Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (15 page)

When he was twenty-one, in 1993, Mariman began to write. Extraordinary for someone who had begun life as a herdsman; but the ambition, that idea of possibility, would surely have come to him from his now absent father, an educated man, with books in a locked chest. Mariman wrote articles on economic matters and they were published in
Pelita,
a Jakarta daily. For every published article he was paid fifty thousand rupiah, nearly ten dollars. This high payment shattered his delicate balancing of tiny sums, made him a new man. He began to feel he had a future. He felt this more strongly when the Muhammadiyah university in Malang invited him to be a lecturer. He asked his mother and his father. They were small people, but they knew about buying and selling. His mother did that every day, with her little stall, and his father dealt in buffalos. They said the salary was too low, and Mariman turned the university down. He decided then to leave the kampung and come to Jakarta.

Jakarta was at the other end of the long island of Java. The fare was fifty thousand rupiah. One article in
Pelita
settled that. He had clothes. And he had lodging: his mother’s sister agreed to take him in. She had a house with three small rooms in a slum in south Jakarta. Mariman was a little bit frightened to be in Jakarta, because for the first time in his life he had no close family within reach. But he didn’t mind about the conditions. They had to pump water for the bathroom and the kitchen. He lived like that, in the small house in South Jakarta, for seven months, from November 1994 to the end of June 1995—that was just six weeks ago, but already (a day is very long for a young man) that life felt far away, and Mariman felt he couldn’t go back to living in those conditions. And though he didn’t say, it was no doubt during that time that he became a CIDES researcher.

I asked Furqan, “He misses the village?”

“Yes. He misses his mother. He would like the village or kampung atmosphere in Jakarta, but he can’t get it.”

“What does he mean by the kampung atmosphere?”

“The respect for older people, praying together in the mosque. But he’s not frightened of Jakarta now. He tries to make the kampung atmosphere in his neighborhood. And he has a girlfriend. He plans to get married as soon as possible.”

But Mariman had hardly begun to make his way.

I asked Furqan, “Does he feel his life has changed so completely in the last seven months?”

“He feels he has made a big jump intellectually. But he has become a consumer.”

Already, that piety, that bit of tutored wisdom. I asked, “What does he mean by that?”

“He is influenced by the consumerism of the big city.”

“He is wearing a nice shirt and a nice colorful tie. Is that what he means by consumerism?”

The shirt was carefully chosen: white, with button-down collar, the shirt and the broad striped tie sitting flat on his almost flat chest. There was a pen clipped to the pocket. He wore belted beige trousers; the belt emphasized his narrow waist. And he wore gold-rimmed glasses. Everything represented expenditure, thought; he perhaps had never dressed so carefully in his life.

Furqan said, “When he was young he wore very simple clothes and could still feel confident.”

I felt that there was a tremulousness about Mariman. He was aware of the clothes he wore, and perhaps they made him nervous. Perhaps they
made him worry about pride and the vanity of transient things, and awakened in him, almost in a religious way, some Javanese-Muslim idea about luck and success bringing the greater danger of a fall.

Furqan said, “Now he feels proud to wear nice clothes, but he doesn’t think that’s all to do.”

I asked to see Mariman’s CIDES card. It was the standard CIDES namecard (Furqan had one, and Dewi Fortuna Anwar), with the CIDES lettering big in the bottom left-hand corner. Mariman’s name was printed in small underlined letters in the top right-hand corner:

It was part of the change that had come to him, but he wasn’t letting it go to his head. He wasn’t forgetting his kampung.

Furqan said, “There is no one like him in his kampung now. But he can talk with them. And many of the people are proud of him, because he is still humble, although he lives in Jakarta. He goes back twice a year. If there is an event in the kampung he will go back. He fulfills all the prayer obligations. He feels that prayers are important, especially when he feels he is very distant from his mother and his father. Because of his religious feeling he is special in his village. Some of his friends have lost confidence as men and have begun to drink in the city. Most of these people are of low education. His religion makes him feel different from his friends.”

“What does he think will happen in the village?”

“He has an ambition through education to alter the village and the disparities. Nowadays his kampung is changing because of him, his prestige.”

In this, as in his education, he was an extension of his father, the buffalo-dealer, who had been the first man in the village to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

I asked, “Are people following him in the religious way?”

Furqan said, “Many of his friends feel that the key of his success is his education and not his religion.”

I was struck by the frankness: I felt that Mariman was still his own man.

Furqan added, “But after education they go back to religion.”

“Is there a difference between education and religion in his own mind?”

“There is. But with education he can also show the performance of a religious person.”

“What does that mean?”

“He can be a better religious person.”

“So he shares Professor Habibie’s ideas about religion and technology?”

“He’s read in a magazine that Habibie fasts twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. So Habibie can combine success and religious spirit.”

“Religious spirit is necessary for success?”

The answer was roundabout, but perhaps Furqan hadn’t understood the question. “Many people in the village fast two times a week, but when they went to high school they stopped fasting and became bad people. They even gave up Ramadan fasting. So he, Mariman, made an innovation.”

“Became bad people? In what way?”

“Working hard in the factories, they feel they are not strong enough to fast.”

Our talk had become circular. It might have been that the third person, the interpreter, was a constraint; or it might have been that we had really come to the end of what was arresting and original in Mariman’s story.

“Is he still studying hard?”

“He is still studying hard.”

“What would he like to be?”

“An expert in economy.”

“He sees Islam as a continuing source of strength to people?”

“He is sure that Islam can be a source of spirit in the future. So he is trying to make education for people in the kampung. This is the concept he is trying to propagate in the kampung.”

I said, “A modern kiyai?” A pesantren head.

He understood the word, and he began to laugh. In English he said, “Thank you, thank you.”

Later I remembered something I didn’t ask. I telephoned Adi Sasono on his mobile phone, and he, busy as he was, passed on the question.

“What about the sheep he didn’t sell? He had twenty-two, and he sold two to go to school.”

Two days later, on a noisy CIDES line, Furqan said, “He gave them to his brother. But he doesn’t want his brother to continue in that way of life.”

The new wealth was great, and to the government’s credit it had gone down far. A big new middle class had been created, and the new housing developments outside Jakarta for this middle class were so many and so vast, and so sudden, that some country roads seemed for long stretches to be like film sets, with old kampung streets—a general effect of low buildings,
pitched corrugated-iron roofs, and fruit trees—kept whole in front of the hard new treeless lines of ocher-colored concrete and glass and red-tile roofs going up at the back. So that two kinds of life seemed to be going on at the same time in the same place, extending the idea that had come to me on the first day, of history here existing in layers, of having speeded up to such an extent in the last fifty years—the Japanese occupation, the war against the Dutch, the events of 1965, and now the immense manifest wealth—that most people, whether in the new developments or the kampung-style road, were only two or three generations away from kampung or agricultural simplicity.

In anthologies of Indonesian writing I looked at while I was there this nearness to the village came over as an unworked-out feeling of loss. It expressed itself in simple tales. It is possible to create a composite tale. The old peasant gets off the bus in the city; he has a gift perhaps for a relative, once known as a village person, but now a famous general or an important civil servant. The peasant, gaping at the city sights, might be jostled and insulted by people in the street crowd. Various memories play in the peasant’s head as he approaches the presence. The peasant, getting nearer and nearer, is staggered by the trappings of power. The general or the civil servant is welcoming or cold—it depends on the politics or sentimental inclination of the writer: but at the end the peasant knows that the past is finished.

Sustained great writing, rather than polemic, can only come out of societies that offer true human possibility; and in Indonesia we have, instead, a pastoral people who have lost their history; who have been involved in prodigious, often tragic, events, but are without the means—the education, the language, and above all the freedom—to reflect on them.

Abstractions: consider this from an editorial in the
Indonesia Times.
“Materialism is still pervading the Indonesian society. Some of the religious leaders in Indonesia view the emergence of people with low moral character as the result of indiscriminate adoption of Western values.… The best way to cope with increasing materialism and individualism is to intensify built-in control in tandem with instilling moral teachings. The development of religious ethics should be intensified in order to counter materialism.…” And so on, that single idea (rather like Mariman’s) repeated over nine paragraphs.

Abstractions: the theme of the RI50 celebrations, as given in the
Jakarta Post,
reporting or summarizing a speech by Emil Salim, executive chairman of the celebrations committee. It begins like the program of a Beethoven symphony. “Under the theme of ‘Expressing Reverence and Gratitude for
Independence by Enhancing the Roots of Our Republic’s Populace,’ the planned celebrations fall into three categories.” The first category will include programs to reflect the five tenets of the state ideology: belief in God, national unity, consensus through deliberation, humanism, social justice. To deal with the God tenet, the Indonesian Ulamas Council will be urging Muslims to “perform a bow of thanks following the Friday prayers.” The humanism and social justice tenet (or tenets) will be dealt with in the Indonesian way: with a national seminar on human rights. No seminar for the democratic principles tenet, though: the French business community of Jakarta will deal with that by putting on a laser show. A sailing extravaganza will make a statement about national unity. Then there is social solidarity; that can’t be left out. It isn’t certain where it fits into the—now—almost Buddhist complexity of the five tenets and the three categories; but it will be handled in this way: Emil Salim will be calling on businessmen to “give something back to the community by decreasing their profit margins to benefit the public in a giant sale. And this discount shouldn’t be on used or defect goods either.”

A simple people involved in great events. And on an occasion like RI50 many words have to be used, but few will have meaning; since the reality, which all understand, needs no words. With religion, the consoler, as recommended in the editorial in the
Indonesia Times,
adding to the simplicity—as, thirty years before, in a poorer, darker time, communism did.

I talked to Goenawan Mohamad about the abstractions of language. Goenawan was a universal man of letters, in the Indonesian way, a practitioner of all the forms; but he was best known as an essayist, admired not only for his independent thinking and knowledge and elegant mind, but also for his use of the Indonesian language.