The 15-year-old schoolgirl's eyes filled with tears as she put down her phone. Her best friend at school, the friend she did everything together with, had just called her. "We can no longer be friends," she had said. "My God does not allow me to be friends with people like you." This conversation took place in a city in Indonesia with a reputation for tolerance. The two girls were students at a high school described as "the most tolerant" in the city. The caller who ended the friendship is a Muslim, the devastated recipient of the call a Christian. The conversation took place within days of a court's decision to jail the governor of Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, for two years on charges of blasphemy.
A Christian governor jailed
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, commonly known as Ahok, is a double-minority — ethnic Chinese and Christian — and a poster boy for Indonesia's pluralism and religious tolerance. His three years as governor of the capital of the world's largest Muslim-majority nation was, in the opinion of many, marked by extraordinary improvements in public services, a fight against corruption and a sharp intolerance of inefficiency. A Jakarta taxi driver summed it all up with two sentences: "Ahok is very, very good. The only reason he is no longer governor is because some people do not like his religion."