Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (12 page)

So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries—Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia—the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.

It was Dewi Fortuna Anwar who sent me to Sumatra. She was a pretty young woman of high academic qualifications, and more than one person thought that I should meet her. Her responsibilities in Indonesia were quite formidable, and she had two name cards. She worked for the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. Her special concern there was the Centre for Political and Regional Studies. In Indonesia everything of any importance is known by an acronym or by its initials, and Dewi’s center was known as PPW-LIPI. She was the head of the Regional and International Affairs Division for PPW-LIPI, and in this capacity went to many international conferences. She was also a research executive for CIDES, the Centre for Information and Development Studies (this was connected to ICMI, Imaduddin’s and Habibie’s Association of Muslim Intellectuals, and Adi Sasono was chairman of the board of directors).

Her hands were really quite full, and at our lunch—arranged by the woman diplomat who had taken me to meet Imaduddin—Dewi had talked formally, and with a certain amount of patriotism, of various important academic-sounding research projects LIPI was engaged in. It was only near the end, perhaps with the coffee, that she began for some reason to talk of Sumatra and her childhood there, the taboos of her clan that she had learned about and still honored. Everything she said about her Sumatran childhood was new and fresh, and some of it unexpected. It was personal and guileless, after her earlier formal talk of international conferences and research. I wanted to hear more, and we arranged to meet one afternoon in her PPW-LIPI office.

The LIPI building, with its modern round tower, impressive from the highway, turned out to have a bureaucratic tarnish inside, as of a place not personal to anyone. Dewi’s office was on the eleventh floor. The waiting room, a segment of the circular floor, was in shape like a piece of a pie that had been cut down and across, with a little arc of external wall like a kind of crust at the side. There were Indonesian wooden puppets on this wall, together with a picture of a temple in multicolored, crinkled batik; on another wall there were bows and arrows. Dewi’s office was across the corridor. It was on the wrong side of the round tower for an afternoon meeting; the sun was fierce; we needed a blind.

Dewi had an academic background. Her father—who had recently died—was a professor. He had done his higher degrees at Columbia and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her mother was a teacher of history at the university in Sumatra.

When Dewi was a child the family lived in Bandung. She was three and a half—and her father was away, studying in Scotland—when relations from Sumatra came visiting, and one of them said to her, “But you should see what you have in Sumatra.” This made Dewi passionate to see what she had in Sumatra, and she went back with these relations to what she realized, even as a child, was her ancestral land.

There was a family house in Sumatra, one of the fabulous Minangkabau traditional houses with horn-shaped roofs. But it had been neglected for twenty years and more, and was empty, and there was talk of spirits. Dewi didn’t even like going near it. She lived with her mother’s maternal uncle. He didn’t live in a traditional house.

Dewi said, “He was an
ulama
.” A Muslim religious teacher. “In Java they call it a
kiyai,
in West Sumatra they call him an ulama. I lived with him for a year. He had a small mosque where he lived. It was called a
surau,
because it was not a public mosque. He had students coming to study with him. He
had his youngest wife living with him. This was unusual, but because he was an important man—and his wife was actually one of his students at an earlier time—he didn’t go to live with her. Polygamy was quite common in those days, but this was the only wife he cohabited with. Before my time he had one or two wives at the same time. He always returned to his surau after being with one of his wives. By the time I was there he had his youngest wife living with him, and she brought me up.”

Dewi spoke in her open, lyrical way. And it was interesting that, with a father studying in Scotland (and probably fending off jokes about Muslims and their shuffling about of four wives), his very young daughter should be discovering and accepting, through an adored and pious older relative, the very same idea, but as an aspect of a beautiful old world.

“When my father came back from Scotland I went back to Bandung. I stayed in Bandung for two years. And when different relatives came from West Sumatra to stay with us in Bandung I decided to ask them to take me back with them. I was five and a half.”

I asked, “Can you remember why you liked the place so much?”

“It was a very beautiful place. Wide open spaces. And we were somebody. When we are there our family is deferred to. I had no competition. My great-uncle simply doted on me. He was very fierce, but to me he was very loving. My great-uncle’s wife was very loving. She used to protect me from my great-uncle’s wrath. I was very fortunate, because my great-uncle wanted someone to carry on the family name. West Sumatra is a contradiction. It is very Islamic, but it is also matrilineal. And I was the daughter of my mother, who was the last female in the line. For this I was very precious to the family. I was expected to show the flag.

“My great-uncle took it upon himself to educate me. He was an ulama, very conservative, all orthodox. But he did not want me to be deprived of modern education. He did not want my mother or my father to blame him for my lack of education. That was why he said he hadn’t wanted me to come back to West Sumatra. But in fact I wanted to wear this head covering and to go to the village school—in the religious village school you had to wear a sarong and a head scarf.”

“You thought of the sarong and the scarf as pretty clothes?”

“I didn’t think of it like that. I thought it was right. But my great-uncle put his foot down. He said that those village schools taught Islam badly and had a poor modern curriculum. He taught me Islam at home himself—when I went to the normal school. So I learned the Koran, and he read various stories from the
hadith,
the supplementary traditions.

“He would also take me around on a Sunday during the holidays to look at our family lands, so that I would know where they are and who worked them. Paddy fields are scattered all over the place. And coconut groves too. Most of the water and the arable paddy fields are at the bottom of the valley; the people at the top of the valley have to walk miles and miles to their paddy fields. My branch of the family tends to control more of the land resources. That is because the women didn’t have too many offspring. If a clan becomes very large the land is parceled out between many people. The land is not alienable, but it has to be divided among the users, the heirs. When an heir dies the land goes back to the nearest female relative.

“So, going round our land, I was being given knowledge of family kinships as well. Because the people who work our land are mostly relatives. And it is important to get to know boundaries. So one acquired a whole picture of village networking.”

From five and a half to fifteen Dewi lived in West Sumatra. Her father visited once, when she was about eight; and her mother visited with some friends two years later. From the age of twelve Dewi went every fasting month holiday to Bandung. So the village was her world.

“Living in the village is a total experience. It wasn’t only about going to school or learning the Koran or finding out about your family or knowing about your property. It is about learning the village way of seeing, and their idiosyncratic beliefs, not always rational, and yet very important. You ignore them or discard them at your peril.

“It happens that my family belongs to a clan—Pitapang—which is famous for its various taboos. They are famous in the village. People say, ‘The Pitapang can’t do this. The Pitapang can’t do that.’ A lot of people from other clans do not realize that there are things we cannot do.”

My hearing began to play tricks. I didn’t always hear “Pitapang” when Dewi spoke the word. I sometimes heard “Peter Pan.”

“There is a belief that the Pitapang is one of the older clans. The Pitapang ancestors probably moved into the area when it was virgin jungle or forest. In the pre-Islamic tradition it was believed that all those forests and springs and rivers were occupied by spirits. Of course, the humans who come to clear the land had to make a compromise with the original spirit inhabitants. So the ancestors had to abide by a code of behavior. Basically designed to ensure a balance in the environment.”

Though that idea of balance and the “environment” was a later, borrowed idea, growing out of another kind of knowledge and logic, and did
not have the force of the earth reverences Dewi was talking about. She herself seemed to say something like that almost immediately.

“In conducting our everyday lives there are other factors we have to consider. We always have to ask permission when we cut down a big tree, or drain a spring, or build a house. We have to follow certain rituals, ceremonies, to appease the guardian spirits.”

This village idea about the spirits of trees and springs seemed idolatrous and irreligious to her great-uncle, the conservative ulama. He already felt that Islam was badly taught in the village religious schools, and had personally taken on the religious instruction of his great-niece.

“My great-uncle basically didn’t want to follow these un-Islamic practices. He knew about it and probably believed some of it, but most of the time he believed that making offering to spirits was un-Islamic. The clan, and some of the older people in the village, believed that if a taboo is transgressed by someone of the Pitapang clan, someone in the clan usually suffers the consequences: a child becomes ill, or something unpleasant happens. My great-uncle paid little attention to the taboos. So I was often ill, and his wife and his friends kept saying, ‘Ah, your great-uncle must have done something again.’ As happened when they used the rice-granary timbers to build a latrine.”

The rice granary would have been a dependency of a main house, and it too would have been horn-roofed, a miniature, on stilts, broader at the top than at the bottom, perhaps with decorated gables, with walls of variously patterned woven-bamboo panels, and with a ladder rather than steps. Rice, the staple, the subject of every kind of old reverence and fertility rite, had always to be treated with respect; to use the timbers of a rice granary, even an old or derelict one, to build a latrine was to set two opposed ideas together, and was a serious kind of desecration.

Dewi said, “I had been ill for a couple of days. They gave me village medicine. My
datuk,
my great-uncle, also had knowledge of village medicines, and had very little faith in doctors; he refused to go to a doctor. Most of the villagers believed he had the ability to talk to some of the guardian spirits. So when children became ill a lot of people came to him for medicine.

“After people asked whether my great-uncle had done ‘something’ in the past few days, my great-aunt remembered that maybe building the latrine with the granary timbers wasn’t appropriate. So my great-aunt and a young man took a big axe and went down to the latrine, and they claimed they saw a creature like a black monkey jumping into the water when they started cutting the bridging plank to the latrine.”

I asked Dewi, “What water did the monkey jump into?”

“A fishpond. After that I became well. People claimed that while I was hallucinating I said all kinds of things.

“There are a lot of things I would hesitate to do, even though I have moved away. For instance, if I go back to the village I would never dip a pot straight from the stove into the water. This is considered taboo. The logical explanation is that the soot might dirty the water.

“And: in fishponds, to protect the fish, we need to have all kinds of material put in the water, and the most common is the bamboo with sharp branches.” Tall bamboos with the branch ends sharpened to spikes: a hidden obstruction, dreadfully mangling. “This possibly protects the fish from poachers. And occasionally, when people drain the fishponds, people will take the bamboo out, and careless people will lean the bamboo against the wall of a house. If a Pitapang does that, it is considered transgressing a taboo, and we must never do it. I was taught that if we did that in the evening, the spirits will be angry and the house will start to shake.

“In the village these taboos are like the equivalent of traffic lights in the city—things you have to obey.”

Most of these taboos applied only to the Pitapang clan. This was why Dewi believed that the Pitapangs were one of the oldest clans and that at the very beginning, when the rice lands were being developed in the jungle, it was they who had made the early compromises with the guardian spirits of the trees and the springs. These compromises had to be honored even now.