The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  She could have gone to an Islamic kadi (judge) to seek a divorce, but with Bambang trenchantly resisting, it was unlikely one would have been granted. So Rabiah decided to give her recalcitrant spouse a final chance—on one condition.

  ‘I can’t stay with you if you don’t pray’, she told him.

  ‘OK, you teach me to pray’, he replied.

  So Rabiah taught Bambang to pray. The novelty of being an observant Muslim and the imperative of maintaining domestic harmony proved sufficient for him to persist, for about three months. He learned to say the salat (daily prayers), fasted through Ramadan and read books on Islam. He also exercised his conjugal rights, and almost immediately Rabiah fell pregnant with their third child. Despite their tempestuous history, she clung stubbornly to her hopes of settled domesticity. ‘I didn’t hate him, I still don’t’, she explains. ‘There was still compatibility there, intellectually, we had the same principles … If he had turned into a good Muslim and taken care of me and the children and stopped his habit, I would have stayed with him, because he was the father of my children.’

  They must have made an odd-looking pair. On returning to Indonesia Rabiah had modified her attire, replacing her abaya with a long skirt, a loose buttoned blouse that hung to her knees, and a Malay-style ‘triangle hijab’, which fastens in the centre beneath the chin and covers the upper body. But in a country unaccustomed to Muslim orang bule (white people), she was still conspicuous enough that passers-by would walk into trees as they craned their necks to gape after her in the street. A photograph taken at the time showed a piously outfitted Rabiah beside Bambang in leather pants and tie-dyed t-shirt, sporting short cropped hair with a plaited rats tail at the back, and new homemade tattoos.

  Rabiah’s assertive piety alarmed her father-in-law, Amir Andjilin, who remained a faithful functionary in the Suharto establishment. After obliterating the Communist Party in the massacres of the mid 1960s, the regime had come to regard the Islamic movement as the most potent threat to its hold on power. As Suharto consolidated his rule and suppressed political opposition, Indonesians turned to their mosques and prayer groups as an alternative forum for venting their views and aspirations. Islamic discussion groups were mushrooming and Jakarta’s bookstores were doing a brisk trade in the works of Islamic radicals such as Hasan al Banna and Abul a’la Maududi, founders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, who advocated political activism twinned with a return to pure Islam as the salvation of the Islamic world. Across Indonesia, a bold new religiosity was flourishing. The hijab was increasingly viewed, particularly among students, as a symbol of covert protest against the regime.

  Amir Andjilin couched his disquiet about Rabiah’s attire in theological rationale. ‘In Islam, the aim of covering yourself is so that a woman does not draw attention. But you getting around like this has the opposite effect’, he pointed out.

  Rabiah agreed to wear her headscarf tied at the back of her neck, affecting a more Western look, but only for a while.

  The expectant couple’s reconciliation was predictably fleeting. Emboldened by her newfound conviction and Muslim identity, Rabiah was no longer prepared to play the docile Javanese wife. Nor would she stay silent about what she saw as the pagan practices of her mother-in-law, who secreted lucky charms around the house and performed monthly rituals with her treasured Javanese kris, a ceremonial dagger believed to be spiritually potent. When Rabiah challenged her, sparks flew. ‘I felt it was my duty to go back and convince them that the type of Islam they were practising was not right. And that was about as popular as an in-grown toenail with my in-laws’, she recalls. The inveterate party boy, Bambang, soon lost interest in getting out of bed before dawn every day to pray, and took to sleeping through the day and rising in the evening to avoid his demanding family. Rabiah thought he had reformed until the day she found a stash of drugs, which she flushed down the toilet. Bambang flew into a fury and lashed out as if to strike her, but his father intervened to stop him.

  Five months pregnant, she announced she was leaving, and Bambang didn’t stand in her way.

  Rabiah and the children moved into a cramped shanty in the shabby backblocks of Pondok Bambu. Their new abode was one of a ramshackle row of attached dwellings known as petak, which means ‘square’ or ‘compartment’. The walls were made of cement at the bottom and bedek, woven palm leaves, at the top. Their ‘compartment’ consisted of a single room that doubled as living space and bedroom, a tiny enclosed porch with a louvre window and chicken wire instead of glass and a lean-to kitchen-cum-bathroom with a concrete squat toilet in the corner. Outside the back door were an open drain and a pump that fed water into a square concrete tub, with a plastic ladle that was used to scoop out the water for cooking and washing. The floors were of cement, the roof of tin, and the thatch ceiling was home to a menagerie of insects and boisterous rats. At night, Rabiah would lay a pathway of ‘rat strips’—oblongs of plastic covered with a strong, sticky adhesive—from the front door to the mats where the family slept, to stop the rats in their tracks before they started gnawing on the children. One night she woke to see a large rodent creeping sideways along the wall. She screamed, waking Devi, who jumped out of bed and got stuck on the rat paper. Their neighbours were intrigued that a pregnant orang bule with two young children should be living in such penury. ‘The concept of white people being poor had never occurred to them. Indonesians can’t get their heads around poor white people’, she recalls.

  They had been there two months when Rabiah went into premature labour and took herself by taxi to the R. S. Ciptokusumo public hospital in Central Jakarta. The delivery was mercifully quick because the baby was so tiny, born two months premature and weighing less than 2 kilograms. Rabiah herself weighed only 42 kilograms, even less than when she had given birth to Mohammed. The nurses wrapped the newborn in a face washer for a nappy and placed her in a humidicrib, top and tailed with another infant because there weren’t enough cribs for all the premature births. Rabiah named the child Rahmah, which means ‘mercy’, from the opening verse of the Quran.

  When her in-laws showed up at the hospital, they were in no mood for celebrating. Because Rabiah had only returned from Australia seven months earlier, they assumed it was not Bambang’s child. ‘They accused me of being pregnant when I went to Indonesia—that was the most devastating thing’, she remembers. After two days, she and baby Rahmah were discharged. Indonesia was still a third-world country where intensive care for premature babies was unheard of; infants simply survived or they died. Rabiah had had no time or money to buy baby clothing so baby Rahmah was sent home to their shack in Pondok Bambu in hospital-issue swaddling clothes.

  Now with four mouths to feed and in need of an income, Rabiah made her way to Jakarta’s business district and traipsed in and out of the city office blocks housing multinational corporations until she found a position teaching English to the Indonesian staff of a large joint venture company. The salary was US$700 per month, a small fortune by Indonesian standards at the time, and it was enough for the family to move out of their shanty and into a spacious house in Pondok Bambu where Rabiah could now afford servants of her own to help care for the children. Her new employer sent a car with a chauffeur to drive her to and from work each day.

  In what spare time she had, she set out to teach herself Islam, relying on a vast array of Islamic literature, mostly in Indonesian, which was stocked in Jakarta’s bookstores. Much of the material available was from the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of the four schools of Islamic law and the prevalent school in Indonesia. Its pioneer was an eighth-century scholar, Imam al-Shafi’i, who believed the Quran should be interpreted purely according to the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed as recorded in the hadith. At all hours of the night in her house in Pondok Bambu, Rabiah could be found poring over books on tawhid, the fundamental belief of the Islamic faith, which holds that God is the one and only entity to be worshipped, and that his sovereign
ty extends to all creatures and all aspects of human life, including governance and the law. She read works by the Pakistani ideologue Maududi and the Arabian theologian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose allegiance with the House of Saud had transformed Arabia into a bastion of Islamic puritanism. Many of these tracts were deemed politically subversive under the Suharto regime.

  Rabiah soon resumed wearing her hijab fastened at the front, to the consternation of her in-laws, whom she continued to visit with the children despite their strained relations.

  ‘I thought we agreed you wouldn’t wear it like that’, Amir Andjilin chastised her.

  ‘But I read this book and it says that Islamically you have to wear it at the front.’ When she showed him the book she was reading, her normally mild-mannered father-in-law was furious.

  ‘This book is illegal! Do you know that to be found with this book you can be accused of collaborating with the enemies of the state?’

  His warning was more prescient than he knew.

  One afternoon in Jakarta, Rabiah was on a bus travelling home. She had left work early, passing up on the chauffeur-driven ride. As always, the pale-skinned orang bule in the hijab was an eye-catching figure, attracting curious stares and whispered comments. She was startled to hear a young man’s voice close behind her.

  ‘Salam Alaikum, Ibu (Peace be with you, mother). Forgive me for speaking to you and please don’t turn around. I’m going to leave a phone number on the seat next to you. It’s the telephone number of a group of sisters who are interested to know how you became a Muslim.’ The young man dropped a scrap of paper beside her and alighted from the bus.

  Busy with her job, three children and her studies, it was several weeks before she rang the number. ‘Selamat Pagi (good morning), my name is Rabiah’, she said in Indonesian to the young woman who answered the phone. ‘I am a Muslim from Australia. I got your number from an adik (brother) who asked me to ring you.’

  The woman on the other end of the phone was a twenty-one year old named Nuraini, a student in the engineering faculty at the University of Indonesia (UI). She invited Rabiah to attend a meeting at her father’s home and talk to a group of students— ‘about how I became a Muslim and were there any more like me on the planet’.

  Rabiah arrived in the evening at Nuraini’s house in Pondok Jeruk, a district of East Jakarta, where about twenty-five students had assembled for a lecture on Surah al Nur, the twenty-fourth chapter of the Quran. This is the chapter that sets out the rules on adultery (100 lashes for an offender and 80 lashes for a false accuser; stoning to death was not prescribed in the Quran) and the dress code for Muslim women, enjoining them ‘to draw their jilbab (cloak) over their bosoms and not to display their finery except to their husbands’. The women in attendance all wore headscarves, and males and females sat in separate rooms with a PA system set up so that everyone could hear. It was the first time Rabiah had witnessed segregation of the sexes, inspired by a hadith which recorded that in the Prophet’s time men and women sat separately in the mosque. The male and female students avoided mingling and making eye contact, in keeping with the Quranic injunction on both sexes to ‘lower their gaze’ when they meet. Most of the crowd were students from either UI or the local Islamic universities. Some had graduated, mostly in engineering or medicine, while others had dropped out.

  ‘They were very intelligent, very articulate’, says Rabiah. ‘When I met these students it was amazing because it was the epitome of what I’d read about how Islam should be practised.’

  After the lecture, Rabiah was invited to the podium to speak about her experience as a Muslim convert. She related the story of how she had first been woken by the azan, and how her initial irritation had been replaced by curiosity and finally devotion. The students were intrigued by the seemingly worldly, affluent foreigner who was exuberant and pious in equal measure. Among the group was a 20-year-old street vendor named Pujo Busono, a fervent young Muslim who worked with his family selling drinks in the market and had latched onto the student movement. Pujo was especially taken by the ardent orang bule, ten years his senior. ‘She was beautiful, she was a Westerner, she was also a Muslim and wearing hijab, and her akhlaq (Islamic behaviour) was very good’, Pujo reminisced when I met him in Solo, Central Java, in 2008.

  The gathering Rabiah joined in Jakarta was part of a clandestine student movement that bloomed from the early 1980s to evade the regime’s crackdown on political dissent. Suharto had introduced a program of so-called Campus Normalisation in 1978 to repress political activity and protests in universities. So students had begun flocking to campus mosques and Islamic study groups, known as pengajian, as an outlet for their grievances and aspirations. The campus activism was promoted by the Middle Eastern–funded Indonesian Council for Islamic Propagation and was loosely linked to the movement known as Darul Islam (meaning ‘Abode of Islam’), which was formed in the 1940s to campaign for an Islamic state. The students, however, were not plotting to overthrow anyone. As one commentator wrote, their focus was on ‘personal morality, piety and discipline’, and an ‘inner rejection’ of Suharto’s New Order and the un-Islamic practices of modern Indonesia.

  ‘The students were not initially coming together because they were strong Muslims’, says Rabiah. ‘It was because of disaffection with Suharto, (the state ideology) Pancasila and corruption. Then they said, “Well hang on, we’re Muslims, we have a perfect system”. It went from being a student movement to an Islamic movement in a very short period of time. And when they turned to Islam—that’s when Suharto realised he had a major problem.’

  Rabiah became an enthusiastic champion of the students’ cause. ‘I didn’t have to be convinced the Suharto Government was rotten and needed replacing. The corruption, the poverty—there was something really rotten. And since the majority of Indonesians are Muslims, the most logical answer was Islamic rule.’

  The student activists followed a highly literal reading of the Islamic texts, inspired by jurists such as the thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who was an early champion of the Islamic revival and the leading proponent of the concept of jihad as military struggle, as opposed to the gentler definition of personal ‘striving’. In keeping with Ibn Taymiyya’s teachings, some of the students sought to emulate the ways of the earliest Muslims, known as the Salaf al-Salih, or ‘pious predecessors’. (Hence the revival movement known as Salafism.) The students called Suharto the fir’aun—a modern-day pharaoh bent on wiping out the believers—and saw the Islamic shariah (way) as a pure alternative to the corrupt and oppressive New Order state.

  To avoid detection, the new movement used a cell structure pioneered by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood known as usroh, meaning ‘family’, meeting in private venues in small groups of around a dozen at a time. ‘Sometimes you would have a group that didn’t even know who the other groups were’, says Rabiah. ‘It was underground and secret only because they couldn’t do it openly. There were lessons taking place all over Jakarta. There would be an initial lecture, then those who had attended would go out and lecture to another ten people, then another ten. It was spreading very rapidly. It was momentous. It was growing week by week, (and) it scared the government.’

  Rabiah became a regular attendee at the secretive trysts held at ever-changing locations around Jakarta. She soon became a minor celebrity in the movement, because her zeal was even greater than that of the students. She was highly regarded by key organisers such as Irfan Awwas, a student activist who later spent nine years in jail for subversion after publishing a magazine critical of the Suharto Government. Awwas remains a high-ranking figure in the Islamist movement as Secretary-General of the Indonesian Mujahidin Council, of which Abu Bakar Ba’asyir was the emir (leader) until 2008.

  Irfan Awwas shared his memories of Rabiah during an interview in his office in Jogjakarta in July 2008. ‘Rabiah was very famous among young Muslims because she was very motivated’, Awwas says. ‘When she joined the usroh movement, people were very surpri
sed—why this woman is more motivated than them in practising Islam. She was very motivated, very energetic. It was really surprising how this convert was so devoted to Islam.’

  Rabiah was even closer to Awwas’s brother, Fihiruddin, who is widely known within the Islamist movement as Abu Jibril. He was also a senior organiser in the usroh movement, and later a founding member of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and senior lieutenant to Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. Abu Jibril famously featured in a JI recruitment video, brandishing a Quran and a gun, and declaiming: ‘No one can fight a jihad without the holy book in their left hand and a weapon in their right hand’. Abu Jibril was arrested in Malaysia in 2001 and detained for three years under that country’s Internal Security Act, before being deported to Indonesia where he has maintained his close ties with Ba’asyir.

  ‘We were quite close, I was her ustadz (teacher)’, says Abu Jibril, who recalls being struck by her ‘aggressive spirit’ and insatiable desire to learn. ‘She was really curious and eager to know everything about religion. She wanted to be the best Muslim. And once she learned something about Islam, she couldn’t wait to practise it. She was young and excited, and we were excited as well, so we worked well together.’ Abu Jibril recalls that when she first joined their movement, Rabiah still smoked the occasional cigarette, an unbecoming habit for a devout Muslim woman. ‘We challenged her—how can you become a mujahidah (female holy warrior) if you cannot give up smoking?’ He says that ‘after three nights of training’ she had quit.