some are just great tunes, no?
I hadn’t thought about how Jakarta, the capital of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, might treat the Christmas season. Had I done so, I might have thought it would be pretty low-key.
(Many years ago as a backpacker, I spent Christmas day in Lahore, Pakistan, and the one church I saw was inside a compound and crawling with security forces armed with large guns.)
So when I walked into the dining room of my Jakarta hotel the other day, the soaring O Holy Night pouring through the speakers caught my ear.
It was followed by Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Jingle Bells (a real favourite here), Last Christmas and some Christmas-themed pop numbers I’d never heard before.
The hotel has a Christmas tree in the lobby. So did the place I stayed at last week. As far as I can tell, both of these hotels have almost exclusively Indonesian clientele, so it’s not a case of playing up to Western interlopers like me.
The shopping centres and grocery stores, too, have their Christmas mixes on repeat. One shopping centre has a giant Santa in a sleigh at the entrance.
Jakarta’s provincial government doesn’t seem to be putting up street decorations – unlike Singapore, where I live, which has gone all-out – but quite a few private businesses have Merry Christmas signs taped to their windows.
All in all, it’s pretty festive for a city that is just over 10 per cent Christian. It speaks to the cultural significance of the season, which has long been more than a religious observance. It’s also emblematic of the tolerance of Jakarta, and Indonesia more broadly, whose citizens are among the most welcoming and friendly people you will meet.
Gelora Bung Karno stadium was full for a Christmas service earlier this month. According to comments on social media, there were Christmas-appreciating Muslims among the crowd.
But there have been ups and considerable downs in how this plays out in the capital. Hardline Islamic groups are powerful in culture and politics. And this was on display in late 2016 when a coalition of them rallied hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to demand the arrest of the Christian and ethnically Chinese governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, commonly known then as Ahok.
In a speech during his re-election campaign, Ahok had said that the Koran did not stipulate that only Muslims could lead Muslims.
Members of the Depok Sunday School Children’s Choir from the Toraja Church perform in Jakarta.Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images
His jailing in 2017 for blasphemy was a win for conservative Islam, but a blow to Indonesia’s projection as a secular and pluralist society under the state ideology called Pancasila.
In the febrile atmosphere of the Ahok outrage, Christmas in 2016 was more subdued, Christians here say. An Islamic organisation called the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) used to go through shopping malls making sure workers weren’t doing anything outrageous like wearing Santa hats.
FPI was banned in late 2020. Another hardline organisation, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), was banned in 2017.
Gubernatorial elections were held late last month, and the most religiously charged faux pas in the Jakarta race was when Suswono, the deputy candidate on Ridwan Kamil’s ticket, joked that wealthy widows should marry unemployed men, citing the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to Khadijah. Suswono promptly apologised. (Ridwan and Suswono, backed by President Prabowo Subianto and his coalition, narrowly lost to Pramono Anung and Rano Karno).
Priest Edwin Alexander Tanalisan from GPDI Pentecostal Church told us he believes religious freedoms were better under autocrat Suharto, whose corrupt regime tumbled in the late ’90s.
“In the Reformasi era, there were some hurdles,” he says, speaking of the nation’s democratic reform. He says before the banning of FPI and HTI, churches such as the one I saw in Pakistan were guarded on Christmas Day and some were attacked.
But things have improved, especially in the past seven years. “Praise the Lord we have so much progress today, so much freedom,” Tanalisan says. “Now we hope that situation will get even better under President Prabowo .”
’Tis the season of hope, after all.
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