The petition from the graduates of the United States university has attracted more than 60,000 votes as of Wednesday, a week before the court plans to hand down its verdict against Ahok on May 9.  

At the April 20 hearing, the pros­e­cu­tors de­manded the judges sen­tence Ahok to two years’ pro­ba­tion if found guilty of vi­o­lat­ing Ar­ti­cle 156 of the Crim­i­nal Code (KUHP) on show­ing an­i­mos­ity to­ward oth­ers. They ad­mit­ted they could not prove Ahok had in­sulted Is­lam as a whole, but only in­di­vid­ual Mus­lims. 

The Harvard alumni are of the opinion that Ahok’s act did not qualify as a violation of any part of Article 156, namely hostility, hatred or contempt against an ethnicity, religion and race. The act in question is a speech he gave in Thousand Islands regency in September that quoted Surah Al Maidah 51, a Quranic verse of­ten used by cer­tain con­ser­va­tive Mus­lim groups to urge Mus­lims to vote only for po­lit­i­cal can­di­dates who share the same faith.

“… supremacy of law should be upheld. The courtroom should be a place where truth and justice are upheld, not a place for justification and legitimation of mobocracy,” the petition stated.  

The trial against Ahok started on Dec. 13 after a so-called anti-blasphemy movement drew more than a million Muslims to rallies to push the government to indict the governor based on an edited video of his September speech. (kuk)

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