Firdaus sits across the table from me at a burger bar in one of central Jakarta’s glitzy malls. Next to us is a store selling Lamborghinis and a mosque sits across the road. “In all honesty, I don’t think Indonesia has ever been ready to be multicultural,” he says as he picks at his chips. “For as long as I can remember, there have always problems for us minorities here.”
Firdaus is a young, outspoken activist from Indonesia’s Ahmadiyya community, a small movement of Islam with around 400,000 adherents scattered across the archipelago. “Both my parents were Javanese,” he says. “My father was an Ahmadiyya priest and I was born in Garut, West Java. But as the son of a missionary I spent my childhood moving from village to village across the Island.”
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