Many of the Muslim leaders I met who were demonstrating against Ahok said that it was an open-and-shut case in Islam that Christians could not lead Muslims. “The Quran is very clear” that Christian leaders are forbidden, said Sofyan, who goes by only one name and who helped coordinate anti-Ahok protests for the hardline Forum Umat Islam group.

But while Ahok’s Islamist opponents insist that the Quran is clear and Muslims cannot be led by Christians (or by Jews), this is, in fact, a far from settled question within Islam. According to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of Islamic Exceptionalism, even within political Islam there is no clear consensus about the role non-Muslims should be allowed to play. “The argument that a non-Muslim cannot be governor of a city, that’s not something we should take at face value, even among Islamists, let alone Muslims more broadly,” he said.

Throughout the Muslim world there is great diversity in how Muslim societies treat the idea of non-Muslim leaders. In a few Muslim-majority nations, like Senegal and Burkina Faso, Christians have been elected to the presidency, the highest office of the land. In 17 other Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, non-Muslims are legally restricted from becoming head of state. (By contrast, according to the Pew Research Center there are just two countries where Christians are required by law to be head of state, not including cases where “figurehead monarchs” like Britain’s monarch are required to be Christian.) In Indonesia, anyone can legally attain any office, including the presidency.

According to Hamid, Indonesia’s Islamists take an even harder stance against minorities’ right to rule than Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood did. The Muslim Brotherhood’s official position was that non-Muslims could attain any state position except that of president; a Christian became vice-president of their political party and was considered as a possible vice-president of Egypt.

Some progressive Indonesian Muslim leaders have suggested that one reason Indonesia’s Islamists take such a hard stance toward non-Muslim leaders is due to mistranslation of the Quran from Arabic, which few Indonesians speak as a first language, to Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. In 2012, when Ahok first ran for deputy governor of Jakarta and Islamists attacked him, Akhmad Sahal, an Indonesian academic, wrote an article in Tempo, the nation’s most prominent news magazine, titled “Are Non-Muslim Leaders Forbidden?” In the piece he argues that the Indonesian translation of the crucial Arabic passage is quite different from the intended Arabic meaning. While in one standard Indonesian translation the Quranic passage reads “O! devout followers, do not take Christians and Jews and make them your leaders,” in the original Arabic, the word that is translated as “leaders” actually means something closer to “protectors” or “allies.”