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The vast majority of Indonesia’s 220m people oppose sharia law and practise a more tolerant version of the Islamic faith. The country’s secular constitution enjoins harmony and voters have consistently rejected calls for an Islamic state.

But audiences throughout the Indonesian archipelago watched the televised flogging of a man convicted of drinking beer. He collapsed after seven of the 40 prescribed strokes and officials said he would receive the remaining 33 when he recovered.

The example of Aceh has attracted fundamentalists from elsewhere in Indonesia, who see it as a blueprint for their own localities.

The irony is that sharia was first introduced into Aceh as part of a package of measures that ultimately succeeded in making peace in the long-running guerrilla war between the conservative, independence-minded Acehnese and the Indonesian state.

The 2004 tsunami, which killed 170,000 Indonesians, devastated the whole northern coast of Sumatra and shocked both sides in the conflict into reaching a deal after 30 years of fighting that had claimed 15,000 lives. It is, so far, a success story. The separatist guerrillas, known as GAM, have decommissioned most of their weapons and the Indonesian army has withdrawn most of its combat troops.

Last Monday the province held the first democratic elections in its history and early returns suggested that voters had elected as governor Irwandi Yusuf, a former rebel spokesman who escaped from jail after the tsunami.

Last Thursday European peace monitors withdrew, leaving an uneasy air of political tension as all sides awaited the final results.

The former guerrillas accuse the government of bolstering the Islamists and using sharia as a method of weakening their consistent demand for a progressive, democratic Aceh, ruled by its own people. “They are exploiting the religious conviction of many Acehnese to manipulate them,” wrote Aguswandi, a human rights activist, in The Jakarta Post.

Aguswandi, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, said the tactic could misfire. “The use of religion as a political tool to pacify the population or as political bribery is a dangerous move. It is like setting a timebomb. When it goes off it could unleash an era of harsh, intolerant and conservative Islam,” he wrote.

For some women, that era is already here. Fatimah, a human rights worker, was arrested after a seminar at a hotel in Banda Aceh when sharia police burst in to find her without a proper headscarf while chatting in the corridor to a male colleague.

Accused of “khalwat”, a vague term that covers proximity between unmarried men and women, she was dragged off to a police station, where she was detained, deprived of sleep and questioned for three days before being released without charge. “It was a nightmare that I will not be able to forget for the rest of my life,” she said.

For international donors, who gave generously to end the nightmare of the tsunami, the next few months will pose hard choices. “Nobody intended our aid to subsidise this,” said one United Nations official.

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