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AP, USA
Feb. 4, 2006

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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 13496 • Posted: Saturday February 4, 2006  

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JAKARTA, Indonesia–Nearly 1,000 Muslims armed with machetes attacked a housing complex belonging to a minority Islamic sect in Indonesia Saturday, some of them throwing Molotov cocktails, police and local media said.

At least six people were injured in the attack and four people were held for questioning, radio and television reports said.

It was the latest in a series of raids on the Ahamadiyah sect, denounced as heretical by mainstream Muslim groups, since the country’s powerful Islamic Scholars Council issued a fatwa, or edict, against it last year.

The mob clashed with hundreds of riot police guarding the complex on the outskirts of Lombok island’s capital, Mataram, and then stormed the homes of the Ahamadiyah followers, police detective Eko Hadiprayitno said.

“They did not want Ahamadiyah people in the area,” he said.

At least one roof was set ablaze, local broadcaster Metro TV reported.

Ahamadiyah, founded in Pakistan at the end of the 19th century, has enraged some Muslims by refusing to accept Muhammad as the last prophet of Islam. The sect has some 200,000 followers in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

Indonesian Muslims generally practice a tolerant version of the faith, but hardline groups are increasingly making inroads amid a global rise in Islamic radicalism.

Critics say the fatwa issued in July, which denounces liberal interpretations of Islam, secularism and pluralism as un-Islamic, has only served to increase intolerance.

Police said more than 100 Ahamadiyah members had been evacuated from the area before Saturday’s violence and were being sheltered in a safehouse in Mataram.

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