Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (5 page)

And now he had a stupendous vision of the future of the faith here.

“I believe what the late Fazel-ur-Rehman told me. He passed away in 1980. He was one of the members of the National Islamic Academy in Pakistan. He was Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago. I invited him to Iowa to give a lecture.” Interesting, this glimpse of the protected goings and comings of Islamic missionaries in the alien land. “I met him at the airport. He hugged me and said, ‘I have read many of your articles and books and I am happy to meet you today. You are Indonesian. I strongly believe that the Malay-speaking Muslims will lead the revival of Islam in the twenty-first century.’ I picked up his bag and escorted him to the car and asked him why he believed that. He said, ‘I am serious. You will lead the revival. There are three reasons. First, the Malay-speaking Muslims have become the majority of the Muslim world, and you are the only Muslim people to remain united. We Pakistanis failed to do that. The Arabic world is divided into fifteen states. You have only Sunnis, no Shias. Second, you have a Muslim organization, Muhamadiyah, with the slogan, Koran and Sunna.’ Because Fazel-ur-Rehman strongly believed that only the Koran can answer modern questions. ‘Third, the position of women in Indonesia is just as at the time of the Prophet, according to the true teaching of Islam.’ ”

I asked Imaduddin, “What are the modern questions that the Koran can solve?”

“Human relations. Sense of equality. Freedom from want, freedom from fear. These are the two things people need, and this is the basic mission of the Prophet Mohammed.”

He had told me in 1979 that he could not be a socialist when he was young because he was “already” a Muslim. It could have been said then that devoutness did not provide the institutions. But this could not be said now that the faith alone did not bring about freedom from want and fear, because the faith Imaduddin propounded was anchored to Habibie’s technological program, whose glory was expressed in the flight of the N-250.

“Science is something inherent in Islamic teaching. If we are backward it’s because we were colonized by the Spanish, the British, the Dutch. Why were men created by God? To make the world prosperous. In order to make the world prosperous we have to master science. The first revelation revealed to the Prophet was ‘Read.’ ”

It seemed part of what had gone before. But when I got to know a little more of the politics of Indonesia I was to see that this was where Imaduddin was taking the war to the enemy, and making an immense power play on behalf of the government.

In Indonesia we were almost at the limit of the Islamic world. For a thousand years or so until 1400 this had been a cultural and religious part of Greater India: animist, Buddhist, Hindu. Islam had come here not long before Europe. It had not been the towering force it had been in other converted places. For the last two hundred years, in a colonial world, Islam had even been on the defensive, the religion of a subject people. It had not completely possessed the souls of people. It was still a missionary religion. It had been kept alive informally in colonial times, in simple village boarding schools, descended perhaps as an idea from Buddhist monasteries.

To possess or control these schools was to possess power. And I began to feel that Imaduddin and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals—with their stress on science and technology, and their dismissing of old ritual ways—aimed at nothing less. The ambition was stupendous: to complete the Islamic takeover of this part of the world, and to take the islands to their destiny as the leader of Islamic revival in the twenty-first century.

Imaduddin said, “Formerly they used to read the Koran without understanding the meaning. They were interested only in the correct pronunciation and a certain enchanted melody. We are changing this now. Now I’ve been given a chance to give lectures through TV.”

Later we went out, past the now empty open space with the rumpled rugs. Imaduddin’s wife was there, waiting for him: a gracious and smiling Javanese beauty. It was something in Imaduddin’s favor that he had won
the love of such a lady. It was she who had packed the jail bag for him seventeen years before, and she reminded me that I had come to their house in Bandung on the last day of 1979.

I went to the bathroom. Ritual ablutions from a little concrete pool had left the place a mess, except for people who would take off their shoes and roll up their trousers.

When I came back there was a tall middle-aged man in a gray suit standing with Imaduddin’s wife. As soon as this man saw Imaduddin he went to him and made as if to kiss his right hand. Imaduddin made a deflecting gesture.

The man in the gray suit was in the Indonesian diplomatic service. He had met Imaduddin when Imaduddin had come to Germany to do his mental training courses for students. He looked at Imaduddin with smiling eyes, and said to me in English, “He is himself. He fears only God.”

And I knew what he meant. And for a while we stood there, all smiling: Imaduddin, his wife, and the man in the gray suit.

Imaduddin told me later that it was the custom of traditional Muslims to kiss the hand of a teacher. The diplomat looked upon Imaduddin as his teacher. Whenever he met Imaduddin he tried to kiss his hand. “But I never let him.”

2
 

T
HE MAN
whom Imaduddin and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals had in their sights more than anybody else was Mr. Wahid.

Mr. Wahid didn’t care for Habibie’s ideas about religion and politics, and he was one of the few men in Indonesia who could say so. He was chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the NU. The NU was a body based on the Islamic village boarding schools of Indonesia, and it was said to have thirty million members. Thirty million people resisting mental training and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals: this made Mr. Wahid formidable. And Mr. Wahid was no ordinary man. He had a pedigree. In Indonesia, and especially in Java, this mattered. His family had been connected with the village boarding schools of Java for more than a century, since the dark colonial days, when Java had been reduced by the Dutch to a plantation, and these Islamic boarding schools were one of the few places to offer privacy and self-respect to people. And Mr. Wahid’s father had been important in political and religious matters at the time of independence.

The
Jakarta Post,
choosing its words with care, said in one report that Mr. Wahid was controversial and enigmatic. There was a story behind the words. Imaduddin believed that it might have been God, no less, who had made President Suharto more of a believing Muslim in these past few years,
had sent him on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and had made him a supporter of the technological-political-religious ideas of Habibie. Mr. Wahid had other ideas about that. He believed that politics and religion should be kept separate, and one day he had allowed himself to do the unthinkable: he had criticized President Suharto to a foreign journalist. Only someone as strong and independent as Mr. Wahid could have survived. He had, remarkably, been re-elected chairman of the NU. But in the eight months since then he had not once been received by President Suharto, and it was now known that Mr. Wahid was in the line of fire.

It was no doubt this scent of blood that made people say I should try to see Mr. Wahid. One note from a foreign journalist described him as “a blind old cleric with a following of thirty million.” This gave Mr. Wahid a comic-book character and confused him with somebody else in another country. Mr. Wahid’s eyes were not good, but he wasn’t blind; he was only about fifty-two or fifty-three; and he wasn’t a cleric.

Sixteen years before, people had been just as anxious for me to see Mr. Wahid, but then it was for another reason.

In 1979 Mr. Wahid and his
pesantren,
the Islamic boarding-school movement, had been thought to be at the forefront of the modern Muslim movement. The pesantren had the additional glory at that time of having been visited by the educationist Ivan Illich and pronounced good examples of the “deschooling” he favored. Deschooling wasn’t perhaps the best idea to offer village people who had been barely schooled. But because of Illich’s admiration the pesantren of Indonesia seemed to be yet another example of Asia providing an unexpected light, after the obfuscations of colonialism. And a young businessman of Jakarta, a supporter of Mr. Wahid’s, arranged for me to visit pesantren near the city of Yogyakarta. One of the pesantren was Mr. Wahid’s own; it had been established by his family.

There had followed two harrowing days: looking for the correct places first of all, moving along crowded country roads between crowded school compounds: usually quiet and sedate at the entrance, but then all at once—even in the evening—as jumping and thick with competitive life as a packed trout pond at feeding time: mobs of jeering boys and young men, some of them relaxed, in sarongs alone, breaking off from domestic chores to follow me, some of the mob shouting, “Illich! Illich!”

With that kind of distraction I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, and I am sure I missed a lot. But deschooling didn’t seem an inappropriate word for what I had seen. I didn’t see the value of young villagers assembling in camps to learn village crafts and skills which they were going to pick up anyway. And I was worried by the religious side: the very simple texts, the
very large classes, the learning by heart, and the pretense of private study afterwards. In the crowded yards at night I saw boys sitting in the darkness before open books and pretending to read.

It wasn’t the kind of place I would have liked to go to myself. I said this to the young Indonesian who had come out with me from Jakarta as my guide and interpreter. He was bright and educated and friendly, always a little bit on my side in all our adventures. Now he dropped all courtesies and became downright irritated. Other people, when they heard what I had said about the pesantren, also became irritated.

At the end of the two days I met Mr. Wahid in his pesantren house. I wrote about our meeting, but it was strange that, until I re-read what I had written, I had no memory of the man or the occasion. It might have been the fatigue of the two days, or it might have been the shortness of our meeting: Mr. Wahid, busy as ever on pesantren business, was going to Jakarta that evening, and couldn’t give me much time. Or—and this is most likely—it might have been because of the very dim light in Mr. Wahid’s sitting room: it was a great strain to try to see him through the gloom, and I must have given up, been content with his voice, and remained without a picture.

What he said explained much of what I felt about the pesantren. Before Islam they would have been Buddhist monasteries, supported by the people of the villages and in return reminding them of the eternal verities. In the early days of Islam here they would have remained spiritual places, Sufi centers. In the Dutch time they would have become Islamic schools. Later they would in addition have tried to become a more modern kind of school. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, where Islam was comparatively recent, the various layers of history could still be easily perceived. But—this was my idea, not Mr. Wahid’s—the pesantren ran all the separate ideas together and created the kind of mishmash I had seen.