Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (78 page)

People brought all kinds of problems to his father, Rashid said. Payment was often in kind, four or five chickens, fruit; and it wasn’t like settling a bill. Payment, once it started, went on as a regular voluntary tribute.

People came simply to be blessed, or to be cured of pains, or to have amulets blessed. Rashid remembered that once a famous local martial arts man, an elderly man, an exponent of jujitsu, came and knelt before his father and asked to be granted inner strength. The bomoh was known for his great strength. He was short, five feet four and a half inches, but well built. He could bend six-inch nails between his index finger and thumb, without having to go into a trance, which was what he normally had to do when he dealt with people’s problems.

When he was in this trance people who wanted to be blessed knelt before him, and he touched them on the forehead, the shoulders, the solar
plexus. Then he made them turn round and he touched them on the back of the head and the shoulders. When people were in pain he touched them on the part of the body that hurt.

Every year the bomoh’s followers made a special pilgrimage to the bomoh’s house and brought amulets to be blessed. These followers were of all communities and all classes, rich, poor, educated, ordinary. Rashid as a child of eight remembered hearing many languages during one of these pilgrimages: English, Malay, Hokkien Chinese, Baba or Chinese Malay.

The bomoh would go into a trance and in this trance he would take off his shirt. He would start shivering, because at that moment he would be focused in his trance on the snow deity, one of the three deities from whom he drew his powers. His assistants would hand him a bundle of flaming joss sticks. He needed the flames to warm himself, and he would appear to be outlining his body with the joss sticks. He would do this for a minute or so. When he was sufficiently warmed, he passed the sticks back to his assistants. They would then dress him in his special shirt and cover him with his cloak. The shirt was important; only the bomoh could wear it; he had blessed it on the altar of the shrine.

When he sat down his assistants gave him a glass of water. He would speak some incantations, blow on the water, drink it, and spew it out. His sword would then be passed to him. This was a real sword, five feet long and double-edged. He would stick out his tongue, and use the sword to make a deep enough incision in his tongue for the blood to flow. The yellow slips of paper for the amulets would be ready. His assistants would pass him the slips one by one and he would drip blood from his tongue on each slip. He would keep on blessing slips in this way, losing blood all the time, until Rashid’s mother said, “That’s enough.” By then he might have blessed a hundred slips.

When the sword was put away he would be covered up and, still in a trance, he would start giving his consultations. Women wanted to know whether they would get husbands, men whether they would get mistresses. Women who were being badly treated by their husbands wanted to know what they should do. Mothers or fathers wanted to know about those of their children who had gone astray.

The bomoh would speak in a language Rashid didn’t understand. This was the special Javanese the bomoh had brought from the Indonesian island where he was born. He also spoke in Mandarin. It was only on these occasions, and in that trance, that Rashid’s father spoke Mandarin.

The sword was special. It was the bomoh’s own. An assistant went into a trance one day and tried to use the sword to cut his tongue. The sword
wouldn’t cut. When the bomoh was old, though, he allowed his tongue to be cut with the sword by one of his assistants. (But Rashid’s language was ambiguous. I wasn’t sure, when I looked at my notes some time later, whether the assistants cut their own tongues, or used the sword to cut the bomoh’s tongue.)

The assistants were the bomoh’s disciples. They didn’t live in the house, but they were at the bomoh’s beck and call. They came to the house every day, and they had to work. One of the things they did was to clean the altar. They were not paid. They were in no way the bomoh’s employees. In fact, they had to bring offerings to the bomoh. Sometimes they even offered money—which the bomoh refused.

There were no statues on the altar. There was only a yellow cloth, with representations of the bomoh’s three deities on a triangle: the snow-mountain god at the peak, with the deities of fire and sword at the base. Snow, fire, sword: the bomoh’s ritual followed that sequence. He told his children on many occasions that he had masters of some kind. He had a master in China and another in Indonesia, and (just as his followers came in pilgrimage to him once a year) he regularly made his own pilgrimage to these masters. He did so by astro-traveling. Rashid never doubted what his father said; he could find no other way of explaining his father’s manifest powers.

The bomoh’s wives—Rashid’s mother and his aunt—were Baba-Nonya, overseas Straits Chinese, people of Chinese origin who had adopted Malay culture and the Malay language. The food in the house was Baba food, Malay-Chinese food, very spicy, and they ate with their hands. They didn’t use chopsticks.

Rashid’s mother, Chinese though she was, worshiped a Malay ancestor, the datuk. Many other Babas did that. Offerings to this datuk were made on the altar by Rashid’s mother. The offerings were of Malay-style food:
rendang ayam,
curried chicken,
rendang daging,
curried beef, sticky rice: food to be eaten with the hands.

Once a month everybody in the house would have his cheeks pierced with a steel needle by the bomoh. This cheek-piercing was done as a form of purification. There was a different needle for everyone; the older the child, the longer and thicker the needle. The child whose cheek was pierced first would have to endure it the longest: the needle would stay in until everyone’s cheeks were done. Sometimes, on special occasions, photographs were taken of the family, the seventeen children and the mothers, all with needles in their cheeks.

Up to the end of the second war the bomoh and his family lived in a kampung in a kampung-style house. Afterwards they moved to a resettled area, to a two-story terrace house. This was the house that Rashid had grown up in. There were three bedrooms upstairs and one bedroom downstairs. Rashid’s mother and one or two of his sisters were in the room downstairs. Rashid’s grandmother was in one room upstairs, with all the other girls. An uncle and his whole family lived in one room. All the boys slept on the landing. At any one time twenty people could be found living in the tiny house. And, with all of that, the bomoh practiced his profession downstairs, in the living room, which was also the temple.

The bomoh’s powers were known in the neighborhood, and people were careful not to cross the family. As an aspect of his success, the bomoh also had a certain social standing in the community, and he was concerned to live up to it. He was particular about his dress when, relaxing from his bomoh work, he went out, as he sometimes did, to his Chinese clan clubs in the town. He dressed in the colonial way then, in a suit and with a bow tie. He would have a game of cards, and an occasional pipe of opium. One of the bomoh’s brothers was an opium addict, and died from his addiction. But the bomoh was not an addict.

The bomoh had never gone to school. He alone knew how much he had suffered because of that as a child and young man, in that far-off time before and during the First World War. And now, in a changed world, he wanted all his children, daughters as well as sons, to be properly educated. He did the best he could for all of them.

Rashid was sent to a local primary school, and then to one of the most reputed colonial secondary schools in the district. Rashid didn’t say it, but he would have known when he got to the secondary school that he was in another sphere. At home Rashid was proud of his father’s powers, and liked them to be talked about locally; but he never talked about them at the secondary school. He never thought to “brag”—he used the schoolboy word—about his father there.

It was at this school that Rashid became aware of other religions. A friendly Tamil boy engaged him one day in “a very basic discussion” about big issues. The Tamil boy said, “Look at Hitler. Look at all those brutalities. You think these people are going to go scot free when they die? And who do you think will punish them? God will punish them. You think all of us are here without any purpose?”

The Tamil boy was a Christian. He didn’t push his faith too hard at Rashid. He was just very friendly, and it was because of this boy that Rashid joined a school Bible class. At the same time Rashid began reading the King James Bible. He liked the language, the pace of the stories, the movement. Other Chinese boys were doing the same thing. The Chinese boys were Buddhists, like Rashid; but they wanted more than they got from the Buddhism of their parents.

Rashid’s little terrace house was full of rituals, with his father’s temple downstairs, its festivities, the annual pilgrimage, and his mother’s daily worship of her Malay datuk. But these rituals couldn’t give answers to the bigger questions that Rashid was now beginning to have. His father’s three deities didn’t offer anything like “the ecumenical love” (the words were Rashid’s) he was discovering in Christianity. “Ecumenical love”: it was like the idea of grace that had overwhelmed Philip, the Chinese Christian convert. The deities of snow, fire, and sword, and the temple rituals, offered Rashid no comparable philosophy, no “big picture.” What happened in his father’s temple was private. People just came there day after day to his father’s temple with their practical problems.

And Rashid couldn’t question his father about what he did. It was inconceivable, for instance, that he should ask his father whether God existed. His father was a bomoh; he had mystical powers. To question him about religion, to express doubt, would be to show disrespect, and that was the last thing Rashid wanted to do.

One of Rashid’s brothers was more than halfway to being a Christian. He was going to church regularly. And Rashid was going to the school Bible class. Sometimes at home, in the living room of the terrace house, where the temple altar was, they sang hymns together in the evenings. The bomoh might then be relaxing, watching television. The hymn-singing in his temple didn’t worry him; he paid no attention.

At school Rashid and the Tamil boy had many talks about Jesus and the Trinity. Rashid wasn’t actually converted, but he went around saying to people, “Why don’t you start reading the Bible?” He preached at them the way the Tamil boy had preached at him. He talked to them about the purpose of life.

He did this to one of the bright girls at the school. The girl was a Pathan; Rashid was attracted to her. She said to him, “Have you ever read the Koran?”

He was prejudiced against Islam at that time. He thought of it as a backward religion; he associated it with Malays, whom at that time he considered
a backward people. But he wanted to have something to talk to the girl about. So he began reading the Koran, in the Marmaduke Pickthall translation. He was fascinated by the introduction to the opening chapter; he thought it the equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer. He liked, too, the constant reference to God as the Most Beneficent and the Most Merciful. This went against the idea he had of Islam and the sword.

But he had doubts. He didn’t like the idea of polygamy and what he could gather from his reading about the position of women in Islam. He asked the Pathan girl why the Prophet had married more than four wives, and the Pathan girl couldn’t answer. Still, he kept on reading the Koran, and it began to appeal to his heart. He felt humbled by it. He liked the repeated references to God’s guidance and man’s need of it. “Show me the straight path”: that, the fifth line of the opening chapter, went deep into him.

He began thinking of himself as a Muslim. To be a Muslim was to bear witness that there was no God but God, and the Prophet was his messenger. This should have created problems in his own mind about his father’s practices as a bomoh. But it didn’t. Rashid never associated religion with what his father did.

He was still seeing the Pathan girl. To him she was a living Muslim, an exemplar, and he began to follow her dietary habits. He was able now to recite Koranic verses. He didn’t think it was enough for him; he thought he should read the Koran properly, in Arabic. He set himself to learn the Malay Arabic script; it took him two years to do sight reading.

By this time there was worry about him at home. Rashid’s parents didn’t like it when he refused to touch pork and refused to hold the joss sticks and perform rituals before the altar. He refused to eat cooked food and even fruit that had been offered up on the altar. To avoid trouble he made himself scarce when the rituals began. His parents knew now that one day he would take a Muslim name. That upset them a great deal. They were Taoist-Buddhists, and as a bomoh Rashid’s father had a position in the community. Rashid was as conciliatory as he could be; he didn’t argue. He never wanted to hurt their feelings.

All this was in 1973. Rashid was in his eighteenth year.

It occurred to me, hearing his story, that four years before, in 1969, there had been terrible racial riots in Malaysia between Chinese and Malays. I asked Rashid about that time.