Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  But the Australian I had then met had already spent two months researching that very matter. Two months! He laughed at my exclamation. Two months were nothing. A scholarly paper required interviews, questionnaires, tables. The academic life might appear leisurely, but it had its severities!

  He telephoned the evening before I left Yogya. He had actually seen a man in the street that afternoon carrying a load of wood on his back. He had felt like running after the wood-carrier, clearly a charcoal-burner, someone with charcoal to burn, and interviewing him. But he hadn’t. He was with Javanese friends—at that pleasant time of day; he had let the moment slip. He had watched his rare quarry—who knows, perhaps the last charcoal-burner in Central Java—walk away below his load in the dusk, disappearing in the black exhaust of the Yogya buses and scooters.

  But the Australian had made his arrangements. In Yogya he had a kind of tenure. I hadn’t. On Christmas Eve the Sheraton threw me out and I had to go back to Jakarta, to the Borobudur Intercontinental. So the royal palace of Yogyakarta remained unknown to me; its Buddhist mandala unexplored; the nine gateways that matched the nine orifices of the human body; the rooms that symbolized so many things, the trees that held such varied meanings; all the mingled Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim mysteries of kingship in Java, matching the wonder of the unique civilization.

  5

  The Loss of Personality

  The Borobudur Intercontinental in Jakarta changed its character at Christmas. The men from the multinational companies, and the foreign economists and advisers, left. Many of them were solitary, middle-aged men. Some went home; some went to the cooler hills or to the islands. The Borobudur offered cut-price holiday deals for local people; and the local people came, with their families; it was a recognized way, among the well-to-do, of spending the holidays.

  Children ran up and down the carpeted corridors and played with the elevators. Nannies or ayahs, some of them barefooted, dandled babies. One Chinese family, doing the right thing for the holidays but not enjoying it, spent a whole morning sitting silently on the upholstered benches outside the elevators on the fifteenth floor. The head of the family, an old man with a ravaged face, wore a singlet without a shirt. From the fifteenth floor the black-haired heads in the pool with the rippling Borobudur design seemed unnaturally large, and (also because of their number) suggested tadpoles. One morning I counted sixty-three heads in the pool.

  Simple pleasures; but they were feeding resentment. Resentment of Chinese; of foreigners; of people with skills Indonesians didn’t have. Resentment, perhaps, of the skills themselves, and the new order they were bringing in, which no one yet fully accepted: new men, new status, new power, new money. Wrong men had money. Wrong men gave themselves feudal airs. Wrong people romped about the Borobudur and showed the other side of the new society.

  “Cheap for you,” the girl said at the hotel shop, when I bought a bottle of port for the holiday. “But not for us.” And her big smile—yet not her old smile, not the smile I knew—was chilling.

  The feeling of wrongness was there. All that had been done during the fifteen years of peace could be ignored. The richer the country became, the better it was made to run, the easier it was for its creative side to be taken for granted, the easier it was for the new inequalities to show. And people could long for 1945, when everybody was equally poor and everybody had the same idea of what was right and wrong. In the town, as in the villages, every improvement made matters worse, made men more uncertain.

  “THE loss of personality,” the loss of the shared feeling for good and bad: this was Darma-sastro’s theme.

  Darma-sastro was a high civil servant in one of the new departments concerned with technology. He had been described to me as one of the gifted new men of Indonesia; and he saw me in his office one evening after hours. He was in his late thirties or early forties. He smoked aromatic Dutch tobacco in American corncob pipes; this, in Indonesia, gave him a distinct air. He was not a handsome man, but he had authority and a presence. He was connected with the upper nobility. He mentioned this only to play it down; but it was this connection that no doubt gave him his detachment from the new élite—“ten thousand, no more,” as he said—to which he also belonged.

  Darma-sastro said: “Among us there are now people who have lost their personalities or their identity. They don’t belong to the village any more. They have become too rich or too important. To them going back to the village would be a degeneration. They have lost the sense of security provided by the mutual-help society of the village. At the same time they are not individuals in the Western sense. They cannot stand on their own and as individuals interact on an equal basis with others.

  “Some of them have been abroad, but there are many people whose bodies have been abroad but whose minds have stayed in the country. How do you tell these people?” This was the way Darma-sastro talked, asking questions and answering them. “They continue to congregate among themselves. They continue to eat the same food. They will not mix with Westerners. They will not subscribe to the newspapers. I have known Indonesians who have spent three years in the United States without looking at an American newspaper. What do they look at? They look at television. The contact with the West is minimal, and that’s the way they want it to be. They can’t function outside Indonesia. They remain villagers. They are there in the West only to get that diploma and to return to Indonesia with that ascriptive dignity.

  “But here they are not members of the nobility. They don’t have the feudal values of noblesse oblige. So, with their new dignity, they seek power and wealth, mainly. This is the cancer. In the old days important people had a responsibility to the society. If you were nobility you were supposed to give an example. The people I’m talking about cannot function now as arbiters of right and wrong because they themselves cannot distinguish between right and wrong any more. Why? In their loss of identity they have lost all values except those associated with power. They are people continuing to look for their own security.

  “It’s not yet become a jungle, but we could get there. There are millions of people who are morally good, but they are powerless to enforce the good. There are thousands—and this is important—who are powerful but are not willing to enforce the good. So you feel adrift. Feeling adrift is like this. You know you should do good and avoid the bad. But now you have to think. And when you find yourself thinking about it, that is when you start feeling adrift. That is when you start feeling that the whole society is adrift. I am telling you: it takes a conscious mental and moral effort for someone like me to do the good. Which is wrong.

  “Where does the money come from, that’s encouraging all of this? It comes from oil.” He walked about the panelled office, pointing to the steel cabinets, the modern equipment. He began to act out his words. “I live from oil, mostly—the government revenue from oil and the tax on other exports. That’s when I’m here, in a town. When I’m outside the big cities I live off the land. We live off the people. I tax them, you see. I impose taxes on them. These people have to understand that I have my needs—they cannot come empty-handed to me.

  “I am surprising you? In Europe in the old days the importance of a noble was measured by the extent of his land. In Java the importance of a noble was measured by the number of people on his land. Because people meant wealth: unpaid labour, part of the produce, army. We are not nobles now, but we haven’t forgotten that people mean wealth.”

  FROM high up, Jakarta was a spread of trees and red tile roofs. But the Jakarta map showed only a few main roads. These were the roads along which the traffic flowed, past the new skyscrapers and the parks and the monuments. The city was contained within these roads. Jakarta was a city without a focus, a cluster of urban kampongs or villages, and these villages preserved the haphazard structure of country villages. No street map could record the twists and turns of lanes and alleys.

  In the centre the villages were of concrete. But farther out they could still be areas of green: houses in unfenced gard
ens, in the shade of fruit trees, with yards swept twice a day. These villages were still communities, still with their appointed “leaders.” Such areas needed little to put them right. But many of these urban village communities were unstable. Land near the centre was valuable; villages could be bought up for development; and the community then had to move farther out. And families multiplied; land was divided and divided again; houses shrank, and the lanes between houses became narrower and narrower.

  No question then of garbage collection: that was left to the ragpickers, the men with the finely made bamboo baskets on their backs, who would sift through the garbage for everything that could be sold, every tin, every bottle, every scrap of paper that could be flattened out and sold to somebody as wrapping paper. The precious fruit trees were fenced around, the bounty of a little piece of Java behind barbed wire, surrounded by little houses. And always children, in every open space, in little broods, as numerous as chickens.

  One little brood was at the foot of a rambutan tree, on the morning Prasojo and I walked through. An old man was up in the tree, using a bamboo rod to pick clusters of the spiky red fruit. Prasojo and I stopped to watch. The man’s son saw us. He saw we were strangers; he took a bunch of the fruit his father had picked and offered it to us with the Javanese-Hindu gesture of courtesy: the fruit in his extended right hand, the fingers of his left hand touching his right elbow.

  The fruit was money to the family; it was being picked to be sold. Just a few hundred yards away, beyond the maze of the village, was the main road, black with diesel exhaust and lined with little stalls. Jakarta was a city of five million. Here, among people close to the abyss, were still, miraculously, the manners of the country village, the graces of an old civilization.

  Prasojo was less moved than I was by the offer of the rambutan. He saw it only as correct behaviour. He said, “It is how I behave myself. It is the behaviour of a man still in a community. In ‘society’ that same boy would probably steal your fruit.”

  The man in a community still lived in the old cooperative Javanese village way. The man in “society” was a man on his own, a man who had left his village and his fellows and cast himself into the town. Prasojo thought such people were “gambling” with their lives; he called them gamblers. They were the men who became rag-pickers. They were the men who could be seen picking up cigarette butts (but using two long bamboo sticks like long chopsticks) to sell the tobacco for a kind of cigarette for the poor. They were the lost people of Java, and some of them were even without “papers.” They were the people squeezed out by the fertility of Java from the civilization of Java, people at the very bottom who had lost their personalities as much as Darma-sastro’s people at the top. With their baskets on their backs, their long sticks, their minute diligence, their eyes forever on the ground, like people withdrawn from the bustle and the crowds, they were a warning to everybody else: things could easily go wrong.

  Jakarta boomed. The city and the country needed wealth and skills. But these things created wounding divisions, and there was rage about the loss of the old order, the loss of the old knowledge of good and bad.

  The holidays ended. The new rich and their children and their ayahs left the Borobudur Intercontinental. The pool was drained for its annual overhaul; where water had rippled blue, white tiles glared, and workmen chipped and hammered. The men from the multinationals and the advisers and the economists returned. There was peace in the corridors. It was back to business.

  6

  Mental Training in Bandung

  It was the rainy season. Even on bright days, southern Jakarta was hidden by cloud, skyscrapers and greenery and red roofs fading away. The land seemed flat, but there were hills to the south, and they showed when the cloud lifted. Up in those hills were the holiday bungalows of people who wanted to get away from the heat and humidity of Jakarta.

  A freeway, cutting through agricultural land—the cause of student protest at one time, but now the freeway took much traffic—led part of the way to the hills. When the freeway ended it was crowded Java again, with a narrow road winding up through unending village (occasionally densing up to little towns), past vegetable and fruit stalls, to tea plantations, over which raincloud and mist drifted, mixed with the black exhaust of buses and trucks and scooters. Here and there the sodden earth at one side of the mountain road had slipped, and the roots of a tea bush, surprisingly thick and long, hung loose above the road.

  From tea and mist the road dipped to a flat clear valley of rice, and then it climbed again, through sharp cone-shaped hills, to the plateau with the town of Bandung: Bandung of the famous postcolonial conference of 1955, with President Sukarno and Mr. Nehru; Bandung of the cool climate, one of the many Parises of Asia that people spoke about in colonial times; Bandung also of the famous Institute of Technology, founded by the Dutch, and inevitably the forcing ground of revolution. Sukarno went to Bandung; his title of “Doctor Engineer” came from this institute.

  And Bandung still had a radical reputation. It was one of the centres of the Islamic revival in Indonesia. Many of Prasojo’s Jakarta friends had gone there for the holiday weekend, to attend a three-day Islamic “mental-training” course at the mosque of the Institute of Technology.

  The course was being given by a man famous among Indonesian Muslims, Mr. Imaduddin, an electrical engineer and an instructor at the institute. Some people in Jakarta thought Imaduddin brave; others thought him dangerous. He had been released from jail five months before, after a year inside. His name, Imaduddin, Arabic rather than Indonesian, hinted at the kind of Muslim he was.

  The outskirts of Bandung were more Javanese than Parisian in the dusk, with the dirt sidewalks and the makeshift roadside stalls. But it was the charmed hour, the “dating” hour Prasojo had spoken about, and for some time we trailed a dating couple on a scooter, the girl carefully made up to ride (arms on her escort’s waist) through the smog and the traffic din, sitting with her legs to one side, her slippers dangerously dangling.

  Prasojo said to me, “You were asking about the langsat complexion. She is langsat.”

  The colour of the langsat fruit was considered the perfect colour for an Indonesian woman. The fruit was pale-ochre, a pale adobe colour; and the girl on the scooter had a clear, southern-Chinese complexion.

  The girl was embarrassed by the scrutiny. When our driver played his headlights on her, her escort, already preoccupied by the traffic, became agitated; more than once he turned around to scowl. When at last they swerved away the langsat girl, slippers dangling, wickedly smiled, and Prasojo said, “Did you see? Did you see?”

  We had to ask our way, street by street almost, to the institute and the mosque. It was in the older, colonial part of the town: impressions, in the darkness and lamplight, of wide, silent streets, houses set back, and of a big administrative building in whose carved roof Java had become only an architectural motif, a piece of Dutch colonial exoticism.

  The cylindrical tower of the mosque was “modern.” It was past seven, and in the open paved spaces between the mosque and its ancillary buildings, groups from the mental-training class, boys and girls, were waiting for the evening session to begin. Soft girls’ voices called from the shadows, “Prasojo! Prasojo!” The success of that boy! Girls liked Prasojo as much as he liked them; and now they thronged about him as though he had been away from them for weeks. The gaiety of the group was like the gaiety of campers. They were Jakarta young people, children of the middle class. They were not like people of the pesantren, or like the more austere, closed Muslim groups.

  Imaduddin was telephoned, and someone led us to his house. Before we could get out of the car, Imaduddin himself came out of his house to greet us, a man of medium height, broad-shouldered, wide-faced, smiling, open; and he swept us inside.

  It was the house of a university lecturer, with plain chairs, shelves, but also with an Indonesian feature: two girls, relatives or servants, sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. They rose just after w
e came in and went away, no doubt to prepare the tea of welcome.

  Imaduddin read the letter of introduction Prasojo had brought. His face lit up as he read; he said he was honoured. He looked less than his forty-eight years. His skin was smooth, his dark eyes bright, and he had a wide, humorous mouth. He was attractive, full of welcome. But how, he asked, had I got to hear of him? I mentioned the name of a Jakarta journalist, and Imaduddin said, with a laugh, “But tell him I am still fighting for my freedom! After five months. The institute hasn’t given me any duties this year.”

  “Why do you think they are afraid of you?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose they’re afraid of my popularity with the students.”

  I asked about his name.

  He said, “It’s Ima-dud-din. It means the pillar of the faith.”

  “Did you take it yourself?” Some Indonesians did that. Prasojo had given himself a name, and told his parents about it afterwards.

  “No, my father gave it to me. He was a student at Al-Azhar in Cairo. I have been Ima-dud-din all my life.”

  The tea of welcome came, in china cups, not glasses. The food of welcome was biscuits, of two kinds, in jars. This was not the hospitality of the village.

  The interrogations had been tough in jail. The first had lasted twenty hours, but Imaduddin had no stories of maltreatment. Among his fellow prisoners there were some famous men. Imaduddin had met and talked with Dr. Subandrio, who had been foreign minister at the time of the army take-over in 1965. Dr. Subandrio had been accused by the army of plotting a communist coup with others, and he had been sentenced to death. Three days before the execution Queen Elizabeth of England had made an appeal for his life, and he had been reprieved. And for all this time—virtually forgotten by the world—this former colleague of Sukarno’s had been in jail: it was not an easy thing to contemplate, sipping tea in Imaduddin’s university house.