Jeans vs. Islam: Sharia Police Crack Down on Muslim Women . . . Again

The Style section of Thursday's New York Times has a sassy little piece discussing the reduced price of designer jeans, "fashion's most eternally reinvented staple." In it, the Times argues that "Denim's day of reckoning [is] long overdue." Tell that to the women of Indonesia's West Aceh district: over in the World News section of Thursday's Times, there's a less-sassy and more profoundly disturbing snippet about Aceh's Sharia police, who will be tasked with finding women wearing tight pants -- a violation of Islamic law -- and shredding the offensive clothing and forcing them to wear government-issued skirts. So far, the district has already pre-ordered 7,000 skirts.

Somehow, I seem to have become the defacto reporter on the Pants vs. Islam beat, which seems like it would be (uhm, should be) a slow desk, but in recent weeks, the issue of women's clothing has run headfirst into the wall of Sharia law. First there was Sudanese advocate Lubna Hussein facing public lashing for wearing pants in public, and now this?

Indonesia is, for the most part, a moderate Islamic state, which makes this latest mandate of the Sharia police all that much more striking. But Aceh seems to be a particularly extreme case: a new Sharia law went into effect in the province this month allowing police to enforce death by stoning for adulterers. The blame for this rise in extremist Muslim law, according to the Times, is to be found in the administration of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has "backed morality-based laws that pleased Muslim conservative allies but angered advocates of human rights."

Still: is the government of Indonesia really designing its own "morally decent" skirts, and forcing local women to wear them starting in January? I suppose in the end, shredding a pair of jeans is more palatable punishment than subjecting women to public lashings, but it has to be asked: Why are sartorial choices deemed worthy of punishment by the state? And, more importantly, where is the moderate Muslim majority?

Yudhoyono touts Indonesia as "the world's third largest democracy and its most populous Muslim nation." In my mind, the words "democracy" and "shredding jeans" only go together in the context of choosing between stonewashing, sandblasting and tapering (hey, it's a free country -- you can even peg them if you want). If, like the Times reports, "denim's day of reckoning" has come, let's hope it's not at the cost of basic human rights.