Obama's Jakarta district sees shift in Islam

Old men train their racing pigeons on the badminton court and screaming children chase each other through the winding, grimy alleyways. But if Obama does decide to drop by his old neighborhood when he visits Indonesia next week, he may notice change around the community's mosque.

The local mosque has become a meeting spot for members of the small but vocal Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), an extremist group famous for smashing up bars that serve alcohol and which made headlines when its followers assaulted several elderly men and women at a peaceful interfaith rally in 2008.

“Now there are so many radicals around here. We don't agree with them but there's definitely more than there was before,” said Ali Rully, a pensioner who was a high school student when little “Barry” Obama lived here.

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation but is officially secular and has long been seen as a bastion of moderate Islam.

But the emergence of pockets of radicalism and a shift from Indonesia's traditional form of Islam, infused with Hinduism and other influences, toward a stricter form of the religion are cause for concern for some moderate Indonesians.

Police recently unearthed a new al Qaeda-linked cell in Sumatra's Aceh province and this month killed one of the world's most wanted militants, Dulmatin, who was involved in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, foreigners and Indonesians.

The recent cases serve as a reminder to the vast majority of moderate Muslim Indonesians that extremism is alive in Indonesia.

One Matraman resident, who asked not to be named, said she had detected an increasingly anti-Western tone in some of the sermons broadcast by the local mosque.

Obama is a Christian but was listed in his primary school records as a Muslim, probably because his father and step-father were Muslims. As a child in Jakarta, he would have been exposed to a very moderate form of Islam by his Javanese stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, say locals.

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