Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (27 page)

I was reminded—though the scale here was smaller—of Imaduddin’s office. It turned out that Budi followed Imaduddin’s religious programs on television (remembering especially an interview Imaduddin had done with a murderer who had turned to Islam in jail). And when I sat through one of Budi’s regular staff-training sessions I thought he had adapted some of Imaduddin’s mental training exercises; though both might have had an American corporate origin.

A friend of Budi’s, a man of twenty-five, an ITB graduate, working in his family’s telecommunications business, had recently visited the office. He was an expert in martial arts. He was also known for his ability to see spirits and to divine people’s illnesses and auras. He saw that Budi’s partner had a kidney problem, and he saw that Budi suffered from sinusitis. When Budi, impressed, took him to his sleeping cupboard the seer said, “In that sleeping room there is the spirit of a very old woman. But she’s not bothering you. So just let her stay there.”

I asked Budi, “What is this old lady like? Did he see her?”

“I asked him what you asked me. And he said, ‘The old lady is of transparent material. Like what is in the movie
Casper, the Friendly Ghost.
’ In an Egyptian book I’ve read it’s stated differently. The spirits in that book can imitate themselves in the form of human beings. Can also transform into an animal.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were interested in these things.”

“I’ve always been interested in these things.”

At our last meeting Budi had gifts for me, books—his uncle’s style still with him. They were books about the first nine teachers or spreaders of Islam in Indonesia, and they were given to remind me of our visit to the teacher in Bandung. They were books for children; but Budi thought them suitable, because they contained the folk stories about those teachers.

Budi translated the story of Kali Jaga for me. Kali Jaga’s reputation was that he was the teacher who had fitted the old Hindu epic of the Mahabharata to the story of Islam for the puppet theater. In that way he took Islam to the people and taught them to worship God and not stone.

Kali Jaga’s father was a minister or regional ruler in the Majapahit empire, the last Hindu empire in Java. The father’s domain was in the north of Java, where there was already some Islamic influence. Though he was himself a believer, he didn’t want his son to teach Islam; he didn’t want to antagonize the Hindu ruler of the empire. When Kali Jaga grew up he became unhappy about the gap between the rich and poor in his father’s domain. He began to steal rice and other food from the state warehouses and gave it to the poor. His father caught him one day and asked him to leave his domain. Kali Jaga became a robber in the forest, robbing for the poor.

One day he saw an old man walking in the forest with a stick with a gold handle. Kali Jaga went and seized the stick from the old man, and the old man said, “What do you want? Do you want gold? If you want gold, look at those trees.” Suddenly the trees the old man pointed to turned to gold. Kali Jaga ran to the trees to get the gold, and the old man went on his way. When the old man disappeared the gold on the trees turned to leaves again, and Kali Jaga realized that the old man was a powerful man.

In fact, the old man was Sunnan Bonang, one of the nine teachers, a man of great power; he could fly and call up water at will. Kali Jaga ran after the old man and begged the old man to accept him as a student. The old man said, “I’m busy. But if you really want to be my student, take this stick of mine and sit here beside the river and wait until I come back.”

The teacher went away. He forgot Kali Jaga for many years. When one day he passed that way again he found Kali Jaga sitting beside the river, with long hair and beard and whiskers and nails, and still with the teacher’s stick. Vines had grown over him. So the old man gave Kali Jaga much knowledge and power, and told him to go out and start preaching Islam to the people. Kali Jaga found it hard to preach to the people, who were Hindus. So he stuck as much as he could to Hindu stories and ceremonies, but changed the words. Instead of the Hindu mantras he recited the Koran.

Budi said, “This preaching was in Tuban, about two hundred kilometers from Surabaya. A big city today, with a harbor.”

“Do you have a date?”

“I don’t know.”

“A century?”

“I would relate this to the fall of the Majapahit empire. This book is meant for children. They don’t put the year and so on.”

The fall of Majapahit is put at 1478. Fourteen years, that is, before the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, and fourteen years before the discovery of the New World. So while Islam was arrested in the West, in the East it was spreading over the cultural-religious remains of Greater India. India had been ravaged by centuries of Muslim invasions; its light, in places like Indonesia, had been put out.

The figure of Kali Jaga, covered by vines, but loyal to his duty, is a magical and simplified version of the Hindu-Jain saint, Gomateswara, meditating on the infinite. The most spectacular rendering of the vine-wrapped Gomateswara is a fifty-seven-foot freestanding nude statue at Sravana Belgola in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. It dates from the tenth century and still looks new. At the statue’s feet, disturbingly, as if in a further testing of the saint, real rats run about. It was strange to find him in this fifteenth-century Javanese story, sitting on a riverbank with a quite different purpose.

Budi’s world, still at a time of crossover between faiths, was more full of ghosts than he knew.

PART TWO
 

1
 

I
N
J
AKARTA
the new wealth could at times feel oppressive. It was changing landscape and lives too fast, or so it seemed: the past was too close. Every weekend, from the disorganized new city created by the new wealth, rich people, rich Chinese especially, looked to get away, for rest, cleanliness, cool air, order. They went, with their families and maids, to the new fivestar hotels; these were now the city’s weekend sanctuaries. In 1979 some Jakarta Chinese had used city hotels in that way, but they had done so mainly during the important holidays. Now the new money, the new luck, made every weekend festive; and on Sunday mornings, in the Borobodur Hotel, the rich folk, Chinese and others, from the Bethany Successful Families, one of the new American evangelical faiths, met and sang hymns and clapped hands in one of the larger public rooms, praying for the luck to last. It felt like luck, this wealth that could bless even the uneducated, because the technologies and the factories that produced it had been imported whole. For that reason, too, it felt like plunder, something that had to end. In the authoritarian state, where luck and licenses came only to the obedient, every idea of development—including “technology”—went with that idea of plunder. Even the rich could be made anxious. So on Sunday
mornings they met in the sanctuary of the hotel and sang hymns and clapped hands with sabbath abandon; on the rear window of their cars there were stickers,
BETHANY SUCCESSFUL FAMILIES,
like a fixed prayer to ward off the evil eye.

I often felt in Jakarta that it was a version, less elegant perhaps, of what Iran might have been like before the revolution: so grand and overwhelming that it seemed wrong to see the sham or to imagine the great city collapsed or decayed.