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Jakarta: We’ve shambled over the collapsing footpaths of South Jakarta and turned up unannounced at the Islamic Cultural Centre, the spiritual centre of Indonesia’s minority Shia Muslim community.
Two figures greet us immediately in the courtyard.
One is a kindly older man offering dinner, as it is iftar, the nightly breaking of the fast for the Islamic month of Ramadan.
The other is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Reviled in the West as a ruthless killer of his own people and a facilitator of terrorism, Iran’s now-dead supreme leader smiles at worshippers, mourners and sweaty visitors from a giant banner stretched over one of the centre’s towering windows.
He is also in photo frames propped on a table, illuminated by candles.
Politicians and pundits in Australia tell Muslims it is inappropriate to publicly mourn Iran’s dead supreme leader. There are no such misgivings in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country and, by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s enthusiastic utterances, Australia’s most important relationship.
Indonesia’s President, Prabowo Subianto, himself supposedly offered his “deep condolences” for the Iranian leader’s death on Wednesday, albeit days after he was killed.
Sympathy for the regime, or for Iran more broadly, is hardly in your face around Jakarta. For a city often quick to protest, nothing major has broken out at the US embassy. At least not yet.
Indonesia’s Muslims are overwhelmingly of the Sunni branch of Islam. Iran is Shia. Still, resentment from either denomination is evident just about anywhere you care to look. Especially here.
“It is Iran who stands consistently in defending the oppressed people,” says Mujib Munawan, the mosque’s 37-year-old spokesman, citing Palestine, Yemen and Lebanon as his examples.
Speaking in a quiet part of the Shia cultural centre, away from the after-dinner prayers on loudspeaker, he says what is happening in Iran is not only unlawful, it is terrorism.
“We wonder why the US government under [President Donald] Trump has become the world’s thugs who feel they have the right to govern other countries,” he tells us.
Down the road, sipping tea and smoking cigarettes at a stall, one Sunni Muslim man tells us no ordinary person in Jakarta really cares which Islamic camp you’re in anyway.
“I don’t understand the politics [of the war],” he says, asking not to be identified because he is a public servant.
“But in this context, I see that Donald Trump’s positive side is that he can reduce conflicts. But the negative side is, why does he slaughter our Muslim brothers, while we as Muslims respect other faiths? This is a principle for Muslims.”
One of the first public figures to grieve for Khamenei was Jusuf Kalla, a vice president under both Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Joko Widodo. He was “indeed deeply sad” at the leader’s death.
Megawati Sukarnoputri, a former president and still a political heavyweight, went further in a letter to Iran’s ambassador to Indonesia.
Khamenei had “led his nation under extremely difficult circumstances, amid geopolitical pressures, economic sanctions, and military threats” and still defended his country’s “sovereignty and the dignity of the Islamic world”, she wrote.
At a Sunni mosque, the Imam, Bunjamin, asks us, “Why is he [Trump] acting as the world police?”
This is all another domestic headache for Prabowo, who has conspicuously refused to condemn the attacks on Iran outright. He did, however, offer to travel to Tehran to serve as a mediator, which saw him nearly laughed out of Indonesia for being delusional.
Prabowo wants to be a global statesman, and has been currying favour with Trump. In January, he enlisted Indonesia into Trump’s Board of Peace, ostensibly to get a seat at the table when important decisions are being made about Palestine.
The clerics were aghast. The board includes Israel, the very country that bombed Gaza to rubble. It was “a clear manifestation of neocolonialism”, according to the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), an Islamic body with muscle to move votes.
So Prabowo called the clerics into a meeting. He must have been convincing because their tune then changed to cautious support. Days later, the government announced it was giving the MUI and other Islamic organisations 4000 square metres of land – the old site of the UK embassy in Jakarta – for new headquarters.
Unfortunately for Prabowo, the MUI’s view since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Saturday, is again to get off the board – regardless of their newly acquired land.
“The United States, which is playing a central role in managing the Palestinian conflict through the Board of Peace, faces a major question,” an MUI statement said. “Is this strategy truly aimed at a just peace, or is it actually strengthening an unequal security architecture and burying Palestinian independence?”
Iran has changed the equation for everyone.
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Zach Hope is South-East Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter at the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
Karuni Rompies is assistant Indonesia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X.
