Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (7 page)

“Before, there was nothing like that. It was very polite. No questions. Everybody just listened to the teacher. With the introduction of the school system in the pesantren my father set up a series of incremental changes. There had been changes before of smaller scope but with no less impact. In 1923 my maternal grandfather instituted a new pesantren for girls. Now it’s so common everywhere.”

The pesantren were essentially religious boardinghouses. By their nature they could not rise much above the level of the people. The improvements Mr. Wahid talked about seemed small: typing, geography, modern history. But perhaps they were not small at the time. Perhaps, as Mr. Wahid said, their effect was incremental.

I asked him about the traditional side of pesantren teaching. He told me of his experiences of the late 1940s, many years after his father’s reforms.

“When I was eight years old, after I completed the reading of the Koran, I was told to memorize this grammar book,
Al Ajrumiyah.
It was about fifteen pages. Every morning I was asked by my teacher to memorize a line or two. I was drilled in that. Later in the evening I had to take this book. A very basic text of religious laws: how to have ablution, how to do the right prayers.”

This was the very thing I had seen in 1979—thirty years later—in the late evening in the pesantren: boys sitting about bamboozling themselves with a simple textbook of religious laws which they would have known by heart, with some boys even sitting in the dark before open books and pretending to read.

Perhaps religious teaching had to come with this repetitiveness, this isolating and beating down and stunning of the mind, this kind of pain. Perhaps out of this there came self-respect of a sort, and even an idea of learning which—in the general cultural depression—might never have otherwise existed. Because out of this religious education, whatever its sham scholarship and piety, and its real pain, there also came a political awakening.

This was the other side of Mr. Wahid’s family story. It was interwoven with the other story of pesantren success and reform.

“In 1908 a local organization was established in Solo called Sarekat Dagung Islam by a trader who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Four years later that organization was transformed into a national organization called Sarekat Islam. It was not confined to trade.

“My grandfather had a cousin ten years younger, Wahab Hasbullah. Wahab had been sent to my grandfather to be educated. Wahab went to Mecca afterwards and took a friend, Bisri. After four years in Mecca they heard about Sarekat Islam. Wahab asked to open a Mecca branch of Sarekat. This was in 1913, the year after Sarekat Islam was founded. Bisri didn’t go along because he didn’t have the permission of my grandfather, who was also his teacher. Bisri became my maternal grandfather. Wahab was my great maternal uncle. When he returned from Mecca, in 1917, he went to Surabaya. In 1919 Sarekat Islam split. A Dutchman influenced two Sarekat Islam members to form the Red Sarekat Islam. In 1924 there was a Saudi congress for the new caliphate for the Muslims. Wahab joined the Surabaya committee.”

In 1926 Sukarno appeared, and national politics were transformed. But Mr. Wahid’s father and grandfather remained important in the religious movement.

“In 1935 the Dutch, worried by the Japanese threat, made a call for a local militia to defend Indonesia or the empire from the impending Japanese threat. And a congress called by my grandfather debated this point: Is it obligatory for true Muslims to defend a country ruled by non-Muslims? The resounding answer was yes, because the Muslims in Indonesia in 1935 under the Dutch had the liberty to implement the teachings of their religion. This means in my thinking that my grandfather saw Islam as a moral force, not as a political force exercised by the state.”

It was, it might be said, a colonial moral debate, among people who exercised no power, rather like the debate in India when the war came. And, as it happened, the militia in which Mr. Wahid’s father served was the one set up by the Japanese, who overran Indonesia in 1942.

“The Japanese established two kinds of militias, the Muslim ones and the nationalist ones. My father was the founder of the Hizbullah militia in 1944. The Japanese recruited young people from pesantren and religious schools. My father’s younger brother was trained and then appointed as battalion commander. With his headquarters situated right there in the pesantren, this involved the whole family in national affairs. They discussed the Japanese war, affairs in Germany, the independence movement.

“In 1944–45 the Japanese established a committee to prepare for Indonesian independence. It was chaired by Sukarno. My father was on this committee. He and eight other members of the committee formed the nucleus of the group to draw up the five principles of the new state, the
panchasila.
In that way he became one of the founding fathers of this state. So when the independence war broke out my father was involved directly. First he became a minister and then later he became political adviser to the commander of the armed forces, General Sudirman.

“My father went into hiding when the Dutch unleashed their aggression. I was evacuated to my maternal grandfather’s house. And there several times a week my father appeared, hiding in the house, not going out, treating his wounds, which were from diabetes, not from bullets. I had to get frogs to fry, to get oil from, for dressing those wounds. Ten to fifteen frogs a time, two or three times a week. After dressing his wounds he would go back to hiding in the nearby villages.

“When the Dutch yielded sovereignty to our state my father was appointed minister of religious affairs. He held that position for three years. In the Japanese time there had been an office of religious affairs which had
been entrusted to my grandfather, but headed by my father as chief executive director. That office was the embryo of the department of religious affairs.”

And, as so often in narratives of this time, if the brutalities of their occupation could be set aside, the intelligence and speed—and the lasting effects—of the Japanese reorganization of a vast and varied area had to be acknowledged.

Mr. Wahid, child though he was, began to live close to national politics.

“My father took me when I was nine years old to this big rally in the Ikada Stadium. Sukarno was to be there.” This would have been in 1950. “The stadium had been built by the Japanese as a sop to us. It was where they now have this national monument.” And it was the park where, before an audience of a million, the French government were to put on their big firework display for the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence. “Up to sixty thousand people were in the stadium to hear Sukarno. He looked like a giant to me. He made this fiery speech against the imperialists. Asking the public to unite in this fight, this struggle. And the people responded so emotionally. I felt so elated, sensing this movement of people participating in this ecstasy. So I shouted as well. I jumped. My father calmed me down. He said, ‘Sit down. Don’t jump.’ Maybe he didn’t want me to get tired. Otherwise he would have to carry me to the car.”

I wanted to hear more about the physical appearance of Sukarno.

Mr. Wahid said, “The posture was good. The face showed not handsomeness, but steely will, a kind of strength. To be frank with you, his face was rough. Reflecting authority, strength of will. That’s why he was charismatic. Especially when he raised his hands and shouted. You could see his eyes then, very alive, as though he was staring the imperialists down. My father being a minister, we were seated not far from him, in the first row. Sukarno stood there, facing us.

“My father died in 1953. He was thirty-nine years old. He had retired from the ministership in 1952 because our organization had been voted out of the only Islamic party of the time. My father retired from the cabinet and formed the new party, the NU, in 1952. He was very active in establishing branches of the party. In one of those trips I was in the front seat and he was in the backseat, and we had this accident in which my father was seriously injured and one day later died. He fell out of the door and was hit by the spin of the car as it skidded.

“My mother came in the night to Bandung, and a number of dignitaries accompanied his body in a hearse to Jakarta. What I saw impressed me deeply. Along the one-hundred-and-eighty-kilometer route people stood
waiting for his body, to bid farewell to him. Thousands of them in the house, in the night. The next morning Sukarno came. And then the body was taken to the airport and flown to Surabaya. In Surabaya we were received by this big throng, tens of thousands of them, crying, bidding their farewell. With my uncle—a major general—on a motorcycle in front of the hearse, we passed through the crowd, three to four deep on each side of the road for eighty kilometers, to the family cemetery in Jombang.

“Seeing all these people weeping and saying good-bye to him like that, the impression on me was like this: Is there anything greater in life than being loved by so many people? I was a child when Gandhi died. Later in life I saw pictures of Gandhi’s funeral. It reminded me of my father’s funeral. That sharpens my orientation.”

This was the family story that Mr. Wahid told, through much of a warm afternoon, in a room at ground level in his NU headquarters in Jakarta, in the cloying smell of stale clove-cigarette smoke, while the two-lane traffic roared and fumed outside just beyond the cleared front yard. The family story—compressed at my request in some places, and sometimes elsewhere made to jump about—contained, layer by layer, the history of the country over the last century and a quarter. It was the story which had dictated the course of Mr. Wahid’s own life. It was the story to which he still referred his actions and attitudes.

He had inherited the leadership of his father’s party, the NU. In 1984 he had taken the party out of politics.

“We realized how detrimental the direct link had proved between Islam and politics—as in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia—because people everywhere then saw Islam as a religion using violence, which in our thoughts is not so. In our thoughts Islam is a moral force which works through ethics and morality. This is not my thinking alone, but the collective decision of the
ulamas
educated by my grandfather. We had a bitter debate about it in 1983 with a Ph.D. in constitutional law.

“In 1991 the Forum for Democracy was established. This totally rejects Islamic politics—political Islam as posed by, say, Mr. Suharto and Professor Habibie. The competition between power centers in our country in the 1990s reflects the need on the president’s part for the widest possible support from the society. Which means from Islamic movements as well. To get that support, identification of national politics with Islam is necessary. My grandfather, by the 1935 decision”—the decision of the congress that
it was all right for Muslims to defend a Dutch-ruled Indonesia against the Japanese—“saw the need to differentiate between the functions of religion and the functions of politics. Now, the decision of Minister Habibie to take the route of Islamization means that he sees politics as an integral part of Islam. I feel it personally because my father participated in the writing of the constitution which gives equal status to all citizens. People should practice Islam out of conscience, not out of fear. Habibie and his friends create a fear among non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims to show their identity. This is the first step to tyranny.”