Thursday morning in Aceh began with a very painful and chilling spectacle. In a public park, a man and a woman were each lashed 140 times with a rattan cane, a flexible rod made from a very common tropical palm in Southeast Asia. The reason for the torture: they engaged in sexual relations outside of marriage and consumed alcohol.
The woman could not bear the blows and fainted. Images from agencies and local media showed a medical team carrying her away from the public place. The couple was among six people who were lashed that day for violating the Islamic code.
Aceh is the only province in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, where Sharia law is enforced. The authorities of this deeply conservative region imposed it in 2001. Here, extramarital sex, alcohol consumption, homosexual relations, and even certain gambling activities are crimes punishable by public flogging.
The head of the Sharia police in Aceh, Muhammad Rizal, explained yesterday that the couple received 100 lashes for extramarital sex and 40 for drinking alcohol. "As promised, we make no exceptions, not even for our own members", he said, referring to a religious police officer and his partner, who were also punished - 23 lashes each - for "being caught in a private place."
These punishments are not isolated cases. In 2025, two men were lashed 76 times each for engaging in sexual relations. Each lash is a public reminder of the power of Sharia in Aceh, where the religious police, the Wilayatul Hisbah, patrol the streets to enforce their moral law.
Outside of Aceh, the physicality of these punishments clashes with national law and international human rights treaties that Indonesia claims to respect. But in Aceh, at the tip of the island of Sumatra, visible and severe punishments are part of the social order, and many residents support them as a guarantee of religious and community values.
The rattan cane used is usually about a meter long and is designed not to cut the skin but to cause intense pain, deep bruises, and muscle injuries. It inflicts more intense pain than a conventional whip, which is usually made of braided leather.
This happens in Indonesia, a country that embraces a mosaic of religions and cultures. With over 270 million inhabitants, approximately 87% identify as Muslims, mostly Sunni, coexisting with Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist minorities. Unlike other Muslim countries, historically Islam in Indonesia has coexisted with local traditions and diverse legal systems, creating a unique model of religious and secular coexistence that successive governments have often boasted about.
The country was established as a secular state, with the constitution guaranteeing religious freedom. However, the influence of more radical Islamic groups has grown in recent decades, gaining more weight in institutions and pushing for stricter laws on morality and behavior.
In Aceh, geographically isolated (at the northern tip of Sumatra, surrounded by jungles and mountains) and marked by decades of separatist conflict (between the army and the Free Aceh Movement, an armed group advocating for independence), it was decided that morality had to be supervised and punished, as in stricter Islamic countries.
Some experts point out that, although physical punishments are not common in the rest of Indonesia, some conservative provinces have toughened laws against extramarital sex and alcohol consumption. In West Java, for example, some municipalities have established "moral supervision units" that impose administrative sanctions on young people for acts considered "immoral" or "contrary to religion."