O ye of seasonal faith. Religious neophytes and Ramadan's born again Muslims. Preaching politicians and the mass millions whose conviction was determined by the accident of birth.
Remember Aisha!
Two teenagers in separate lands, separated by a millennia. United by a common faith. One saved by it, the other condemned by it.
At 13, Aisha bint Abu Bakr was the blooming wife of Prophet Muhammad. Daughter of the first caliph, her life revered in Sunni history as her lap was the resting place of the prophet's final breath.
At 13, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was damned by a local sharia court. Less than a year ago the Somalian girl was raped and then accused of adultery. Her punishment in Kismayu, southern Somalia, was a mob pelting her with stones until her torturous demise.
The historical Aisha was saved by revelation - surah An-Nur - which requires that four witnesses bare testimony to charges of adultery.
Ironically it was this very interpretation of sharia law that condemned the Somalian to barbaric capital punishment.
"We will do what Allah has instructed us," officials before the execution told the BBC in November.
As Aisha begged for mercy, 50 men arrived to hurl stones at her.
Amnesty International reported that nurses during the stoning checked if Aisha was still alive: "They removed her from the ground and declared that she was...So the stoning continued".
In Indonesia, the elegant introspection of Ramadan was shattered as a religiously docile nation contemplated a regression of common sense and legalized torture.
Historically famed for being brave and devout, Aceh province is fast becoming a home of specious piety and chauvinistic backwardness through a noxious litany of conservatism.
A new bylaw by the provincial council earlier this week condemns adulterers to be stoned to death, while failing to subject corruption and bribery to equal punishment.
An unsettling prospect of mob justice in the righteous name of religion when coupled with the culture of amok, which Merriam-Webster defines as a murderous frenzy traditionally unique in Malay cultures.
The latest bylaw widens the scope of sharia ordinances in the province as supporters rationalize brutality by claiming that stoning is categorically inherent to Islamic law.
But no verse of stoning exists in the Koran. At best the surah An-Nur calls for adulterers to be flogged. Their basis of the hadith (the words and deeds of the prophet) too should be aligned in historical context.
Stoning, like flogging, was the conventional punishment of the day. A common custom of Abrahamic faiths, traceable and recurrent to the Old Testament in an era before the gallows or modern rifle.
Sharia is generally divided into five branches - beliefs (itiqadat), morals (adaab), worship (ibadah), transactions or contracts (muamalat) and punishment (uqubat).
Nowhere is there an intent of torture in traditional or modern Islam.
Muhammad was a prophet who happened to be an Arab.
As a nation with enough commonsense to realize there is no contradiction between democracy, plurality and Islam, and that women do not have to be covered like mummies to be virtuous, Indonesians should extricate Arab traditions that have no bearing on the spirit and message of OUR religion.
Aisha was married to the prophet at a tender age. Another Bedouin practice that until a century was also found in other places.
But our ability to reason independently (ijtihad) means that a person like cleric Puji Cahyo Widiyanto who married an 11-year-old last year in Central Java is closer to a pedophile than an example of the prophet.
The Koran and the prophet, while suggesting extreme punishment, obfuscated its application so that it may be interpreted in a way that was never intended.
Indian born scholar Abdur Rahman I. Doi in his book "Shari'ah: The Islamic Law" even wrote that during Muhammad's life, "it was not possible to prove...one single case of adultery".
Without a wavering faith in Allah, the prophet or the Koran, Indonesian Muslims must also begin tackling historical injustices tied to ancient cultural circumstances that have marred modern interpretations of Islam.
To address chauvinistic latitudes that allow only men to have, through marriage, multiple sex partners.
To debunk myths about the role of women and cross-religious marriages.
"Man is created weak," reads a verse in An-Nissa. "Allah wills to lessen your burden".
But it is the fallible man himself, not God's rules, that burden the mind with religious dogma that reverts to an age of jahiliyya (time of ignorance).
Aisha is a common name in the archipelago. Some lead simple honest lives, a few may not. None deserve brutality as the last remembrance of their life.
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