Not long after meeting the students, Rabiah resigned from her highly paid job as an English teacher, having decided it was Islamically unacceptable to be teaching mixed classes of male and female students. She says the company offered to segregate the classes but she now found the job repugnant anyway. ‘I hated it because people who learn English want to be as Western as they can, and the more Islamically aware I became, the more distasteful that was.’ She told the company the job was no longer consistent with her beliefs. ‘I didn’t tell them “I’m an enemy of Suharto”.’
Rabiah’s home in Pondok Bambu became a meeting place where the young zealots could canvas their radical politics out of their parents’ earshot. Many of the older generation were alarmed at how the youth were scorning the Indonesian cultures of their forebears in favour of a puritanical form of Islam rooted in mediaeval Arabia. Young women who had been disowned by their families for donning the hijab began turning up on Rabiah’s doorstep, and visitors from the provinces coming to attend lectures could always find a spare mat on her floor. The female students displayed posters of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and pictures of women with black chadors clutched tightly around their faces demonstrating in the streets of Teheran.
Rabiah was seen as a role model and mentor for young women in the Islamist movement, and helped to popularise a new, more pious mode of dress, which quickly became de rigueur among the female students. Traditionally, Indonesian Muslim women had worn Malay-style long-sleeved blouses over ankle-length skirts with separate scarves. Rabiah encouraged them to don the all-enveloping abaya, a cloak-style garment commonly worn in more conservative Muslim societies.
‘That was the first time Muslim women in Indonesia wore long thick dresses’, says Pujo Busono, the young market vendor who had joined the movement. ‘She was followed by other women in the community. This idea to change the dress of all Muslim ladies in Jakarta came from Rabiah.’
Inspired by their Iranian revolutionary sisters, some of the student activists took the radical step of donning the niqab, the Arabian-style veil (a variation on the chador), which covers a woman’s entire face except for her eyes. This practice, followed by those who seek to emulate the ways of the Salaf al-Salih, is based on a particular reading of Surah al Nur in the Quran, which urges women to ‘draw their jilbab (cloak) over their bosoms’. As the original jilbab included a head covering, Salafists reason that pulling it down over the bosom would mean it covers the face as well. The prononents of this reading also cite a hadith which recorded that the Prophet’s wives dressed like ‘black crows’, clad head to foot in black.
Abu Jibril remembers that Rabiah was the first among the Indonesian activists to cover her face with a veil. ‘At a time when there was nobody wearing chador, she already wore it.’ Where once she had seen the veil as a sign of cultural subjugation, she now saw it as a symbol of religious and political defiance. It was a highly provocative move—so much so that the movement’s leaders persuaded the women to desist from wearing it, for fear it would draw the attention of the authorities.
The stories of Rabiah’s zeal are still recounted with enthusiasm within the Islamist movement in Indonesia. One oft-told anecdote recalls an occasion when she was travelling on a train with a group of activists. While her companions took their seats in the crowded carriage, Rabiah insisted on sitting on the floor. ‘Why do you sit on a chair when the Prophet never did?’ she demanded of one of her fellow travellers. For the entire all-day journey Rabiah sat on the floor of the train, while her friends sat on seats. One of them recalls joking that because an ayat in the Quran refers to the ‘throne’ of Allah it must be acceptable for Muslims to use chairs. Abu Jibril cites this incident as proof of his student’s superior conviction, although Rabiah recalls that at the time he chided her for being fixated on technicalities, saying ‘She has accepted Islam but faith hasn’t entered her heart’.
Rabiah’s conspicuous activism was bound to bring her to the attention of the Indonesian authorities. Irfan Awwas says that because of her involvement in the Islamist movement she was ‘watched by the government’ and as a result ‘she was in danger’.
But for now the student movement was not the government’s greatest concern. A more pressing worry was the revival of the old Darul Islam campaign for an Islamic state, and the emergence in its midst of a clique of charismatic new leaders. Among them were two clerics from Solo in Central Java, a charismatic preacher named Abdullah Sungkar and his loyal lieutenant Abu Bakar Ba’asyir.
Darul Islam had been formed in the 1940s and campaigned for Islamic law to be made the foundation of the new Republic of Indonesia. Its quest had failed when founding president Sukarno opted instead for a secular democracy and refused to include Islamic law in the constitution. Infuriated by this perceived betrayal, a rebel commander named SM Kartosuwiryo declared his own Islamic state based in West Java in 1949. It was known variously as Darul Islam—meaning ‘the Abode of Islam’— or Negara Islam Indonesia, the Islamic State of Indonesia. A 13-year rebellion was crushed when Kartosuwiryo was captured and executed and his embryonic state collapsed in 1962.
Darul Islam was resurrected in the 1970s, and covertly supported by the Indonesian intelligence apparatus, which hoped to flush out its enemies and co-opt them with money and protection in return for a pledge of loyalty. Among those who joined the revived Darul Islam were Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. They were both students of Yemeni heritage who had joined the Indonesian Islamic Youth Movement in the 1960s and set up their own pirate radio station to promote Islamic law; it was deemed subversive and was shut down by the government. They went on to establish a pesantren, or Islamic boarding school, in the village of Ngruki on the outskirts of Solo. It was modelled on Ba’asyir’s alma mater, the esteemed Gontor pesantren in East Java, which embraced the ‘modernist’ school of Islamic thought, combining a rigorous modern curriculum with a puritanical teaching of the Islamic texts.
But as the renascent Darul Islam blossomed in the late 1970s, the Suharto regime sensed it had grown out of control and a full-scale crackdown was launched, with some 700 Muslim ‘extremists’ arrested. They included Sungkar and Ba’asyir, who were charged in 1978 with subversion.
‘The charges were standard fare for the time’, wrote Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. ‘Broadly worded accusations against two men who dared to criticise the Suharto government, with nothing to suggest that they advocated violence or were engaged in criminal activity.’ At their trial, Abdullah Sungkar made an impassioned oration, which cemented his status as a champion of the Islamist struggle. He accused the Indonesian government of hijacking its opponents, rigging elections and stacking the parliament with military appointees, and alleged systematic torture of Muslim detainees, including an associate who he said had been electrocuted thirty-one times. He claimed he himself had been prevented from sleeping for three days and three nights, and had been made to stand for hours while being questioned until he confessed, which he called ‘a violation of fundamental human rights’. Despite his dissertation, he and Ba’asyir were sentenced to nine years in prison, reduced on appeal to three years and ten months.
By the time they were freed in 1982, Sungkar and Ba’asyir were renowned as heroes of the Islamist cause, and their school at Ngruki had become a beacon of resistance to Suharto. The pair had begun regrouping their followers, using Ngruki as their base and adopting the usroh model of clandestine cells. Ba’asyir referred loosely to those who joined them as their jemaah islamiyah, or Islamic community. Rabiah had not yet met the two dissident clerics, but it was inevitable that their paths would soon converge, as the pair were gaining iconic status among the students in Jakarta.
However, for Rabiah to be accepted in the Islamist movement, there was one awkward anomaly to be resolved: her marital status. Her husband Bambang had finally relented and given her a divorce after meeting another woman. So she was now a janda, or widow, a term used for any woman who has ‘lost’ he
r husband, whether through death or divorce. Among devout Muslims it was considered unseemly for a woman to remain alone, especially a middle-aged mother of three. (Rabiah was now thirty years old.) Marriage is considered an integral duty in Islam, as the Prophet Mohammed instructed Muslims: ‘marriage is half your deen (religion)’. Furthermore, pious women were expected to travel with a mahram, a husband or male relative to act as chaperone. There was no shortage of eager suitors for the attractive mujahidah from Australia. One was a taxi driver; another a wealthy businessman turned Muslim activist whose home was used as a meeting place by the usroh groups. A third was the headmaster of an Islamic primary school in Jakarta who had written a book on Quranic study and sent a copy to Rabiah, followed by a proposal of marriage. Furious that an Islamic gift should come with such strings attached, she returned his book and spurned his proposal.
The least likely among those paying her court was Pujo Busono, the young drinks seller who had listened rapt to her tales of conversion at the first students’ meeting she attended in Jakarta. Pujo was the son of poor market vendors, a man of little education or experience and meagre means. His circumstances appeared to have changed little when I met him in 2008, outside a small neighbourhood mosque in Solo. Sitting cross-legged on the verandah and at times misty-eyed with nostalgia, Pujo was eager to share his memories of Rabiah. He pedalled me in the rickshaw he now rode for a living to his extremely modest home nearby, where, in the company of his new wife and baby son, he recounted how his first marriage came about.
Pujo knew he was the least prepossessing of Rabiah’s admirers, but knew also that what he lacked in worldly goods he could make up for in spiritual fervour. Not only did he find Rabiah extremely attractive; he calculated as well that marrying the single mother of three was his Islamic duty.
‘I read a hadith that said “the best of you are those who help orphans and widows”’, Pujo recounts. After visiting several times at her home in Pondok Bambu, he summoned up the courage to propose marriage. Taken by his sweet nature, humility and youthful enthusiasm, Rabiah accepted, to the bewilderment of their peers.
‘People were very surprised why this woman with very wide experience would want to marry this very ordinary man’, says Irfan Awwas. At first, he says, ‘people questioned her motives, they were suspicious. But then they became convinced about her Islam, and the facts swept away their suspicions.’ The fact that it was essentially a practical arrangement made it Islamically sound, as far as Awwas was concerned. ‘She needed a man to accompany her to go anywhere. Pujo was physically fit, although economically poor. So Rabiah married him for Islamic reasons alone. It’s part of how she was able to maintain her belief.’ For Abu Jibril, who married them, Rabiah’s choice was further proof of her conviction. ‘She didn’t care what kind of husband he was. What was important to her was that her husband was a good mujahid, even though his situation was very poor.’ Pujo himself was clearly proud of being chosen: ‘She liked Pujo because he’s also strict and very brave, including doing jihad’, he later proclaimed.
In keeping with custom, they had spent no time together alone and barely knew each other. He was just twenty, softhearted and naive. She was in her thirties with three children, fiery, strict and uncompromising. He called her Ibu, which means ‘mother’ or ‘Mrs’, reflecting the gap in their age and experience. She renamed him ‘Mohammed’.
‘Poor Pujo, it was a disaster from the first day’, says Rabiah. ‘Not because he wasn’t a nice person—it was just a horrible mistake. I mean it was a big mistake on my part because I was totally unaware of the fact that in an Islamic marriage compatibility has to be established beforehand and that includes social status, intelligence, education and culture. I was still in my black-and-white stage and I thought if a man’s a good Muslim and a woman’s a good Muslim then there won’t be any problems. He was decent and kind, but we were like chalk and cheese.’
By her account, he was extremely jealous and tried to make her stay at home. He also assumed he could spend her money as he saw fit, which Rabiah insists is ‘Islamically not allowed’ because in Islam a woman’s money is her own. By his account, she was a difficult woman to please. When he was unemployed, she complained that he was always hanging around the house; when he went to look for work, she complained that he was always going out. ‘So doing this is wrong, and doing this is wrong. If there was a small problem or a big problem, it always became a big problem, even when it was not supposed to be big’, says Pujo. They argued often; once he struck her and was mortified afterwards. The marriage would prove short-lived, though not through want of devotion on the part of Pujo, which he was still professing more than twenty years later.
Not long after their marriage, Rabiah learned that a group of students was planning to travel to Central Java for a weekend study session in Solo, the hometown of Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. She eagerly accepted an invitation to join them. They set off one Friday morning in early 1984, Rabiah and her three children squeezed in among a busload of about fifty students, for the bumpy 500-kilometre journey. Pujo was not invited.
It was an intensive weekend of Islamic study. They attended lectures, talks and prayer sessions for nine or ten hours a day and late into the evening, then slept for a few hours before rising for the fajr (dawn) prayer, and studying all day again until isha, the evening prayer. On the second day, there was a special guest speaker—Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the former political prisoner and renowned co-founder of the Ngruki school. Rabiah couldn’t see him speak; she was in a separate room with the women students, while Ba’asyir was in the room reserved for men. She was captivated nonetheless. His subject was Tawhid al Hakimiya—the concept that God alone is the law-maker, and that only His laws must be obeyed, as laws made by men are an abrogation of His sovereignty.
For Rabiah, this idea of a universal, God-given regime, which rendered irrelevant the unjust and arbitrary whims of humans, was profoundly appealing. It was a radical and empowering prescription: only God’s laws must be obeyed; the laws crafted by mere mortals can be ignored. And the crystal clarity with which Ba’asyir spelt this out left no room for doubt.
‘I thought it was the beginning of finding what I had been looking for for a long time, because he spoke with knowledge and certainty, and you could tell he knew what he was talking about. He was so calm and sure about it, that’s what affected me. It’s like being sick and going to a series of doctors, and having a lot of tests, and you know there’s something horribly wrong with you, and finally you meet a specialist who says, “OK, there is something seriously wrong with you, but we’ve got the medicine and all you have to do is learn how to use it”.’
Afterwards, Rabiah fell into conversation with an ustadzah (female teacher) who taught Arabic at the Ngruki school, and at whose house the students were staying for the weekend.
‘What brought you to Indonesia?’ the teacher asked her.
‘I want to study Islam and learn Arabic, but until now I haven’t been able to find the right place’, Rabiah replied.
‘Why don’t you come and live here? You could study and get a job teaching English.’
The ustadzah said she would ask her husband to raise the matter with Ba’asyir, who was in charge of the school.
Back in Jakarta, Rabiah told Pujo she wanted to move to Solo. He was enthusiastic, apparently presuming he would be going too. By his account, he arranged a letter of recommendation from one of the leading activists in Jakarta, Ibnu Thoyib, addressed to Abdullah Sungkar and urging him to ‘receive this family’. Ibnu Thoyib (whose real name is Abdullah Anshori, and who is also known as Abu Fatih) would later become a leading lieutenant in JI, as head of Mantiqi 2, the branch that covered most of Indonesia.
Three weeks later, Rabiah received a message in Jakarta, relayed on behalf of Sungkar and Ba’asyir, advising her: ‘come down to Solo’. The brevity of the dispatch belied its import. Rabiah was to be the first—and only—Westerner admitted into the inner sanctum of their jemaah
islamiyah, or Islamic community.
8
TRUE BELIEVERS
Indonesia, 1984–1985
On the outskirts of Solo in Central Java, a narrow road crosses a bridge over a muddy creek then weaves through the backblocks of the village of Ngruki to a dusty cul-de-sac and a set of imposing wrought-iron gates, where a sign announces the entrance to the Al Mukmin Islamic boarding school. Inside lies a rambling compound of classrooms, office blocks, dormitories and a modest flat-roofed mosque. Back in the 1980s it was surrounded by luminous green rice paddies, which have since been overrun by the clutter of suburbia.
After being ushered through the gates, Rabiah and her companions were shown to a modest cement block house, the home of the pesantren’s co-founder and principal, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. He emerged to greet them, a tall sinewy figure in a white robe, large wire-rimmed glasses and silver-flecked beard. With him was his wife, whom he introduced as Mbak (sister) Ecun, a small, bright-eyed woman with a warm smile. Like her husband she had the strong nose, Arab complexion and forthright manner of her Hadhrami forebears, the seafaring traders from Yemen who first brought Islam to Indonesia.
‘Salam Alaikum’, Ba’asyir greeted the newcomers. ‘Welcome to Ngruki, please take a seat’, gesturing towards a cluster of bamboo chairs in his living room.
Rabiah was taken aback.
‘Why have you got chairs?’ she scolded him. ‘Why don’t you sit on the floor according to the Sunnah (custom) of the Prophet?’
Ba’asyir chuckled quietly and slowly nodded his head.
The Mother of Mohammed Page 14