The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  ‘Sah, sah’, he replied; in English, ‘that is correct’. By the next time she visited, he had got rid of the chairs.

  The earnest preacher and the intense convert from Australia formed an immediate bond. They shared the same unflinching certitude and all-consuming sense of mission. Like his students, Rabiah called him ustadz (teacher) Abu. She recalls a very different man from the heartless fanatic described in Western media reports in later years, after the Bali bombings of 2002.

  ‘Ustadz Abu was very humble and gentle’, says Rabiah. ‘He was quietly spoken and very calm. He was always very approachable, he had a way of making you feel at ease.’ As for his impression of her: ‘I don’t know if he’d ever met a Western woman before. He was shocked by a lot of things I said.’

  Ba’asyir had already vetted Rabiah via phone calls to Muslim contacts in Australia and references from colleagues in the Islamist movement. Now he quizzed her about the Muslim community in Australia, her knowledge of Islam, plans for further studies and reasons for wishing to move to Ngruki. Rabiah told him she wanted to learn Islam ‘the correct way’. He warned her that the school was under constant surveillance and her presence would be noted by the authorities, and pointed out the salary would be a meagre $15 per month, supplemented by a supply of rice, tea, sugar, cooking oil and kerosene.

  ‘If you’re doing it for monetary reward, then Ngruki is not the place for you. You must be doing it for the sake of Allah’, Ba’asyir advised.

  Rabiah and her companions stayed for a week as guests in Ba’asyir’s home. The cleric and his wife vacated their bedroom for the visitors, sleeping in their children’s room for the duration of their stay. In the course of that week Rabiah began a lasting friendship with Ba’asyir’s wife, Ecun (pronounced ee-choon), a lively, curious woman with a keen sense of humour, who found the convert’s bluntness refreshing and amusing compared with the unfailing politeness of the Javanese.

  ‘She was really enthusiastic, very highly motivated and energetic’, Ecun remembered, when I met her at their home in the Ngruki school-grounds in 2008. ‘And she was very direct. Rabiah will say anything. If she likes something, she says so. If she doesn’t like it, she says so as well.’

  At the end of the week, Ba’asyir doubted that Rabiah would want the job. ‘You should go home, pray istikharah, think about it and decide if this is what you want’, he told her. But she felt no need for guidance. ‘I knew instantly it was where I wanted to be. I didn’t have to make up my mind, I already knew.’ The school shura (council) approved her appointment. Like her marriage to Pujo, it was essentially a practical arrangement, according to Wahyuddin, who was the son-in-law of Abdullah Sungkar and a council member. ‘She was unemployed and had no place to stay, (and) the school needed her knowledge of English because she was a native speaker.’ The fact that the paltry salary did not deter her only enhanced her credentials in Wahyuddin’s eyes. ‘She was a very established woman, with money. So to live in this poverty, she had to be strong.’

  Rabiah returned briefly to Jakarta to pack up her possessions and the children, nine-year-old Devi, Mohammed, now aged eight, and Rahmah who was eighteen months. She told Pujo he could join them later. He would visit them from time to time in Solo in the coming months, but for all intents and purposes their marriage was over when she moved to Ngruki.

  Ba’asyir’s wife, Ecun, found her new friend a house around the corner from the pesantren gates and 100 metres down the road from the girls’ school, which at the time was in a separate compound. Their new home was palatial compared with their tiny petak in Jakarta. It was freshly built of unpainted grey cement with tiled floors and boasted two bedrooms, a family room, guest sitting room, bathroom and a large kitchen overlooking the headstones of the cemetery next door. The rent was cheap because the Javanese disliked living beside the kuburan, ‘the place of graves’. Rabiah had no such superstitions. With her savings she hired two servants to keep house and look after baby Rahmah, while she began her new job teaching English at the Ngruki girls’ school.

  It was early 1984 and these were heady times at the Al Mukmin pesantren, a crucible of the Indonesian Islamic revival and the increasing resistance to Suharto. The campus was the focal point of a community of 1000 to 1500 people, comprising students, teachers, staff and followers of Sungkar and Ba’asyir. Within the straitened confines of Suharto’s Indonesia, it was its own separate world, where the law of God and the customs of the Prophet prevailed over the fiat of the dictator, in an atmosphere of brazen defiance.

  ‘The jihad atmosphere dominated our campus’, recalled one pupil from around this time. The santri (students) would march around the schoolyard railing against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and handing out leaflets urging support for the Afghan mujahidin. They called themselves al Mukmin, the moniker the clerics had chosen for their school. While a Muslim is someone who merely submits to Allah (the word Islam means ‘submission’, and muslim means ‘one who submits’), a mukmin is a true believer who strives to put all of his or her beliefs into practice. Many of them were the children and grandchildren of Darul Islam devotees, who had sworn to carry on the quest of their martyred hero Kartosuwiryo to have shariah law enshrined in Indonesia. In the meantime they were dedicated to living it themselves. Despite being a political neophyte, Rabiah was thrilled to be a part of it. ‘The whole thing was exciting, it was exhilarating. It was huge, there were hundreds of people. It was like a mini dawlah (Islamic state)—except of course they didn’t kill people as punishment. All the women covered. The etiquette and akhlaq (behaviour) was totally Islamic. Everyone I knew who lived there—teachers, students, administrators, cooks—truly wanted to live their Islam, in every way, shape and form.’

  The school day began well before sunrise, when the muezzin’s first call to prayer rang out over crackling loudspeakers from the mosque. At Ngruki there were two morning azans, a custom copied from the time of the Prophet. The first was at about 3.30 a.m., to wake those who were fasting so they could eat before daybreak and those who wished to perform a voluntary pre-dawn prayer. Another azan about an hour later announced the compulsory fajr (dawn) prayer, heralded by the ‘the first thread of light’ on the horizon, as stipulated in the Quran.

  Classes commenced at 7 a.m. and continued until 11.30 when they broke for lunch and to rest through the harshest heat of the day, then resumed from three until 6 p.m. The students were compelled to speak in only English and Arabic. Any child who spoke in Indonesian or their native dialect was penalised with detention or 100 lines: ‘I will not speak Javanese. I will not speak Javanese. I will not speak Javanese …’ While the school taught mathematics, science and English, its focus was on Islamic studies, which included the philosophy of tawhid, the ‘one-ness’ of all things under God; the ‘science’ of tafsir, interpreting the Quran; and fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, which was taught by Ba’asyir. Although secular subjects were part of the curriculum, the notion of a secular system of government was spurned. ‘They used to say anybody who graduates from Ngruki and then becomes a government employee, it means their education has failed’, says Rabiah.

  Ibu (mother) Rabiah, as she was known to the students, taught English six days a week, typically taking between two and four classes per day. For her, the job was merely a means to an end—furthering her own studies of Islam. ‘I hated teaching English. I had to do it to be there, but I would have much preferred to be in the classes, not teaching them.’

  Every morning after the dawn prayer and before classes started, a two-hour lecture was held for the teachers, usually given by Abdullah Sungkar. ‘Aba’ (father), as he was universally known among staff and students, did not teach in the school, but regularly lectured to the teachers and in the mosques of Solo. Sungkar travelled frequently to raise funds and sponsorship, run the businesses associated with the school yayasan (foundation), and do dakwah, or proselytisation. In his absence, Ba’asyir would conduct the morning lecture instead, and an additional talk for the teachers three a
fternoons a week. While Sungkar’s speeches were invariably political, Ba’asyir’s were devoted to the letter of Islamic law. Their styles were a study in contrasts.

  ‘Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sunkgar were like chalk and cheese’, says Rabiah. ‘Ustadz Abu (Ba’asyir) was a very humble man, very quiet; whereas Aba (Sungkar) was loud, someone who would always say what he thought. He was boisterous, he would laugh and make jokes, he always kept you on your toes. Abdullah Sungkar was extremely intelligent, he had a very strong personality, he was charismatic but daunting, and he commanded respect. He was a bit more scary, he just had this aura about him. You automatically got a feeling that you wouldn’t want to make him displeased.’

  Abdullah Sungkar had used his nearly four years in prison to memorise the Quran, which he could now quote chapter and verse. Ba’asyir had spent his confinement studying the hadith, committing hundreds of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds to memory. Ba’asyir was thin, thoughtful and cautious. The product of his formal training, he was the scholar of the pair; the bespectacled headmaster and organiser; bookish and methodical, respected for his superior mastery of the minutiae of shariah, by nature modest and reserved. Sungkar was imposing in both physique and voice; tall, solidly built and loud, ‘more like an Arab than an Indonesian’ as Rabiah recalls. Self-taught in Islam and prone to bombastic rhetoric, he would often stand correction by Ba’asyir on the finer points of Islamic law. Rabiah recalls they were always arguing. The two men had a profound influence on Rabiah as leaders, teachers, mentors and friends. ‘I love them both and I respected them both, but for different reasons. I respected ustadz Abu’s knowledge. And you couldn’t know Abdullah Sunkgar and not be impressed by his passion, by his unwavering conviction. Not that ustadz Abu didn’t have that too, but they had very different methodology. They were the first of a long line of many people I’ve met in my life since I became a Muslim, who live their Islam to the extent that there isn’t anything they love more in the world than Islam.’

  Of the two it was undoubtedly Sungkar who was the leader, entrepreneur and demagogue; he would electrify the congregation in the mosque with his thundering orations. Sungkar believed there was no room for compromise with the kafr (unbeliever) Suharto and Indonesia’s state ideology, Pancasila (‘five principles’), which prescribed belief in one God, justice and civility, unity, democracy and social justice, but made no mention of Islamic law. Rabiah recalls one memorable sermon by Sungkar in a Solo mosque.

  ‘A person who compromises is like a fly that gets up in the morning, and flies off to find whatever sustenance Allah has provided him’, Sungkar opined.

  ‘If he finds milk, he will consume milk. If he finds meat, he will consume meat. If he finds sweets, he will consume sweets. And if he finds shit, he will consume shit.’

  The congregation sat awestruck as Sungkar bellowed his finale. ‘And that’s what a Muslim does when he consumes Pancasila! Because Pancasila is shit!’

  In his lighter moments, Sungkar affected an air of casual informality, riding around the campus in a safari suit on his motor scooter yelling ‘Salam Alaikum’ and waving at passing students and staff. But he also enforced a code of strict discipline and obedience to the concept of ta’at, which asserts that Muslims are compelled to obey their leader as long as he conforms to God’s laws.

  Sungkar demonstrated the point in his inimitable style during a lecture when he called a trainee teacher before the class, and instructed him to take his motorbike and dispatch a letter to a nearby post office.

  ‘Did you post the letter as I told you to?’ he asked, when the young man returned fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Yes, ustadz’, the teacher replied.

  Sungkar glared at his watch.

  ‘Stand up and I’ll ask you again. Did you post that letter as I told you to?’

  ‘Yes, ustadz’, his victim gulped nervously.

  ‘Are you blatantly lying to me?’ boomed Sungkar. ‘I told you to go to the post office on Jalan Gajah Mada and post the letter. You’ve only been gone for fifteen minutes. I gave you a motorbike, not a jet. It’s impossible for you to have done it in that time.’

  ‘Ustadz, you forgot’, the young man stammered. ‘There is a post office that is closer, on the way to Gajah Mada, so I posted it there to save time.’

  Sungkar feigned fury to demonstrate his point.

  ‘You have not obeyed me! You have supposed that you knew better than me’, he thundered, his point being that the young man should have obeyed his orders. The offending teacher was sent to Coventry for three weeks, forced to sit alone for meals, the other staff forbidden to speak to him. The lesson for all who witnessed it was that the orders of the leader must be obeyed, as long as they do not conflict with the word of God.

  In contrast to his redoubtable colleague, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir was unfailingly approachable, according to Rabiah. Although male and female students were taught separately, the Ngruki leaders did not impose the strict segregation observed by the students in Jakarta, and the door to Ba’asyir’s home was always open. ‘Ngruki was a family’, Rabiah says. ‘I was very close to ustadz Abu’s family, especially his wife. I used to see them on a daily basis. I would often go and sit with he and his wife and I used to visit Mbak (sister) Ecun regularly. You could just go and visit whenever you wanted. If you had a question you could just go and knock on the door and say “Is ustadz here?” Sometimes I would go to ustadz Abu’s house and he would be doing the washing for his wife—Abdullah Sungkar would never do that.’

  On Fridays, the Muslim day of rest, Rabiah would often take her children to visit Ba’asyir’s family at his home. Ba’asyir would sit on the floor and play games with his sons’ toy cars with baby Rahmah, having got rid of his bamboo chairs after Rabiah’s pointed comments the first time they met. Their children were around the same age. Rabiah’s girl Devi would play dolls and cooking games with Ba’asyir’s daughter, Zulfur, while Mohammed played in the rice fields with Ba’asyir’s two sons, Rashid and Abdul Rohim. Ecun remembers the boys coming home after chasing eels in the paddy fields looking like a trio of little water buffalo, covered head to toe in mud, which they traipsed through the house. Rabiah was furious at the mess; Ecun’s view was ‘they’re children, let them play’, although she couldn’t help but be impressed by Rabiah’s fixation with cleanliness amid the dirt and dust of rural Indonesia.

  While the children played, Rabiah would bombard Ba’asyir with questions about the intricacies of shariah law, which she was determined to master. She describes a patient and mild-mannered teacher, reluctant to rush to judgement, who would sometimes express reservations about the dogmatic zeal of the students in Jakarta. He disapproved of their enthusiasm for the controversial doctrine of takfir, the practice of denouncing as infidels Muslims who are deemed to have strayed from ‘pure’ Islam. Rabiah says his view was ‘you can’t just go around saying “you’re kafr”’, as the students tended to do. ‘Ustadz Abu would say: “No, if someone believes in Allah, even though they may be ignorant of many things in Islam, that is not the basis to say they are outside of Islam”.’

  Within a month of arriving at Ngruki, Rabiah volunteered to swear a bai’at, or oath of allegiance, to Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. The bai’at is an Islamic tradition based on a pledge of loyalty sworn by the companions of the Prophet Mohammed who accompanied him on his historic hijrah from Mecca to Medina, to escape his enemies and establish the Islamic faith. As Rabiah tells it, she repeated after Ba’asyir words to the effect of: ‘I swear to hear and obey to the best of my ability all things pertaining to the word of Allah and the way of the Prophet’.

  The practice of swearing bai’at was later used in Indonesia as evidence against many of Ba’asyir’s followers who were arrested in the 1980s for subversion. However, Amnesty International, which called these detainees ‘prisoners of conscience’, reported that taking the bai’at was not evidence of subversive intent: ‘Such pledges of obedience are common in many different kinds of organisations in In
donesia, most of which are perfectly legitimate. An oath by itself need not entail acceptance of the authority of the organization’s leadership over that of the state.’ Amnesty found that the oaths taken at Ngruki, which varied in wording but were broadly similar to the one described by Rabiah, were ‘more in the nature of a declaration of faith’ than a vow of obedience.

  Rabiah saw her bai’at as akin to a verbal contract of employment, signifying that while she was at Ngruki she would defer to Ba’asyir’s authority in matters of her daily life and religion. ‘Ustadz Abu was responsible for me. I did it with him because I worked at Ngruki and he was the director. In terms of what was halal and haram (“allowed” and “forbidden”) for me, he had limited authority. For example, he would advise me on issues like marriage, but I was free to make my own decision.’

  After settling in at Ngruki, Rabiah decided to formally end her marriage to Pujo Busono, whom she had seen little in the months since they had wed. She believed their marriage had been a mistake and in practical terms had no further need of him as provider or chaperone. When he came to visit one day she took him to see Abdullah Sungkar and announced she wanted a divorce. Dismayed, Pujo argued against it.

  ‘Do you want to be married to him?’ Sungkar asked Rabiah.

  ‘No’, she replied.

  ‘Has he provided for you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have work?’ Sungkar asked Pujo.

  ‘No’, the young man said.

  ‘This is ridiculous’, Sungkar erupted with his usual brusqueness. ‘The thing is she doesn’t want to be married to you, so give her a divorce and stop this nonsense.’ Pujo remained a committed activist after their divorce, joining the Islamic Defenders Front, the Indonesian Mujahidin Council, and Ba’asyir’s security detail, by his own account.

  Rabiah’s children were too young to attend the Ngruki pesantren, which did not have a primary school at the time. Keen to have her firstborn learn Arabic, she enrolled nine-year-old Devi in an Islamic boarding school on Madura island off the northern Java coast. However, Abdullah Sungkar ordered her removal from the school, after learning that its principal was a follower of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Shia creed Sungkar abhorred. Seven-year-old Mohammed attended the same local Islamic primary school as Ba’asyir’s sons. Mohammed’s schooling was abruptly interrupted one day while the children were standing to attention at assembly to salute the Indonesian flag. For his salutation Mohammed turned his back and slapped his bottom in the direction of the ensign. In an echo of her own mother’s frequent forays to Mudgee public school, Rabiah was summoned to explain her son’s behaviour. This was no minor infringement— failing to honour the flag was tantamount to treason. Rabiah explained that the boy was simply being naughty. But when pressed to insist that he salute the flag in future she refused to do so, instead withdrawing him from the school and arranging to have him home-schooled instead.