Among the Believers (61 page)

The trainees didn’t seem to mind. They were like happy campers, thrilled by the drama of the final early rising. They got up from their metal chairs and went away hesitantly, the girls to one part of the
mosque area, the boys to another. They were children of the Jakarta middle class, people faced with the special Indonesian threat of the loss of personality. In Islam, the life of the mosque, with its rules and rituals, they found again, or reconstructed, something like the old feudal or rural community that for them no longer existed.

I
MADUDDIN
said he wasn’t going to get up for the 3:00 prayers with his trainees. But he was up at three-thirty. On Mondays and Thursdays he did that, because he fasted on those days. The custom was peculiar to the Muslims of Indonesia, and I had been told that it might have had its origin in animist practice. The fast was not strictly a fast; as in the fasting month of Ramadan, it was possible to eat before sunrise and after sunset. A refinement for some on these fast days was to eat only white foods, white being the colour of purity, and also convenient, since it enabled an Indonesian to eat as much as he liked of his favourite food, rice. But I heard about the white foods afterwards, and couldn’t ask Imaduddin about them.

He said, when I saw him the next morning in his office, which was adjacent to the classroom of the previous night, that he fasted on Mondays and Thursdays because the Prophet fasted on those days. It wasn’t in the Koran, but there was a reliable
hadith
about it. And Imaduddin was also concerned about his weight. In addition to his Islamic fasts, he jogged. He said he had to look after himself; he was nearly fifty. He didn’t think he had fully recovered from his Arab overfeeding. But that had occurred nearly eighteen months before. His paunchiness made me feel, rather, that twice a week, during his fasting days, he built up an overwhelming appetite.

He was so varied. He used tape recorders and Western psychological games for his Islamic mental training. He had a mullah’s passion; but he also jogged. He had lived through a tremendous period of Indonesian history; he had been acquainted with great Indonesians. He had benefited from the independence of his country, from its stop-and-start development, from the opening up of the world for people of his generation. He had become an electrical engineer; he had travelled; he had studied for a higher degree in the United States.

He had lived in many eras; he had been part of a great flowing together of the world. But Imaduddin was indifferent to the wonder of
his life; he took his new world for granted. There was no development to explore. Imaduddin was born a Muslim in Sumatra. Everything was contained in that beginning: to that beginning there had only been added events, tools, and age.

Imaduddin’s father, as he had told me the previous evening, was a graduate of the Islamic Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was important in the Muslim Masjumi party.

“My father was a religious teacher, attached to a religious school run by the sultanate in the Dutch time. It was a famous school, and my father was the principal. During the revolution, the war against the Dutch, I was involved in the Muslim army, Hizbullah. I was trained for two weeks in 1946 as a guerrilla fighter, and they gave me a star and a stripe as a first sergeant. At the age of fifteen! Hizbullah actually means the soldiers of God.”

“Why do you say ‘Muslim army’? Weren’t you Indonesians, fighting for Indonesian independence?”

“There were so many groups in the revolutionary army at that time. The communists, the PKI, had their own army; they called it the Red Army. The socialists had their own groups. The nationalists and Sukarno owned their own. We fought each other sometimes—when the Dutch were away.

“After we gained our independence I went back to high school. In 1947 the revolutionary government had opened the first secondary school in our area. So I went to this school and I stayed there until 1953.”

“What made you decide to be an electrical engineer?”

“In 1952 Dr. Hatta, the vice-president, visited Sumatra, and he talked about developing the country. He visited the largest waterfall close to Medan in Sumatra, and he gave a talk about the importance of electricity. I was spellbound by this speech. In the following year, 1953, I finished high school. I got the highest mark. When I asked my father to send me to Bandung he said, ‘I don’t have the money. But if you want to go by yourself I give you my permission—and my prayer.’

“My mother sold one of her rings, and I went to Jakarta with just enough money to buy the ticket for the ship and to buy food for one or two months here. The ship started from Sumatra in the evening, about six. We sailed for three nights and we reached Jakarta in the evening. I was amazed by the crowds.

“We reached Jakarta at night, but the port was closed, and we were allowed to land only in the morning. Actually there were four of us on the ship who had graduated. So early in the morning we went to the Ministry of Education, and I went straight to the scholarship department. I showed them my marks and my letter of recommendation from my high school. One of my friends had a friend in Jakarta, but he wasn’t sure whether the friend would be able to accommodate all four of us in his house. But fortunately the friend accommodated us. We slept on the floor of the sitting-room. The house was actually the private house of Mr. Sutan Sjahrir, the secretary-general of the Indonesian Socialist Party.”

I said, “But that’s a famous Indonesian name. You can’t drop it so casually.”

And it was astonishing that he should speak it like that: Sutan Sjahrir, one of the early nationalist figures of Indonesia, exiled by the Dutch from 1934 to 1942, and prime minister of Indonesia in the first year of independence.

Imaduddin said, “Actually, Sutan Sjahrir had visited us in Sumatra. I was one of the leaders of the students in Medan in my high school and I met him there. He was on the look-out for promising young men—the socialists were like that. And you can imagine what it was for a youngster, talking to that great man.

“We left Jakarta that same day and went to Bandung with an introduction to the secretary-general of the Socialist Party in West Java. And we were accommodated by him also for a few nights. And we came to ITB, the Bandung Institute of Technology, and registered ourselves.”

“But this is a wonderful story about Sutan Sjahrir.”

“The socialists were like that. Always looking for supporters. Actually, I couldn’t be a socialist because I am already Muslim. The good ideas of socialism I can find in the Koran.”

“But the Koran doesn’t give you the institutions. That’s what socialists try to do. You want more than the ideas.”

“For the institutions, it’s up to us. Hizbullah, the Muslim army, was created by the Masjumi party. My father was one of the leaders of that party, representing his region, North Sumatra. And he sat in the highest council of the Muslim clergy. So, although I was attracted by Sutan
Sjahrir and his manner and his intellectual capacity, I couldn’t be a socialist because I was already a Muslim. I admired him as one of our national leaders, but nothing more than that.”

“Did you in Masjumi actually have a programme?”

“They did. Decentralized government. Two chambers. Cooperative economy. The natives of a region participating in the economy.”

“Is that Islam? Or regionalism?”

“They stressed rural development. Most of the Muslims are in the rural areas.”

Muslims, Muslims: he used the word where other people might have said Indonesians.

And on his first Friday at the Institute of Technology in Bandung Imaduddin had a shock.

“It was very secular here in 1953. You couldn’t find any mosque round here. You would have to walk three kilometres down to the village to find a mosque. Most of the professors at the institute were Dutch—and they were here until 1957, when Sukarno kicked them out. Most of the lectures were in English. That was the rule, for people who couldn’t talk the Indonesian language. I found on the first Friday that some of the professors were giving lectures during the prayer time. I was from Sumatra, and I was brought up in a strict Muslim family. So to me not going to the mosque for Friday prayers was quite a mental shock.

“I stood up and asked permission of the Dutch lecturer to go to the mosque. He seemed very friendly and allowed me to go. Two or three students followed me out. I went to the mosque, but I lost the lecture. So I always had the choice on Fridays—mosque or lecture. That was why it started the idea in my mind of having a mosque close to the campus. That first time only three or four of the students followed me out. Now—I believe
The New York Times
did a survey and they said that two thousand students go to the mosque.”

“You applied for a scholarship. Did you get it?”

“After two months. My mother’s money, the money from the ring, lasted two months. It was five hundred rupiah.” Eighty cents now, after all the devaluations. “The scholarship was three hundred rupiah a month, which was enough. The boarding house cost about one hundred.”

Some people came into the office. Among them was a middle-aged
man, small, carefully dressed, perhaps of simple origins, perhaps the father of a student. He was respectful towards Imaduddin; and Imaduddin, with the prompt courtesy that had made such an impression on Prasojo (and me) the previous evening, excused himself and got up to greet his visitors.

I gave up my armchair and sat at the desk while Imaduddin and his visitors talked. There was a duplicated, letter-headed sheet at the top of some letters. It wasn’t quite the public circular I thought it was. It was personal, from the United States, from a university professor sending season’s greetings with an end-of-the-year round-up of family news. American coziness, good will to all men of all cultures: here, on Imaduddin’s desk. American teacher and Asian learner, infidel and missionary: in what degree of misunderstanding had they come together!

In 1947 the revolutionary government, in the midst of all its troubles, had established a secondary school in Sumatra. Ever since then Imaduddin had been academically on the rise; and in 1963, ten years after he had come to Bandung with five hundred rupiah, the Bandung institute had sent him to the United States to get a higher degree. He had spent three years there, at first in Iowa, and then in Chicago. In the summer of 1966, at the end of his course, he got a holiday job at Cornell as a consultant in the Indonesian language. He got a hundred dollars a week for nine weeks, and with the nine hundred dollars he went to Europe and then to Mecca.

“I cried in Mecca. The first time I entered the mosque there, the place with the black stone, I cried. And I also cried when I was about to leave.”

That was the way, after his visitors had gone, he told about his first three years abroad. That was the emphasis he gave: the three years of higher study, the luck with the Cornell holiday job, the climax in the Great Mosque of Mecca.

“Actually, that letter you looked at”—so he had noticed—“was from my professor. He’s a Christian. He wrote a letter of protest to the government when I was arrested.”

After that time abroad his Muslim interests became more international. At Cornell he had met a man from Malaysia. In 1971, through this man, he went to Malaysia to help with the conversion of a polytechnic into a university. Imaduddin stayed for two years in Malaysia, until 1973; he became involved with the Muslim youth movement there and still
looked upon the people of that movement as his “brothers.” He felt that it was from that time that he had become suspect to the Indonesian authorities—they, and others in Indonesia, were nervous of “the Malaysian disease,” and they were especially nervous of radical developments in the Bandung institute.

Nineteen seventy-three was the year of the oil-price rise, the year when money for Arab oil seemed to come like a reward for the Arab faith. Muslim missionary activity picked up; in a dozen foreign countries, half-evolved Muslim students, until then shy in the new world, hardly able to relate their technical studies to the countries where they were, felt the time had come to proclaim the true faith. Imaduddin travelled, to Libya, to England, rising higher in international Muslim students’ organizations, more and more in demand for his mental-training courses, which gave a now necessary modernity to old-fashioned mullah’s teachings.

His imprisonment had not arrested his rise. His card, white, black, and green (the Islamic colour), said:
Muhammad Imaduddin Abdul Rahim—Secretary General—International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations
. He had no Indonesian name.

I said, “But all your names are Arab.”

“They are not Arab names. They are Muslim names.”

The midday call to prayer came from the mosque tower—the mosque that hadn’t been there when Imaduddin first came to the Bandung institute to study electrical engineering. He said he would be back in fifteen minutes, and he left me to the books in the bookcase.

Some, in English, were the bread-and-butter books of Islamic missionary work:
The Myth of the Cross, Jesus Prophet of Islam
. Others were Indonesian translations published by the movement, paperbacks. One book was by Qutub, an Egyptian. I didn’t know about Qutub; Imaduddin said he had been killed by Nasser. Another book was by Maulana Maudoodi. He was the Indo-Pakistani fundamentalist so extreme that he had opposed the idea of Pakistan, because Indian Muslims weren’t pure enough for a Muslim state. For thirty years after Pakistan had been created, he had agitated (though never offering concrete suggestions) for Islamic laws and an Islamic state. Entirely destructive to Pakistan, he had at the end flown to a Boston hospital, surrendered to Western science, and died.

Imaduddin came back. We were now well into the lunch hour of
this fasting day of Imaduddin’s; and I felt that now, especially after his prayers, he was aware of doing without.

I said, “Is it only Islam that moves you?”

“I like some Western music.
Messiah
by Handel. I like Bach. The religious music.”

But he was not happy about the attention paid in Indonesia to the monuments of the old faiths.