The moment
On 1 June 1945 Sukarno proposed to the committee preparing Indonesia's independence five principles for the coming state, among them belief in one God. A draft preamble of 22 June, the Jakarta Charter, added seven words obliging Muslims to follow Islamic law; on 18 August, the day after independence was proclaimed, the words were dropped. The constitution's first principle, Belief in the One and Only God, set the country with the world's largest Muslim population on a path between an Islamic state and a secular one: the government came to recognise six religions, and only in 2017 did the Constitutional Court allow followers of indigenous beliefs to record them on identity cards.
People: Sukarno, Abdurrahman Wahid