Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (22 page)

I asked for an example of something improper.

“In the middle-class Jakarta house they have this sofa that’s not the simple sofa. They add the intricate wood carving, and they gild it. It’s too
much. And they have these chandeliers. They become this status symbol. Our rivals don’t know. You see, Mirta and I have the same background and are open to Western civilization, Western households. We travel. For us it’s not entering another world.”

Always, though, there was the wish not to talk down, not to appear to be “telling” people. They managed this even on their advice page, “
Dari Hati ke Hati,
” “From Heart to Heart.” There were two “aunts” on the page. They dealt with the same problems, and they often disagreed: so it was up to the reader to judge. One aunt was a man of forty, a physician. The other was a lady of seventy who had been with the feature since it started. She was the wife of a high police official, was a feminist (but in the Indonesian way, Widarti said), and did much social work. Her work on “
Dari Hati ke Hati
” had made her a star; she was invited all the time to seminars. Religion, though, had now begun to soften her copy, making her at times a little too ready to leave the solution of readers’ problems to Allah. She lived in a fine “complex” on the outskirts of Jakarta; she sent in her copy by fax; it was part of her style.

Dita, the journalist, told me of a problem that had recently divided the aunts of “
Dari Hati ke Hati.
” Should a widow of twenty-three marry a bachelor student who wants to wait until he graduates? Or should she marry a widower of thirty-five who has a child and wants to marry her now? The woman says the widow should wait for the bachelor; the man says the widow should marry the widower. The question is like something from the shadow theater, with no single correct answer, and it is perfect for “
Dari Hati ke Hati
”: every person will respond according to his own character and circumstances and experience. (The woman writer here will know—better than a man—that it is not always easy for a new wife to live with someone else’s child.)

Mrs. Mirta said the feature had value because most people in Indonesia were afraid to assert themselves. They needed advice and stiffening. A recurring problem was the difficulty of living with in-laws, which people in Jakarta had to do, often for years, because they didn’t have the money to move out. She gave a rough, abbreviated translation of one letter.

“I have been married less than a year. I work in a big company, while my husband has his own business. My eldest sister doesn’t like my husband. She didn’t want to lend a hand for the marriage, and it’s still like that now. One day the unavoidable happened. My sister had a big quarrel with my husband. My sister is very afraid of her own husband. I also don’t have a good relationship with him. My sister leaves her children at our place every day,
and she only goes back to her house after her husband comes home from the office. Because my husband can’t get along with her, he won’t come home as long as she is in the house—and she is in the house every day. I don’t know what to do. I wish we could move to our own place, but our savings have been used to renovate my parents’ house. I have tried to talk to my parents about my sister, but they told me that all children are welcome in the parents’ house at any time.”

The woman half of “
Dari Hati ke Hati
” says the situation is bad. The unhappy couple should leave the house, get a room somewhere. Get some money; even sell some jewelry; move. Otherwise things will get worse. Get out of the house for six months, breathe fresher air; and perhaps then the husband’s anger against the sister will subside. “If you love your husband, and are willing to sacrifice your jewelry for him, maybe it will turn into a blessing from Allah, something not material. And pray. And perhaps Allah will lessen the friction between your husband and you.”

Mrs. Mirta, with something like resignation overlaying old affection, said of her veteran columnist, “That’s where she is nowadays.”

The male half of “
Dari Hati ke Hati
” was altogether tougher. “I would like to know what really happened between your husband and your sister. Why is it so mysterious? Something must have happened. Otherwise they wouldn’t hate each other so much. You have to find out, and you are the only person to be the mediator.” Once the true cause of conflict was out in the open, everybody had to be cool and rational. “And you should leave your pride behind. If your husband is still dependent on your parents, he’d better be more careful.” Though the husband would do better to rent a house, if he worked harder and earned a little more.

But there were levels of desperation and raw distress below this—distress set off or sublimated, on the faces of poor young girls, by the black or brown
hijab,
or Muslim head cover, as though that simple form of self-suppression was the only way open to them of dealing with instincts and needs that couldn’t be satisfied. And, thinking about the success of a magazine like
Woman’s Era
in India, I wondered whether there wasn’t a great need here as well for a magazine for women just emerging.

Widarti said that it was true, but she couldn’t do it, and no one at the press could do it; they didn’t live in that “mode.” If they tried, they would be talking down, and that would be hurtful and bad. The only thing would be for her to find someone educated from that social level; but that would be hard, because it would be asking someone to “go back.”

“It’s my opinion that you can’t go back. All over the islands there is a sort of parable about a son who travels and gets rich and educated, and when he comes back to the village he feels alienated, gets everybody angry. And the mother says something, and the boy turns to stone. This story occurs all over the islands. The moral is that you as a child must never hurt your parents’ feelings.” Widarti didn’t apply this story to herself; but I felt it cast a light on her own—almost religious—dread of talking down.

They couldn’t reach out to the other world, but that other world was now coming to them. When
Femina
was started no girl on the staff wore the Muslim headdress; now there were five or six who did, and neither Mrs. Mirta nor Widarti felt she could say, “This is something I don’t want to see you wearing.” From the late 1980s certain Muslim groups started to become critical of women’s magazines like
Femina.

Widarti said, “In former times there was no preaching in the mosque or on television. Only in Ramadan. But in the late eighties, early nineties, this Muslim thing is not only in Ramadan, but more and more all the time. In the beginning these religious lectures were only once a week, Sunday for the Christians, Friday for the Muslims. Now it’s every day for the Muslims, early-morning lectures.”

Those early-morning lectures on television were Imaduddin’s. In this new, well-lighted office it was strange, even a little jarring, to be reminded of him and his mental training. It was like being reminded of another world: it was a tribute to his new power.

“In front of our office is a mosque, and the loudspeaker becomes louder and louder. And I can see my staff becoming more and more religious. They go now to the mosque for prayers three times a day, and we can’t do anything. This morning we had a discussion about our chief cook in our test kitchen. After her hajj she changed her dress. A Muslim wardrobe now, the veil, the long blouse, the scarf to cover herself up even in front of the flames. We are thinking about her safety. Because her clothes are of polyester material, very easy to catch fire. But she refused to change.” She was about thirty, the chief cook, with two children. Before the pilgrimage to Mecca she wore Western clothes.

An angry group of students had recently come to the office. “They were critical of a lady wearing a white bathing suit. They asked me to write an open letter of apology. There were about twenty-five to thirty of them, in their twenties. Some girls among them wearing purdah, some girls wearing jeans. Maybe—this is a guess—they like it, seeing the girls in the swimsuits, but they know it’s forbidden by religion. Their anger is they are forbidden, and we are not. We have the liberty they don’t have.”

But Lukman Umar didn’t have to talk down to attract the women outside the
Femina
pale. That world outside was his own. He just opened his heart and looked inwards, and knew what would speak directly to those women.

He was a small, slender man with the complexion of the langsat fruit—the color of the water chestnut or pale adobe—which is the complexion most admired by Indonesians. He received me in his office, which was quite dark—and, almost as if by design, the opposite of the airy, blond-and-white open plan of the
Femina
building. We sat formally with three of his senior managers at a very big, dark-colored table, the center of which had been laid out with his firm’s publishing catalogs. A Christian lady on his staff was also there, to do the interpreting for him. The arrangements were too formal for anything beyond formality. And something was wrong with the air-conditioning unit that afternoon; it was blowing out warm air.

He was in a dark blue, short-sleeved safari suit. His eyes were watchful, his expression neutral, buttoned up; perhaps he was not well that afternoon. But there was such an atmosphere around him, in that office, it was hard to forget that the executives worked for him, that the building was his, and that the whole publishing enterprise had been created by him out of nothing.

I wanted to hear from him about his past; but I soon felt that what was coming out had come out many times before, and that in that too-formal setting there was no way of going any further. I felt that the executives knew the stories, the stations of his ascent: the Japanese occupation, his father going away, his mother selling little snacks, pawning her land titles to pay for her son’s fare to Jakarta, his publishing of the lecture notes at the Muslim university in Yogyakarta. There was a vast submerged experience, but these were its visible points, always able to awaken emotion, as they were doing even now, in the dark, crowded office, emotion running in a line from his mother and his childhood to his magazines and their readers. Though we couldn’t talk long about the past, because time was short, a little less than an hour to get through everything. If I wanted to know more I was to send in written questions to the Christian lady.

What was more on his mind was a recent business success. He had been granted a license by the government to export labor. I had read two days before in the
Jakarta Post
that thirty-four of these new labor-export licenses had been granted, so that now in Indonesia there were eighty-six of these licenses altogether. There had been objections to the new licenses from some of the older exporters; they said the labor-export market was saturated.
There had also been stern words from the minister of manpower. The government, he said, didn’t want to hear any more stories of Indonesian workers being abused by foreign employers. There had been recent reports of a maidservant being tortured: the government didn’t want to hear anything like that. Labor exporters should “properly manage the way they dispatch Indonesian workers abroad.”

I said to Lukman Umar that I found it strange that he, a publisher, should have gone into labor exporting. There were disagreeable possibilities, and I would have thought that echoes from his own childhood would have made the business too painful for him.

He said, in his interpreter’s translation, that there was really no strangeness. He had been moved by the situation of people who couldn’t get jobs. He was acting on their behalf, and it wasn’t easy. The labor they were competing with came from India and Bangladesh, and in those countries the governments were organizing the labor-export business.

On my last day in Indonesia I got faxed replies from Lukman Umar’s office to questions I had sent in. His mother, he said, had never stopped living in the village in Sumatra. Her land and rice field, which she had inherited from her ancestors (the title deeds of which she had pawned in 1955 to pay for Lukman Umar’s fare to Jakarta), she had passed on to Lukman Umar’s three brothers and sisters; they still lived in the village and needed the land for their livelihood. His mother had come sometimes to stay with Lukman Umar in Jakarta after he was married, but she had never stayed longer than two months. She died at the age of a hundred and two. He had built a “cemetery” for her, her mother, and her brother in Padang. He gave the full address of the cemetery: it was important to him.