Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (10 page)

After Imaduddin’s joviality the words had an ambiguous ring. They might have been defensive, from a zealous convert, or they might have been a way of letting Imaduddin know that he wasn’t to go too far. For the
first time I saw Imaduddin momentarily uncertain. His smile lasted a little too long before he said, “Uncooked.” As though carrying on the joviality and the racial game; but then he let the matter drop and left the Oklahoman to his socks and shoes.

The conversion ceremony was to take place in a room downstairs. It was small and low and air-conditioned, with walls faced with gray marble. The marble had disquieting mausoleum suggestions, and the room felt quite cold after the glare and reflected heat of the exposed big courtyard and steps. It was furnished like a lecture room of sorts. For the principals of the ceremony there was a high platform with hardwood benches or forms back and front of an altar-like table, with microphones; for the witnesses, on the floor, there were rows of classroom-style chair-desks.

The bride-to-be—for whose sake the Oklahoman was converting—was the niece of a businessman who was also a well-known poet. Poetry here, for the most part an amateur activity, was much respected, and the people gathering in the marble chamber reflected this mixture of culture and comfortableness. Whispers subsided. The hissing of the air conditioners, always there, but now suddenly dominant, appeared to act as a fanfare for the ceremony.

When the shufflings were done, Imaduddin, with his glasses hanging down stylishly from his neck, appeared as a central figure on the platform, on the far bench, against the gray marble wall, below an elegant brass plaque with black Arabic lettering. He sat between two men—beginning to chant from the Koran, against the air-conditioner hiss—and faced the Oklahoman and his bride across the table.

They, the couple, had their backs to us, together with their witnesses, one on either side. The bride, Indonesian-small, looked eager and feather-light in a yellow gown and a reddish headdress. The Oklahoman, white-necked below his flat black cap, was broader, stolider. His blue trousers looked American; his green batik shirt—it might have been a gift or a new purchase—did not, on him, suggest frivolity.

When the chanting ended, Imaduddin, smiling at the Oklahoman, said to him in English, “We welcome you back to Islam. Back to Islam, because in our belief everyone was born as a Muslim, without sin. You have come back to Islam because you have opened your heart to the truth. In everything submitting yourself to the will of God. Islam means submission.”

Then it was time for the Oklahoman to make his declaration. He said first of all that he was speaking in conscience and without duress. He sounded shy. He had no pronounced Southern accent, and for a big man his voice was light, never rising above the hiss of the air conditioners. This
might have been because he had his back to us, and perhaps also because he didn’t have Imaduddin’s microphone skills. He spoke the words of his convert’s declaration first in Arabic—this would have been a further reason for his shyness—and then in English: “I testify there is no other God than Allah and Mohammed is his last prophet.”

Imaduddin said, with something of his lecturer’s jollity, “Ah.” As though what had just been said hadn’t, after all, been so hard. Smiling, and still with his jollity, he said to the Oklahoman, “You want to change your name?”

The Oklahoman didn’t have time to answer. Feminine voices called from the floor in English, “Yes, yes.” And, “Better.” And, “Much better.”

Like an impresario, Imaduddin asked, “You like the name Mohammed?”

The Oklahoman liked the name.

“And Adam?”

That name was liked, as was Khalid.

“So,” Imaduddin said, “Mohammed Adam Khalid, you are reborn as a new Adam. I hope you will be happy with the new name.”

The main part of the ceremony was now over. The bride-to-be’s family took over. They wanted the change of name and they were happy. Mr. Khalid, the Oklahoman—a gentle, small face on his big body—came down from the platform and there was a general kissing and embracing. The women in the gathering, until then demure, became assertive. This part of the ceremony belonged to them. There was a release of pent-up, happy chatter. Cameras flashed, and the food boxes, from a firm of caterers, which had been stacked up all the while on a chest against one wall, were taken around now by girls and offered to everyone.

Imaduddin had appeared to suggest Mr. Mohammed Adam Khalid’s new names to him one by one, as though each name had required a separate inspiration. But this turned out to be only Imaduddin’s preacher’s or television style. He said when I asked him about it that Mr. Khalid’s names had been chosen by Mr. Khalid’s bride-to-be. So the tremulous, eager girl in yellow and red had known all along what was going to happen to the big man from Oklahoma sitting beside her on the bench.

I learned this, about the names, in Imaduddin’s house on Sunday morning. His mental training trip to the United States and Canada had been delayed, and I was able to go and see him again. There was no trouble with taxis this time. He sent the Mercedes and Mohammed Ali to the hotel. He
wasn’t absolutely sure that Mohammed Ali—as a chauffeur still a little green and shy—would know how or where to pick people up from the hotel. But Mohammed Ali was only five minutes late. The Mercedes smelled of air fresheners, like a New York taxi; and the gaudily jacketed cassettes might have been of Arab music.

Recognizable and reassuring this time: the small, colorfully uniformed marching groups, arms swinging from side to side; the furniture shops and wheel shops almost encroaching on the highway; the Heroes Cemetery; the lane, the little house, the big garage with the sliding door, the dark room, the little Eiffel Tower and other mementos, the small sunlit garden at the back bounded by a rockery against the wall of the neighboring house with the red-tile roof; the serving girls. One of them, in a red bodice, offered me fruit and fruit juice. Imaduddin wasn’t in the room, was perhaps with the masseur again. But Mrs. Imaduddin came in to welcome me, padding about on the plain reed mats on the tiled floor, and then she went out again. She came in again a short while later to ask whether I liked the fruit and to say that her husband was “preparing.” He came out, in his sarong again, from the front room, moving briskly, looking down, not saying much, saving his talk for when he was dressed.

He talked of the conversion of Mr. Khalid in a down-to-earth missionary way. He appeared to have no other idea of the wonder of the occasion, no idea of the extraordinary movements of peoples which that conversion could be said to contain. Imaduddin had spent years in the United States. He would have known that there were many states in the American union. He could have found out that Oklahoma was a comparatively new state, and that it had been created by the overwhelming movement westwards over Indian territory late in the nineteenth century. This would have been at the time of similar expansionist movements in Argentina, Africa, Asia: at the time, in fact, when the Dutch, in their grinding-down way, were waging a long war in Aceh in Sumatra; and when, perhaps, Imaduddin’s muezzin grandfather was calling the faithful to prayer in neighboring Landkat.

The conversion in the Menteng mosque of a young man from Oklahoma was full of historical linkages and ironies. But to see them required another vision of the world. Imaduddin’s missionary worldview was simpler. Everyone was born a Muslim, without sin, he had said at the conversion ceremony. What followed from this—though Imaduddin didn’t say it—was that everyone in the world outside Islam was in a state of error, and perhaps not quite real until he found his Muslim self.

Imaduddin’s father, the mufti’s favorite, had had his higher education in Mecca and then at al-Azhar in Cairo, always in a little bubble of Islamic learning, spiritually always insulated from the cataclysms of the time. Imaduddin had traveled far beyond Mecca and Cairo, to the world outside; and he had not gone for religious learning. He had gone for the technical and scientific knowledge that was to be his livelihood, and later for rest and security and asylum after things had become too dangerous for him at home. Yet spiritually Imaduddin lived in the bubble in which his father had lived. Nothing in Imaduddin’s worldview acknowledged the implications of the asylum and law and learning he had traveled to find. The outside world seemed to be simply there, neutral territory, something “found,” open to all, to be used as required.

So Imaduddin might in 1980 use his Saudi grant not to go to a Muslim country, but to the United States, to the University of Iowa, benefiting later from a kind of asylum. He might while he was there be given a vision of the high Islamic destiny of the Malay-speaking Muslims by the Pakistani fundamentalist fanatic Fazel-ur-Rehman, himself enjoying, bizarrely, academic freedom at the University of Chicago, and sleeping safe and sound every night, protected by laws, and far away from the mischief he was wishing on his countrymen at home. This kind of freedom and protection was what a Muslim persecuted at home could look for in the neutral world outside Islam, and Imaduddin appeared to see no anomaly. In his world-view—in spite of the mementos of foreign lands in his cool, low sitting room—nothing seemed owed to the world outside Islam.

He said, with one of the analogies that came to him easily as preacher and scientist, “The Koran is a value system. It’s like a car. A car is a system. If you have only the tire and the wheel you don’t have a car. Islam is a system. You have to have it all. Or you leave it. You cannot be halfway Muslim or third-way Muslim. You become a Muslim wholeheartedly or not at all.”

Nothing therefore affected the faith; every kind of new learning could be made to serve the faith. When he came back from the United States in 1986 with his second degree he could, as he said, use the techniques of power system analysis for his Islamic mental training classes. And now that the faith was the faith of the government, the faith in Indonesia had special political needs.

It had, for example, to deal with Mr. Wahid, with his thirty million pesantren Muslim followers. And while Adi Sasono lay about Mr. Wahid with modern-sounding words like “elitism” and “religious feudalism,” Imaduddin could use the technological needs of the age (and his own technical
training) to beat poor old Mr. Wahid—and his “deschooling”—deeper into the ground. Imaduddin never mentioned Mr. Wahid by name to me (just as Mr. Wahid, when he had talked to me, had never taken Imaduddin’s name). But it was clear who was in Imaduddin’s sights when he repeated in his house what he had said in his office, that the whole purpose of the creation was to make the whole earth prosperous.

He said, “It’s written in the Koran. When Adam was created the first knowledge given to him by God is science.”

So when he went to Iowa he was serving the faith. When he came back and attached himself to Habibie and the N-250 he was serving the faith.

He said, “The politicians will have to understand that—because of that plane—we are gaining our position with science and technology.”

He made politicians—poor Mr. Wahid!—sound like people who were not rightful rulers.

It was the perfection of the “value system” of his Islam. It was curiously circular. It was—adapting his preacher’s analogy—like a very smooth and easy treadmill, rather than a car: it kept him busy and went nowhere. Even if you said to him that people in Iowa had been kind to him when he was in need, he was prompted to say nothing about the people. Their kindness was simply another tribute to his faith: God, he said, loved him very much.

Near the end of our talk that Sunday morning I asked him again about his outspokenness in the late 1970s and his troubles then with the government.

He said, expanding on what he had learnt in jail in 1978 and 1979 from the former foreign minister, Subandrio, “Never criticize Suharto. He’s a Javanese. Young people shouldn’t criticize older people, especially big people.” For Imaduddin—not so young in 1977: forty-six to President Suharto’s fifty-six—this went against the grain. “I was trained in the Dutch way and then in the American way, where criticism is O.K. And I was born in Sumatra: I can argue with my father. I had to learn the Javanese way.”