The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  ‘I taught my children there is no law except the law of Allah’, she says. ‘I told him he was naughty and that it was a rude thing to do. But I wasn’t prepared to tell him he had to salute the flag.’

  Rabiah became well known at Ngruki for speaking her mind. On one occasion she reprimanded Ba’asyir’s wife Ecun, who came from a family of well-off batik merchants and had her own line of clothing, for selling hijabs with lace trimming. Rabiah was sure this breached the Quranic ayat urging women not to ‘display their adornments’.

  ‘You can’t sell these, it’s haram (forbidden)’, Rabiah reproved her friend.

  Mba Ecun disliked an argument and, in any event, it was hard to argue with Rabiah.

  ‘When ustadz comes home I’ll ask him’, she diplomatically replied.

  She raised the issue with Ba’asyir that evening. ‘Rabiah is saying this business I’m doing, that Allah will be displeased with me, and the money’s haram.’

  Ba’asyir nodded with a quiet laugh. ‘Sah, sah’, he replied. ‘That is correct.’

  Ba’asyir himself used to wear a black kopiah, a traditional Malay-style box-shaped hat, until Rabiah took him to task.

  ‘Ustadz, it’s not right that you wear that hat. It’s a symbol of nationality. You should wear a Muslim hat.’

  From then on he took to wearing a soft crocheted cap of the kind worn by men who have done the haj, which on windy days would go flying off his head as he rode around on his motor scooter. He would shake his head in mock sorrow, muttering ‘Rabiah, Rabiah, aduh!’ (Aduh is a mild exclamation, akin to ‘oh dear’.)

  Abdullah Sungkar’s safari suit also attracted Rabiah’s ire. After leading a government delegation on an inspection tour around Ngruki, Sungkar asked Rabiah whether she had seen the official party which included Defence Minister Benny Murdani, who had come to ensure the dissidents knew the government was keeping an eye on them.

  ‘Did you see our visitors?’ Sungkar asked Rabiah.

  ‘Yes’, she replied. ‘I was watching out the window when the delegation went past. I couldn’t distinguish you from them because you dress the same.’

  The next time she saw him, she says, he had abandoned his safari suit in favour of more orthodox Islamic attire.

  To her students, Ibu Rabiah was foremost a disciplinarian. ‘She was very strict and not very patient. She sometimes clashed with the students, so some of the students didn’t like her very much’, Ecun remembers. One former student, Sri Murtiah, recollects that Rabiah was ‘very strong and very strict’ but ‘funny’ at times and a ‘good teacher’. ‘Sometimes when the students couldn’t follow her English, we would laugh and she would laugh as well. But when the students were undisciplined, she became angry. If she was serious, the students should be serious too. She didn’t scream at us, but she had a very loud voice.’

  Rabiah was such a stickler for Islamic etiquette that she was appointed by Ba’asyir as ‘house mother’ to monitor the female students’ akhlaq, or Islamic behaviour. In scenes reminiscent of a younger Rabiah with her ‘shariah stick’ patrolling the streets of Lakemba, she would stride around the dormitories where the girls slept six to a room, laying down the law. Her pet hate was the wasting of food; if she found food discarded among the rubbish she would whack the bin with a stick and harangue the nearest suspect. Another aversion was the female students’ habit of forgetting to collect their laundry from the clothesline, which often meant it ended up blowing around the schoolyard. Rabiah believed some of the girls had too many clothes anyway; as her mother used to say, no one needed more than three sets—‘one on, one off, one in the wash’. Any girl who forgot to bring in her washing would get two warnings. The third time, she was punished. ‘I used to make them put all their clothes on at once. Whatever clothes they had they’d have to put them all on top of each other, because they didn’t appreciate what Allah had given them, and they had more than they needed anyway. It was very successful, very successful.’

  But in a country where merely raising one’s voice is considered unbecoming, some of Rabiah’s colleagues disapproved of her mode of discipline. ‘The Indonesian teachers were absolutely horrified at my methods. They wouldn’t say anything to me, but they used to complain about me’, she says. Any expression of anger was frowned upon as not only culturally inappropriate but Islamically suspect as well. A hadith records that when an early Muslim asked the Prophet, ‘Messenger of Allah, teach me some words which I can live by’, the Prophet replied, ‘Do not be angry’, repeating the advice three times. But curbing her volatile temper was a challenge Rabiah had never mastered, although she claims to have made some headway. ‘That is the biggest struggle I’ve had. But from someone who used to pick up a chair and throw it, to someone who only becomes irate and raises their voice, I have made progress.’

  Among her disapproving colleagues was Abdullah Sungkar’s son-in-law, Wahyuddin, who was then a teacher and later became headmaster of the pesantren, a position he still held in 2008. Wahyuddin admired her strictness but frowned on her tirades, recalling, ‘She easily became angry and the students bore it’. After one outburst, a complaint was made to Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. By Rabiah’s account, Ba’asyir took her side, telling the complainant: ‘If you have come here to tell me that she lost her temper for other than the sake of Allah, I will listen. Otherwise, make this the last time you stand before me.’ Rabiah did not hear of any further complaints. Ecun recalls that in contrast to Rabiah’s own impatience, Ba’asyir was unfailingly patient with her.

  ‘Ustadz Abu was always very loyal to me’, says Rabiah. ‘People would complain about me and ustadz Abu would always maintain that as long as my behaviour was not un-Islamic it was alright. He always gave me an excuse if it was anger for the sake of Allah. He would say, “If her behaviour is un-Indonesian or un-Javanese, that’s OK, because she’s not Indonesian or Javanese”.’

  However, Ba’asyir’s patronage and her friendship with Ecun did not help endear Rabiah to some of her colleagues, particularly the women on the staff. ‘The female teachers in Ngruki didn’t take kindly to outsiders’, she says. ‘Some of the female teachers never accepted me because I was never a santri (pesantren student), I was an outsider, I was a bule, I couldn’t speak Arabic. I wasn’t even married when I was there and that was another problem.’ Wahyuddin confirms that her status as a janda (‘widow’ or divorced woman) was a source of discomfort to the other female teachers. He says some of the women felt ‘uncomfortable’ about her habit of approaching the male teachers to seek their advice on Islamic issues. ‘The wives of the ustadz were not happy with it’, Wahyuddin says. Rabiah’s position as ‘house mother’ was supposed to include the provision of a house inside the school-grounds but, apparently because of these rumblings, her move was blocked, and Wahyuddin and his wife took the house instead.

  While Rabiah was at Ngruki, Ba’asyir and Sungkar were in a crucial phase of their campaign for an Islamic state in Indonesia. Using the usroh model of an ever-expanding cell structure, the small groups of followers they established proliferated from their base in Solo across the island of Java to the capital Jakarta. They urged their supporters to implement shariah within these groups, using a series of manuals written by Ba’asyir, as a precursor for an eventual Islamic state.

  ‘I never saw or heard anything from Abdullah Sungkar or Abu Bakar Ba’asyir that suggested some massive underground movement plotting a military takeover of the government’, says Rabiah. ‘It was just Muslims saying there is no alternative but the law of Allah and the way of the Prophet. Even when they broke into cells, that was still the target. It was underground and done in secret only because they couldn’t do it openly.’

  This account is supported by an analysis of Ba’asyir’s manuals done by Amnesty International in the 1980s. The manuals set out forty duties for usroh (family) members such as physical health, cleanliness, education, honesty, abstinence from alcohol, charity and obedience, with the aim of creating an ‘Islamic brotherhood’. They descr
ibe the three foundations of usroh as knowledge, education and jihad. Jihad is defined as ‘struggle by education, struggle in both body and soul for the greatness of Islam, struggle through politics, and struggle through the use of one’s wealth’. There was no mention of violence or military struggle at this stage in their campaign.

  Sungkar and Ba’asyir’s growing popularity led to rumblings of disaffection in the wider Darul Islam movement, which had long been riven by personal rivalries and doctrinal disputes. ‘There were rumours in Jakarta that Abdullah Sungkar had deserted Darul Islam and breached the chain of command, that he was creating divisions in the umma (community) and setting himself up as a rival to Darul Islam’, says Rabiah. ‘They were saying he was doing it because he wanted to set himself up as the new caliph (Muslim leader) of Indonesia.’

  Rabiah was now such a trusted insider that she was chosen as an emissary to travel to the capital to try to find out who was behind the sniping at her mentors. It transpired that much of the gossip was emanating from a particular Islamic study group in Jakarta. Students of this group were taught a method known as nukil, in which they learned to read the Quran in Arabic by translating it word for word into Indonesian and writing the Indonesian words next to the Arabic text. The classes attracted members from a range of rival groups and had become a hotbed of gossip and intrigue, much of it directed against the two clerics in Solo.

  With the twin aims of learning Arabic and gleaning intelligence on the rumblings, Rabiah joined the nukil study group in Jakarta. It was there she met a Javanese undergraduate named Abdul Rahim bin Ayub, a jovial twenty year old who had studied engineering at the Catholic Jayabaya University in Jakarta but had abandoned his degree to become a full-time student activist. He had mastered nukil himself and was now teaching it to others. Abdul Rahim had a twin brother, Abdul Rahman, who was studying Arabic at the Saudi-funded Institute of Islamic and Arabic Language Studies in Jakarta.

  An acquaintance of Abdul Rahim was a religious teacher named Zainal Arifin, who later migrated to Australia. Arifin remem bers Rabiah as the ‘Abdullah Sungkar woman’ who showed up one day in Jakarta in around mid 1984. He describes her as a ‘strong woman’, ‘very fanatic’ and also ‘very good looking’. Once again, according to Arifin, she soon had a throng of admirers eager to marry her, including Abdul Rahim.

  However, Rabiah had no interest in remarrying at this point. She was there to sort out the dissent against her mentors, and it turned out that Abdul Rahim was among the most vocal detractors who felt Sungkar and Ba’asyir had deserted the broader Darul Islam movement. Rabiah persuaded him to travel to Ngruki to meet the clerics for himself, as a result of which he transferred allegiance and joined them. Unbeknown to either Rabiah or Abdul Rahim, his switch came at a critical juncture in both of their lives, and in the history of the Islamist uprising in Indonesia.

  By the mid 1980s, the tensions between the Islamist movement and the Suharto regime were coming to a head. In the preceding years the government had been tightening the noose on the movement seen as the most potent threat to its hold on power. Activists including the son of Darul Islam founder Kartosuwiryo were arrested and put on trial, accused of reviving the campaign for an Islamic state. The Muslim youth group run by Rabiah’s colleague Irfan Awwas was raided and his newspaper shut down. Awwas himself, who had infuriated the government by publishing Abdullah Sungkar’s courtroom denunciation of Suharto, was arrested and would soon be sentenced to thirteen years imprisonment for subversion. He and others were accused of belonging to an illegal group named Komando Jihad, meaning Holy War Command. Amnesty International wrote: ‘The Indonesian government has regularly accused radical Muslims in recent years of being members of a Komando Jihad aiming to set up an Islamic state in Indonesia, but often the evidence for such a link presented at their trials has been insubstantial. Many commentators have doubted whether a Komando Jihad exists or ever existed, and have suggested that these accusations were used to stifle radical Muslim activity.’ Amnesty denounced Awwas’s trial as unfair, and suggested he had been detained ‘for peacefully exercising his internationally-recognized right to express his political and religious beliefs’.

  The Ngruki school was by now under close surveillance and government spies were suspected of infiltrating the pesantren. Secret police posed as becak drivers outside the front gates, although they were easy to pick, says Rabiah: ‘The real becak drivers were barefoot or wore thongs. The secret police wore army boots.’ Their presence at the mosque in Solo merely inflamed Abdullah Sungkar, who would announce at Friday prayers: ‘All you secret police stationed outside the mosque, don’t stay outside, come in! I’ll give you a few minutes to make your way in. And may Allah guide you to the truth.’ Sungkar’s sermons became ever more inflammatory. Rabiah remembers him fulminating in public: ‘Suharto is going to hell! And anyone who follows him is going straight where he’s going!’

  Rabiah had by now joined the speakers’ circuit herself, accepting invitations to give talks for women in private homes or in the mosques. Her usual topic was Islamic dress, which she advocated passionately. ‘The reason they asked me to speak was because I was a white convert who wore hijab. It was the shock impact—here’s this Western woman who should be wearing a bikini saying, “I want to live under Islam”. I would get better results (than an Indonesian woman) because I was a Westerner and I had chosen it, so that made a greater impression on them.’

  Rabiah was also a vocal advocate of polygamy, an Islamic practice that the Suharto government had moved to restrict.

  ‘As we all know, the government has said, “don’t have two wives”. Well, I’m here to tell you: don’t have two—have three or four!’ Rabiah would urge her audience. For her, the argument for polygamy was black and white: it is part of God’s law, laid down in the Quran, which cannot be altered by humans. At this point, her support for polygamy was largely theoretical, though she would later embrace it in practice as well.

  It was only a matter of time before Rabiah’s displays of bravura brought her to the attention of the authorities. That time came on Indonesia’s national day, 17 August 1984, when patriotic citizens were expected to fly the Indonesian flag as proof of their allegiance to the republic. The flagpole outside the orang bule’s home at Ngruki remained conspicuously bare. The next day there was a knock on her door. It was the local rukun tatanga, the Indonesian equivalent of a neighbourhood-watch man who doubled as a spy for the government. He was carrying a letter from the district commander of the Komkamtib, the Central Command for Security and Stability, instructing Rabiah to present herself at its local headquarters the following morning.

  Rabiah took the letter to show Abu Bakar Ba’asyir.

  ‘You have no choice, you have to go or they’ll drag you’, he said gravely, then walked with her to Abdullah Sungkar’s home to inform him.

  ‘It’s obvious someone has reported her, maybe it’s one of the neighbours’, said Ba’asyir, adding in a hushed voice: ‘Maybe there is an informer’.

  Rabiah recalls that Sungkar was uncommonly quiet. ‘I think I know who informed on her’, he said, as the room fell silent. ‘I think it might have been me.’

  The week before, during his Friday sermon at a public mosque in Solo, Sungkar had berated his congregation for failing to stand up to the regime, and held Rabiah up as an example.

  ‘Don’t you Indonesians know the meaning of shame?’ he had hectored them. ‘We’ve got this orang bule teaching at Ngruki— she’s a convert and she refused to put up the flag on national day.’

  As he recounted the story, Abdullah Sungkar looked sheepish. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with them calling her in.’

  The next morning Rabiah presented herself to the Komkamtib as instructed, carrying two-year-old Rahmah on her hip, and was questioned for several hours. What was she doing in Indonesia? Was she a spy for the Australian secret service? Was she a follower of Abdullah Sungkar? Did she support an Islamic state? Why had she not flown the flag? She was
sent home at nightfall but ordered to return the following day to be questioned again. She played dumb and told them nothing, apparently with the desired effect. At the end of her interrogation, a frustrated commander snapped at his subordinate in Javanese, apparently assuming Rabiah would not understand: ‘Get this woman out of here, she’s an idiot’.

  The simmering showdown between the government and Islamic activists came to a head in September 1984, after the introduction of a new law requiring every organisation in the country to recognise the much maligned state ideology, Pancasila, as its ‘sole ideological basis’. It was a deliberate affront to the Islamic movement. A prayer meeting-cum-rally was organised in the port district of Tanjung Priok in north Jakarta. Rabiah was invited to speak at the event, and travelled to the capital ahead of time. But the day before the rally the organiser who had arranged her attendance was detained by the police, and Rabiah was advised to stay away for her own safety.