Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (13 page)

At the time of Dewi’s wedding, for instance, there were strange “goings on” (this was Dewi’s word) in the ancestral long house. But custom required that one of the big wedding occasions had to be in there. So the house was opened up, and preparations started for the great feast. Strange things then began to happen. Furniture was moved in inexplicable ways and food disappeared. A cousin of the maternal great-uncle who had brought Dewi up—a cousin, not the ulama himself, who would have washed his hands of the whole thing—said, “Oh, maybe we have forgotten to make offerings to the spirits.” They had forgotten. Since spirits do not live in clearings, but in big trees or springs, meat was thrown into the bush about fifty yards from the ancestral house. That was enough to appease the spirits. There was no trouble after that.

It was believed in the village that in the beginning there were three clans. The Pitapangs were one of the three. The three clans were descended from three cousins; they did not intermarry. It was these three clans who observed
the original taboos. And the Pitapangs had an added gift: they were rain-makers.

Dewi said, “I have noticed in my experience that whenever I have a big party, that during that one day there would be some rain, if only for an hour or half an hour. I got married in April. A dry season. The first day the reception was in my husband’s house.”

“He belongs to one of the clans?”

“Different clan, but same village.”

“Arranged marriage?”

“A personal choice. In my husband’s house they were having problems with water. My husband’s house is on the higher ground, very dependent on rain to fill their water tank. So they had to be careful with water. During the first day of the wedding it was completely dry. The next day the party was going to be at our ancestral house.” It had not been used for many years and was in bad repair. “At three in the morning on the big day the rain started to pour, and everybody got wet in the house. The outdoor kitchen was totally flooded. But then in the morning the sun shone beautifully, and everything was nice until eleven o’clock, and the groom came, and the guests. When they were in the house it started to pour again for about an hour. That kind of thing happens at every wedding.

“There was a mistaken belief that when we left the village this kind of Pitapang association with rain would disappear. But such is not the case. An aunt of mine married off her youngest daughter in Jakarta. So, fearing it would rain, she actually took the trouble to go to a medicine man, a
dukun,
in Banten in West Java—which is famous for its medicine. And the dukun promised that it wouldn’t rain on the great day. And my aunt paid the dukun to make some offerings to prevent the rain on that day. It’s quite common here. When they were catering for Singapore National Day they had a dukun to ensure it wouldn’t rain. At the APEC meeting [one of the international conferences Dewi was connected with] a lot of medicine men were called.

“My mother and I said that we didn’t believe that the Banten dukun was strong enough to overcome the Pitapang tradition of rain during a family wedding. My uncle, my aunt’s husband, came from another part of Sumatra; he didn’t believe a word of our Pitapang beliefs. He said, ‘It is
not
going to rain.’ So he didn’t cover the lawn with an awning. He had all the tables done nicely. They worked all day on it. At three or four on the morning of the wedding the heavens opened, and all the nice tables were ruined. He believed too much in the Banten dukun. My mother and I at the time were quite pleased.”

Religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy. Perhaps only shut away tribal communities can have strong and simple ideas of who they are. The rest of us are for the most part culturally mixed, in varying degrees, and everyone lives in his own way with his complexity. Some people manage things instinctively. Some, like Dewi, can be self-aware at the same time. She valued all the many strands of her background. She said, “My life is rich because my different worlds converge.”

When, after ten years, she left her Sumatran village, it was to go to England, to be with her academic parents. She was fifteen. She had spent very little time with her parents; but she found she had no problems with them. There was no generation problem. The years in the village had made her religious and conservative; she thought that her parents were too liberal, and sometimes she found her mother’s skirts too short and tight. In time her political attitudes were to change, but her personal values remained conservative; though, because of the matrilineal traditions of the Minangkabau, this conservatism gave her a degree of self-esteem as a woman that was not strictly Islamic.

In many ways, then, her love of the ways of her village appeared to expose her to the old fundamentalist conflict of the region. It was as though the bloody thirty-year religious war of the last century (which had destroyed the Minangkabau royal family and their palace, and had brought in the Dutch as rulers) had settled nothing. Something like this, or some related theme, must have been in Dewi’s mind—there might, perhaps, even have been recent academic seminars or conferences on the “plural” society: there is no end of these conferences in Indonesia: they are a kind of harmless substitute for a free press—because, without any prompting from me, she went on to make an almost formal statement about the true faith and the old ways.

She said, “When it comes to relations between men and God one should adhere to the pure form of Islam, not the syncretic form. We cannot be a good Muslim and adhere to polytheistic or animistic beliefs and practices. But when it comes to ordering the relations between man and his neighbors—how we live in society—each grouping has different needs and customs. I do not believe that a universal religion or a national ideology should attempt to eradicate customary practices, as long as those practices do not violate the basic tenets.”

It was a restatement of what she said had been agreed about the relationship between Islam and the
adat,
the traditional ways, after the bitter religious war of the last century.

“Islam was put at the top, the highest body of law, to which the adat would be subordinated. The saying is: ‘The adat would lean on the
sharia
[Islamic law], and the sharia on the
Kitab
.’ ” The Book, the Koran. “Practices explicitly violating Islam were to be forbidden—drinking, gambling, cockfighting, marrying more than four wives. But other aspects are considered O.K., because there is nothing in the Koran or in the sayings of the Prophet against the matrilineal system.”

Yet, though in Dewi’s mind all was clear, the relations between men and God would not always be separate from the relations between men and their neighbors. There would always be ambiguities, even about the position of women, and these ambiguities of the faith in West Sumatra were again awaiting a fundamentalist rage.

I stayed all afternoon in Dewi’s office. When I left, LIPI offices were closing, and the bureaucratic round tower, with many of its inmates now apparently running away, seemed more impersonal than ever. On the avenue just in front I waved down a street taxi. Easy enough to do; but the taxi was dilapidated, with open windows and without air-conditioning, and it was the rush hour. Rush-hour traffic in Jakarta was always bad; this was very much worse than usual because some streets in the center near the presidential palace had been closed off that day in preparation for the celebrations of RI50—the official shorthand for the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence. For many minutes, in an absolute jam, the hot air quivering with fumes and car-body glitter, I faced the back of a small van:

There were stickers like this on many cars and small vans in Jakarta; there was religious need, the need for consolation beyond what men could give; evangelically, the half-converted country was up for grabs. The young taxi driver, from Sumatra, sharp-featured, reading me as a man from India, said in English that India was a very good place: it was full of mystics. Between us we didn’t have enough of a common language to develop this difficult subject; we let it drop. Sunk in his half-collapsed driver’s seat, his knees wide apart, the driver shook his slender khaki-clad legs in nervous irritation and, to pass the time, began teaching me Indonesian. After my long exciting
afternoon, the day was dying on the highway in heat ripples and fumes; a migraine built up.

It was under the spell of Dewi’s own enchantment that I went to her village when I was in Sumatra. And, of course, everything was smaller than I had imagined: what Dewi had transmitted to me, what had held me in Jakarta, was the enchantment she had felt as a child.

Dewi’s mother took time off from the university at Padang to show me around the sacred places. With her was a visiting academic, a family friend, who had done much research on local ways. He told me that he had asked Dewi one day, when she was a child, what she wanted to do when she grew up. She said she wanted to be a Muslim religious teacher, an ulama. Only a man could be an ulama: the reply spoke not only of Dewi’s admiration for her datuk, but also of the Minangkabau feminine self-esteem that had come to her at the same time.

The family house we went to was not the house where Dewi had stayed as a child. It was the house of Dewi’s husband’s mother, who was herself a distant relative of Dewi’s. It was a modern bungalow. Glass louvers; heavy carved chairs in the Indonesian middle-class style; a big plastic ornament on a side table: a coconut tree with a lot of nuts, simple in outline, and in basic colors; two rows of concrete ventilation blocks at the top of the wall, the lozenge-shaped gap set vertically in the upper row, horizontally in the lower; a Mahabharat scene on one wall (an acknowledgment of the Hindu past or the adat), and on the facing wall an Arabic scroll. It was modern and middle-class and unremarkable.

But perhaps not unremarkable for Dewi’s young daughter, who had been sent by Dewi to live in the village, like Dewi at her age; and for whom this house and the rich, sheltering vegetation outside—the coconut, the bamboo, the banana, the rambutan, the sapodilla—might have been acquiring paradisal associations. She had come back from school, the little girl, while we were there; and now, having changed into a fresh frock, was sent off again, with a little book in one hand, and with every sign of content, to her religious class.

Take away the rambutan, and the vegetation might have been the vegetation of the Caribbean. But in the Caribbean the coconut and the bamboo and the banana were old imports, from this part of the world and from the Pacific. And here the sapodilla (the chico of India) was an import from South America. The similarity of vegetation had been arrived at in different ways, and the associations of the vegetation in the two places were
quite different. The Caribbean vegetation spoke of the slave plantations and now of the tourist trade. This landscape remained the sacred ground of an ancient clan.

The surau or private mosque of Dewi’s maternal great-uncle—where, because of his great authority, though contrary to custom, he had lived with his youngest wife—was in a coconut grove that seemed derelict.