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Indonesian Students Recorded Their Abuser Head Teacher - Then Married

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Two former pupils at a Lombok Islamic boarding school gathered testimony against their head teacher over sexual assault claims, then fell in love and wed.

Two former students at an Islamic boarding school on the Indonesian island of Lombok spent more than a year quietly building a case against their head teacher over sexual assault allegations. Along the way, Ziadatur Rahmah and Yusron Azzahidi fell in love, and the pair are now married.

The man at the centre of the allegations is Ahmad Imanuddin Sumar, the respected leader of the Abu Barokat school, where he was known to pupils as "Abah", meaning "father". Several students say he sexually assaulted them. Rahmah, who goes by Zia, and Azzahidi were once star pupils there before moving on to university - he to the capital, Jakarta, and she to Cairo, Egypt.

The investigation began during a late-night phone call between the two friends, who had drifted into reminiscing about their school years. During that conversation, Zia told Azzahidi that Sumar had assaulted her when she was 16.

She described leaving class to use the toilet and being stopped by Sumar in the school gardens. He asked her to come to his house, which stood on the school grounds. Once they were inside, she said, he told her he loved her, drew her onto his lap and began kissing and touching her, and instructed her to do the same to him. The encounter ended abruptly when one of his children started pounding on the locked front door. Sumar motioned for her to go, and she slipped out through the back.

"I felt very dirty, ruined, and I was lost," Zia later said of the aftermath.

Azzahidi was torn about how to respond. Pupils at the school had been raised on the motto "Sami'na wa ata'na" - "We hear, and we obey" - a phrase that framed obedience to authority as a duty. But he could not put the account out of his mind.

Gathering the testimony

Azzahidi decided to act. Together with Zia and two of her school friends, Wanda Hamidah and Mahima Eka, he began quietly collecting accounts from other students who described being assaulted by the head teacher. The group worked to corroborate the claims, assembling statements from several people over the course of a year.

Word of their effort eventually reached Sumar. He turned up at Azzahidi's family home and used the phone belonging to Azzahidi's sister to reach him. Earlier, the sister had texted asking Azzahidi to call urgently. When he dialled the number, it was not his sister who answered but his former head teacher.

"I knew. I knew exactly what he wanted to talk about," Azzahidi said.

A recorded plea for silence

On the call, Sumar urged his former pupil to bury the allegations. "Cover the shame of your teacher. Everyone makes mistakes, my child," he said through tears. What he did not realise was that Azzahidi was capturing the entire exchange on a recording.

That kind of pressure is a recurring obstacle in such cases. Indonesia's National Commission on Violence Against Women has described sexual abuse in Islamic boarding schools as a national emergency. Legal experts say many complaints never make it to court because those who come forward are talked into dropping their claims or pushed into keeping silent - precisely the outcome Sumar was seeking on the phone.

For Azzahidi, the trust once placed in the school's leader made the discovery harder. He had grown up admiring Sumar, whose authority went unquestioned by the students under his care.

The partnership that grew out of the investigation changed the lives of the two central figures. What started as a phone conversation about their shared past turned into a joint pursuit of accountability, and then into a relationship. Zia and Azzahidi married after working side by side to bring the allegations to light.

Their account offers a rare look at how former pupils turned collaborators to challenge a figure who had held near-total authority over them, in a country where campaigners say such abuse too often stays hidden.

Indonesia boarding school abuse, Lombok Islamic school, Ahmad Imanuddin Sumar, pesantren sexual assault, Indonesia national emergency abuse, student justice Indonesia, Abu Barokat school, religious school abuse

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