The title page of Max Havelaar, published in 1860.
from its strictures in 1862, two years after the book's publication; clove and nutmeg were taken off the list in 1863, tea, cinnamon, cochineal and indigo in 1865, tobacco in 1866. And eventually a wholly new approach to the governance of the colony took root. By the end of the century the East Indies were ruled under the principles of a brand-new and so-called Ethical Policy. The Dutch now started to take sedulous care of their subject peoples. Under the new scheme they employed officials not simply to repress and squeeze profits from the territory, as in the past, but to take charge of public health, to improve education and to offer agricultural help, the better to advance the condition of the people.
This reform – too little, too late, and not enough to still the nationalist mood – was perhaps Eduard Dekker's greatest legacy. But it was not to be in place until the beginning of the twentieth century. At the time of the Krakatoa eruption – and at the time of the events that led to the Banten rebellion – most of the old colonial attitudes and most of the old colonial establishment still held sway. Matters were beginning to change and to improve; but they had not yet fully done so, and the unreformed state of the colony left ample room for those who were determined to agitate against the Dutch and their unrequested mastery to make such mayhem as they could. Among those most eager to lead the agitation, and to make the most mayhem, especially in Banten and the ultra-religious west of Java, were the more conservatively minded Muslims.
One hundred and seventy million Indonesians are currently members, notionally or devotedly, of the Islamic faith. It is the most populous Muslim country in the world, and the greatest of all success stories – if numbers are the best indicator of success – in fourteen centuries of Islamic proselytizing. All of its people are either converts or descendants of converts: it is easy to forget that the world's greatest Muslim populations – in Iran, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia – all belong to a faith that is quintessentially and inescapably Arab. Indonesia was converted by Arabs, and it looks to Arabia and Arabians still for spiritual guidance and direction.
Islam, it should not be forgotten, is at its heart an imperial religion, and Arabism is perhaps the greatest of all contemporary imperial movements – one of the many reasons for its current collision with the West, which of course has its own competing, profit-driven imperial agenda. The collisions between Arab-inspired Islam and its agents, and the money-driven,. trade-driven West and hers, have been many and various: those that occurred in the East Indies in the latter part of the nineteenth century are now, when seen from today's perspective, classics of the kind.
Islam first came to the East Indies in the thirteenth century, and ironically (considering the present schism between East and West, between spirituality and materialism, between God and Mammon) it came with Arab traders who were in search of business there. There is a grave of a sultan in north Sumatra that dates from 1211. There is another, at Gresik in east Java, which sports designs indicating that it was carved by masons from India in 1419. A late-fifteenth-century mosque in Demak, on the north coast of Java about 300 miles east of Batavia, was clearly the result of architectural compromises between Javanese and Arab builders. It had a holiness to it that the local mullahs regarded as both profound and ineffable, and they declared that to visit it seven times – though there is no spiritual explanation for the number – had the spiritual worth of the single haj pilgrimage to Mecca.
In Banten itself Islam became properly established at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a little later than in much of the rest of Java, and considerably later than in north Sumatra. It caught hold immediately, spread with extraordinary speed, and before long became a model to which Arabs and hajis alike could point with pride. Among the Bantenese and their coastal compatriots the Sundanese, the religion achieved a degree of penetration that was almost unrivalled in the archipelago. The west Javanese soon had a reputation for being more assiduous, more spiritual and more fundamentalist than almost any others. It was difficult for a traveller to pass between Batavia and the coast without seeing scores of mosques, and without hearing the five-times-daily cry of the muezzin, calling the willing faithful, here in their millions, to prayer.
Yet, it is important to remember that East Indian Islam was always of a much milder stripe than that practised in the Middle East and Africa. The lingering influence of Hinduism, in particular, led to a significant local dilution of Islam's rigours. Regional superstitions, pockets of animist belief and a whole host of religious oddities washed over the mullahs' teachings – with the result that the Islam that developed in Java, especially, turned out to be highly syncretic, a maze of compromises that drew influences not merely from Mecca but from a patchwork of other beliefs as well.
In spite of this rather off-centre aspect of Javanese Islam, a central feature of life on the island, and in particular of the lives of most Banten Muslims, remained the pilgrimage to Mecca. Although all good Muslims everywhere were required to take part in the haj, figures compiled by the Dutch government suggest that more Bantenese and Sundanese went to perform the obligations of orthodoxy than any other group in Java. And the figures were all the while rising steadily: in 1850 just 1,600 undertook the haj; by 1870 it was 2,600; and in the 1880s an average of 4,600 took off on boats to Arabia.*
The Dutch authorities were understandably wary of the practice, and they could have used the harsher regulations of the Cultivation System – to curb the travel of suspect individuals, for instance – to prevent it. But they soon realized that to forbid a custom of pilgrimage that was centuries old would have been fatally imprudent: all they could do was to try to make sure the pilgrims were persuaded to keep their potentially corrosive sojourn in Arabia as short as possible, and to monitor the behaviour of them all just as soon as they came home.
What bothered the Dutch was that the longer the pilgrims stayed away, the more ‘Arabized' they were on return, the more they held the Dutch infidels in contempt, the more they tended to take part in violent acts against the colonial power. ‘Mecca was nothing but a hotbed of religious fanaticism, wrote Snouck Hurgronje, the leading Dutch scholar on Islamic matters of the time, ‘where people were inculcated with hostile feelings against Christian overlords in their homeland.’
(The history of militant Islam is long and extremely complex, and well beyond the scope of this chapter's account of the political effects of Krakatoa's eruption. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the rise in extreme anti-Western Islamic feeling in some corners of the world – like the Dutch East Indies – came about when it did and as it did because elsewhere in the Muslim world, in the late nineteenth century, Islam was coming under an increasing threat from Western imperialism. In North Africa and the Middle East, for example, European powers – the French and the British most notably – were seizing territory or assuming influence on all sides, to the dismay of the mullahs and the mosque.
The mullahs in Mecca, not unreasonably, saw those pilgrims who were coming from the East – from lands that were already under the unwelcome control of Dutch infidels themselves – as having a use. They could perhaps be messengers, men who could return to their homes to spread the Word, try to reassert Islamic purity and authority, and somehow eventually – as their supreme goal – wrest the archipelago from the menace of the unbelievers' control. The fact that the Krakatoa tragedy took place just when these developments were beginning to unfold is one of those historical coincidences too attractive to ignore.)
It is usually the case with the upsurge of any political or religious movement that one figure, a charismatic leader, or a demagogue, or both, becomes the identifiable personality of the movement. Such was very much the case in west Java, with the steady rise to prominence of a Java-born mystic named Haji Abdul Karim. Abdul Karim, whose teachings played no small role in the Banten rebellion, was from the middle of the 1870s the leader of a powerful local Sufi movement, which he and a corps of acolytes managed f
rom his headquarters in Banten town.
Abdul Karim had started his Islamic education early. He had been to Mecca when he was a mere child; by his teenage years he spoke and read Arabic fluently, he had a scholarly knowledge of Islamic theology. He returned to his birthplace in his late twenties, and, as his mentor back in Mecca suggested, set himself up as a seer and messenger of Allah – a role that endeared him mightily to the Javanese masses. He had been in trouble with the Dutch authorities for violating passport regulations, and so was already regarded as a scourge of the infidels, a thorn in the imperial flank.
By the late 1870s his home had become a place of pilgrimage: tens of thousands of fanatic Bantenese and Sundanese would come each day for a laying-on of hands, or a few words from this remarkable man. He was showered with alms. The Dutch Resident – suspicious no doubt, but well aware of the power of the man – paid an official visit. At first the message that this wali Allah offered to his growing army of followers was simply one of the need for piety, orthodoxy and asceticism.
But as the number of his disciples grew, so his message dramatically changed – though whether it did so at the behest of Mecca or on Abdul Karim's own initiative is not clear. His revised version was considerably more alarmist, and for the ruling Dutch it was deeply ominous. For Abdul Karim began to predict what other devout Islamic seers were busily preaching, much to the worry of authorities in other regions of the world* – that the Mahdi, the messianic figure who would come to save the world from godlessness in its last days, was shortly to appear.
And in this pronouncement appears at last the key, the single link of chain that connects two apparently unconnectable features: on the one hand a volcanic eruption and on the other a movement
A Javanese imam who had performed the same pilgrimage to Mecca as the rebel leader Haji Abdul Karim.
for political change. The prediction made by this charismatic Islamic mystic and ardently accepted by tens of thousands of his followers, that the Mahdi was about to come, turns out to be intimately connected to the eruption of 1883. And it is so connected because the version of Islamic teaching that deals with the Mahdi and his Holy War against the infidel holds that the arrival of the Mahdi is always accompanied by a series of definite signs. There would be diseases of cattle. There would be floods. There would be blood-coloured rain. And volcanoes would erupt, and people would die.
And it so happened that each and every one of these predictions had occurred in Banten in precisely the manner that Haji Abdul Karim had forecast. Cattle were dying on all sides because of an uncontrollable outbreak of murrain, the foulest of all bovine plagues. The west Javan coastal villages from Merak south to Labuan had been devastated by tsunamis. The rain was still tinted brown with the ash that swirled ceaselessly in the skies over Java. The island of Krakatoa had blown herself to pieces. And 36,000 people had died in the tidal waves from the ash flows and the gas flows that had resulted.
What clearer signs could any devout believer possibly demand as an indication that the Day of Judgement was at hand, the Mahdi was on the way and the Holy War against the infidel was about to begin? Small wonder, some might say, that two of the foot-soldiers in the coming war, dressed in martyrs' white, pressed their attack against the unbelievers, just weeks after the eruption was done. The fact that Abdul Karim had himself long since returned to Mecca* to assume a senior post in the Sufi hierarchy there made no difference: his teachings had been heard, his disciplines were in place, and a network of his so-called tarekat, the brotherhood he had established to carry on his work, was functioning like a well-oiled piece of machinery.
One of those who would be bold enough to link the two events, to put Krakatoa at the head of a long chain of happenings that culminated in the 1888 rebellion, was by chance one of the eruption's eyewitnesses. He was called R. A. van Sandick. A technical-school teacher from Deventer in central Holland, he had been hired by the colonial government for his knowledge of hydraulics. He just happened to be aboard the official vessel the Gouverneur-Generaal Loudon when Krakatoa exploded.
He watched with horror as the events unfolded; he plunged promptly into the relief effort, learning as he did so as much as he could about the social conditions of west Java, and how they had been changed by the tragedy. In 1892 he wrote a short, seven-chaptered book, Leed en Lief in Banten (Sorrow and Love in Banten), which was the first to offer details of Abdul Karim's predictions. The following translation may be a little shaky, but the message in the relevant chapter is abundantly clear:
The mullahs and teachers of religion in the pesantren,* who were stirring up the people in Banten, took the opportunity given by the enormous and deep-felt impression left by the Krakatoa eruption, to expand their influence. Was it not, they said, the revenge of Allah, not only against the unbelieving dogs, but also against those Bantenese people who were serving these kafirs, these infidels? There was no doubt: the disaster of Krakatoa was a sign of God, the great omen of which the holy Abdul Karim had spoken. Had he not predicted heavy earthquakes, and the end of the world? And see, the sun was darkened for hours, and now after the eruption the sun shone as a red or sometimes as a grey or blue ball on a grey firmament. Was this not strange, these nameless colours shining these days at twilight?
Did not God create the tidal waves that rose 30 metres above normal sea-level? And did he not speak in a thunder, as a result of which the whole of Banten shook in deepest darkness? And, ask the fishermen of the Sunda Strait – has not the bottom of the sea been raised by a God? Has not three-quarters of the island of Krakatoa disappeared? Are you blind to all these deeds brought about by God? Be humble for the Almighty! Pay for your sins! Can you still doubt, said the mullahs, now that you know that Abdul Karim has predicted all this?
A somewhat more sinister development was the discovery that autumn of a number of documents and letters, written in Arabic, which were circulating in the towns of Banten. The Dutch Colonial Police who managed to intercept specimens said immediately that they were attempts by foreigners to foment trouble in the wake of the eruption. And though most of the letters in fact seem to deal with the immense social problems caused not by Krakatoa but by the cattle-plague, suggesting it had been the work of a wrathful Allah demonstrating his displeasure with the Dutch infidels and their local stooges, the letters' interest today turns more on their origin than on their content.
Most of the letters appear to have come, via messengers, from Arabia itself. And though the entire peninsula was then under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, it was still the fountainhead of Islamic orthodoxy. Fundamentalism prevailed most especially on that particularly devout desert southern tract of the peninsula known as the Hadhramaut, now part of the eastern side of Yemen.
The fact that nineteenth-century Java was being whipped into a fury in part by Yemeni fundamentalists – acting directly (it is said, though not proven, that Arab mullahs were in Banten soon after the eruption), or indirectly (the letters and distributed propaganda documents), or through their proxies (of whom Abdul Karim was the most prominent of scores of Arab-educated hajis) – is oddly mimicked by similar events that appear to be taking place around the world today. The spiritual vigour behind today's Islamic militancy comes in large measure from the mosques of the Hadhramaut; and there are figures abroad today, Saudis and Yemenis both, who are every bit as defiantly anti-Western as was the East Indies' Haji Abdul Karim more than a century ago. The historical parallels are intriguing, and with implications that will keep scholars busy, no doubt, for many years.
The first two strikes on the soldiery of the Serang garrison turned out to be part of what would become a much larger plot. The planning was meticulous and took years – though the first suggestions of rebellion were made just after the eruption in 1883, the outbreak itself did not occur until five years later, July 1888.
In all cases the leaders and instigators were hajis – the rebellion was Islamic-inspired, Islamic-led. Teams of forty were selected. Oaths were demanded and offered, with all
the participants solemnly agreeing, in writing, to perform the killing. Fighters were chosen, schooled in the techniques of pentjak – an East Indies version of fencing – and heavily armed with newly made swords and lances and the viciously sharp curved daggers called goloks, all of them made by sympathetic metal-workers in Batavia. White robes and white rag-turbans were made and collected for the warriors. Lists of targets – all of them European, all of them kafirs – were selected. Rumours were circulated that a Holy War was at hand, creating frightened apprehension among the Europeans, a mood of eager anticipation among the natives in their kampongs. Come the morning of Monday, 9 July 1888, and the stage was properly and fully set.
The first attack was made at a village called Sanedja, which today is a suburb of the industrial town of Cilegon.* Long before dawn teams of partisans cut the telegraph wires, blocked the escape roads, then at first light swarmed into the compounds of the various Europeans – the Assistant Resident, the salt-sales manager, the collector, the junior controller – and hacked them and their families down wherever they were found. There was nothing pretty about the assault, and little that was noble: the first family to fall victim was that of a clerk named Dumas: while he managed at first to escape through a window, his amah – whom the assailants mistook for his wife – was attacked with lances. The Dumas baby was sliced to pieces in her arms, and when the servant was later found she was alive but terribly lacerated, still cradling the dead infant. Dumas himself was later discovered sheltering with a Chinese: he was dragged outside and shot.
The prison was attacked and broken open, the inmates freed. The Assistant Resident, a man named Johan Hendrik Gubbels, was chased from one end of town to the other: his young daughter Elly was stoned to death, her head crushed with a boulder. Her sister Dora was hacked down and killed by men who, as the morning wore on, were increasingly frenzied, seemingly enjoying what was fast becoming an orgy of bloodletting. Gubbels himself was eventually found and stabbed to death. His body was dragged out into the open air for the rebels to see – and they howled their approval.
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