Indonesia Hosts Miss World

Indonesia Hosts Miss World

Beauty queens, Lady Gaga and the power of Islamist thugs.

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For the second time in two years, Indonesia's government has bowed to radical Muslim groups threatening violence against a Western cultural icon. Having cancelled a sold-out concert by pop star Lady Gaga last year, officials this month banished the Miss World beauty pageant from the capital city of Jakarta.

The world's largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia once had a reputation for moderate religious practice. But Islamists have gradually made inroads in society and in the young democracy's leadership. By scrapping years-old plans to crown Miss World in Jakarta on Saturday night, the government handed another victory to the likes of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), which led protests denouncing the pageant as "pornography" and a "whore contest."

FPI is a vigilante group that doesn't limit itself to public protest. Often wielding batons and machetes, it attacks nightclubs, stores that sell alcohol, restaurants that operate during Ramadan, mosques attended by Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims, Christian churches and other supposed bastions of immorality.

In this photograph taken on September 24, 2013, Miss Philippines Megan Young (C) walks on the catwalk during the fashion show of Miss World contestants at a convention center in Nusa Dua, in Indonesia's resort island of Bali.

This violence goes largely unchecked because FPI has friends in high places. Indonesia's ministers of religious and social affairs both attended the group's 15th anniversary celebration last month. Which helps explain Jakarta's decision last year to revoke Lady Gaga's concert permit after FPI threatened to confront her at the airport and "burn the stage" at her performance.

In the case of Miss World, organizers hoped to mollify FPI and their ilk by cancelling the pageant's bikini round and having contestants wear one-piece swimsuits or more modest sarongs instead. Still the radicals protested. So three weeks before showtime, the government announced that Jakarta was off-limits. Miss World 2013 will be crowned on Saturday in a hastily arranged finale on the traditionally Hindu island of Bali.

Not that the FPI is satisfied. "We are obliged to disband [the pageant] if the government allows it to be held in any region of Indonesia," its leader has said. The Jakarta Post quoted an FPI cadre asking a crowd of the faithful in East Java: "Are you ready for jihad? Are you ready to clean Bali of sin?"

Security will be tight on Saturday in Bali. As it happens, the pageant will be held in the same complex that next week will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit of some 1,200 CEOs and 20 world leaders, including President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Maybe some of those high-flyers could find a quiet moment to ask their Indonesian hosts why Jakarta plays nice with thugs like the Islamic Defenders Front.

A version of this article appeared September 27, 2013, on page A18 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Indonesia Hosts Miss World.