Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Just outside the office wall, the bright light yellowed, turning the dust and smoke into gold: the hot afternoon on the turn, moving now towards dusk, the traffic as hectic as ever, full of event but (like a fountain seen from a distance) constant. Against this, but from within the office, no doubt from the carpeted and rumpled open space at the end of the corridor, hesitant scraping sounds developed into a shy chant.

  Imaduddin heard: it showed in his eyes. But, with the same kind of courtesy that had made him tell us earlier that it was not necessary to take off our shoes in the corridor, he appeared not to notice. He didn’t interrupt his story.

  After four years at Iowa he finished his course in industrial engineering. He received a letter from some friends in Indonesia advising him not to come back just then. He showed the letter to the American immigration people—he had to leave the country as soon as he had graduated—and they gave him an extension. He also showed the letter to his professor. The professor knew that Imaduddin’s Saudi grant had stopped with his graduation, and he offered Imaduddin a teaching job. Imaduddin taught at Iowa for two years.

  I said, “People have shown you a lot of kindness.”

  I was trying to make a point about people in Iowa, unbelievers. I believe Imaduddin understood. He said with a mischievous smile, “God loves me very much.”

  The chanting from the corridor became more confident. It couldn’t be denied now. I could see that Imaduddin wanted to be out there, with the chanters and the prayers. For a while longer, though, he stayed where he was and continued with his story.

  In 1986 an Indonesian friend, well placed, in fact a minister in the cabinet, made a plea to the Indonesian government on Imaduddin’s behalf. He gave a personal guarantee that Imaduddin would do no harm to the state. It was because of this that, after six years of exile, Imaduddin was allowed to go back home. He went to Bandung. He thought he still had his lecturing job at the Institute of Technology, but when he reported to the dean the dean told him he was dismissed. So—though Imaduddin didn’t make the point—it was just as well that he had turned away from electrical engineering.

  The chanting now filled the corridor. It was authoritative. It recalled Imaduddin from his narrative of times past. And now he couldn’t be held back. He rose with suddenness from his office chair, said in a businesslike way that he would be with us again in a few minutes, and went out towards the chanting.

  The room felt bereft. Without the man himself—his curious simplicity and openness, his love of speech, his humor—all his missionary paraphernalia felt oppressive: something being made out of nothing. It was only someone like Imaduddin who could give point and life to the electric blue Egyptian paperbacks on the glass-topped desk.

  When he came back he had lost his restlessness. The prayers, the assuaging of habit, had set him up for the happiest part of his story. This was the part that dealt with the success—still with him—that had come after nearly a decade of jail and exile and being on the run.

  The success had followed on his coming to Jakarta, the capital, after the humiliation of Bandung. In Jakarta he was closer than he had been to the sources of power. For the first time he could act on the principles of Javanese statecraft he had heard about from Dr. Subandrio eight to nine years before in the jail. They were simple but vital principles: knowing your place in the society and your relationship to authority; knowing what could or couldn’t be said; understanding the art of reverence.

  He said, “From 1987 I started to be active in Jakarta life. I learned very fast.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “The geopolitics of Indonesia. The rules of the game Suharto is playing.”

  Still, for all his new tact, he had a nasty stumble. It happened in his second year in Jakarta. He was working in a tentative way on his human resources idea.

  “I started collecting some friends to start a new organization to be called Muslim Intellectuals Association—or something. We met at a small hotel in Yogyakarta. This was in January 1989. Four policemen came and dismissed the meeting. My name was still considered dirty. Suharto was still under the influence of the intelligence people.”

  The intelligence people, he was to tell me later, were under the influence of the Catholics, and they were nervous of the Muslim movement. The incident showed him that though the society was completely controlled, it wasn’t always easy to read. It would be full of ambushes like this. He saw that it was wrong for him to think—as his Sumatran upbringing and American training encouraged him to think—that he could act on his own. He needed a patron.

  “I learned more about the political situation. I read about Professor Habibie. I read cover stories in two magazines. I tried to learn more about him. I asked my friend”—perhaps the minister who had made it possible for Imaduddin to come back to Indonesia—“to introduce us. I was accepted by Habibie in 1990.”

  “What actually happened?”

  “I sent a letter by a student to Professor Habibie. Then I went to his office, accompanied by the students, three of whom I had made my ‘pilots.’ I met him on the twenty-third of August, 1990.”

  A full year, that is, after the police had broken up the meeting of intellectuals in the Yogyakarta hotel. Habibie agreed to be the chairman of the new body.

  “Why did you choose Habibie?”

  “Because he is very close to Suharto, and nothing can be done in this country without the approval of the first man. Habibie told me that I had to write a proposal, and that this had to be supported by at least twenty signatures of Ph.D.s all over the country. So I came back and for a fortnight went to work on the computer. I got forty-nine people to sign the letter. They were mostly university people. Habibie showed this letter to Suharto on the second of September 1990, and Suharto gave his approval immediately. He said to Habibie, “This is the first time the Muslim intellectuals have united. I want you to lead these intellectuals to build this country.’ Of course this letter will become a national document.”

  At this point Imaduddin’s career took off. “After coming back from the meeting with Suharto, Habibie established a committee to prepare a conference. The Association of Muslim Intellectuals was established by the beginning of December 1990. Suharto committed himself to opening the conference.” And there was a further sign of presidential forgiveness. “When Suharto through Habibie wanted to find a name for the paper for ICME, Habibie asked me to find a name. I gave him three choices: Res Publica, Republik, Republika. Suharto chose Republika. After that I began to gain my freedom. I can talk anywhere I like. When I came back in 1986 I wasn’t allowed to give any public lectures. So things have changed completely in Indonesia. Of course there has been opposition. Non-Islamic, Catholics.”

  “Why did Suharto change his mind?”

  “I don’t know. A puzzle to me. Maybe God changed his mind. In 1991 he went on hajj to Mecca—the pilgrimage. His name now is Hajji Mohammed Suharto. Before that he had no first name. He was just Suharto.” And Imaduddin became a busy man. “Since 1991 I have been assigned by Habibie. He called me one day and said, ‘I would like you to do just one thing. Train these people. Make them become devout Muslims.’ ”

  “So you’ve given up engineering?”

  “Completely. Since 1991 I have been every year to European countries, United States, Australia, just to meet these students, especially those getting scholarships from Habibie. I train them to become good Muslims, good Indonesians. Next week, as I told you, I go to visit Canada and the United States. I will be there for two months. I will visit twelve campuses.”

  It was possible to see the political—or “geopolitical”—purpose of his work. The students were already dependent on Habibie and the government. Imaduddin’s mental training, taken to the students at their universities, would bind them even closer.

  He said of the students abroad, “When they become devout Muslims and good leaders of Indonesia they will not think about revolution but about accelerated evolution.” It sounded like a slogan, some
thing worked over, words, to be projected as part of the program: development, but with minds somehow tethered. “We have to overcome our backwardness and become one of the new industrial countries by 2020.”

  So, starting from the point that in Indonesia there was something more important than technology, we had zigzagged back—through the human resources idea, which was the religious idea—to the need for technological advance. A special kind of advance, with the mind religiously controlled.

  This zigzag had followed the line of Imaduddin’s own career, from his troubles at Bandung to his importance in the Habibie program. And in his mind there would have been no disjointedness. The most important thing in the world was the faith, and his first duty was to serve it. In 1979 he had had to express his opposition to the government. It was different now. The government served the faith; he could serve the government. The faith was large; he could fit it to the government’s needs. He had not moved to the government; rather, the government had moved towards him.

  “I felt in 1979 that the religion was under threat. The intelligence group at that time was under the influence of the Catholics, who were afraid of Islamic development here. They have what is called in psychology projection. They think that because they are a minority they will be treated like they treated the Muslims in other countries. Now I have my friends in the cabinet. It’s God’s will.”

  The Javanese way of reverence was now easy for him. He said of Habibie, his patron, “He’s a genius. He got summa cum laude in both master’s and doctorate in Germany, in Aachen. His second and third degrees were in aeronautical engineering. He’s an honest person. He’s never missed a prayer. Five times a day, and he also fasts twice a week, Monday and Thursday. Habibie’s son is smarter than his father. He went to Munich.” And Imaduddin had also arrived at an awed understanding of President Suharto’s position as father of the nation. When Habibie had shown the president Imaduddin’s first letter about the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, the president, running his eye down the forty-nine signatures, had stopped at Imaduddin’s name and said in a matter-of-fact way, “He’s been in prison.” Habibie reported this to Imaduddin, and Imaduddin was wonderstruck.

  He said to me, “One name. When you think of the hundreds of thousands who have been to jail here …” He left the sentence unfinished.

  And now he had a stupendous vision of the future of the faith here.

  “I believe what the late Fazel-ur-Rehman told me. He passed away in 1980. He was one of the members of the National Islamic Academy in Pakistan. He was Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago. I invited him to Iowa to give a lecture.” Interesting, this glimpse of the protected goings and comings of Islamic missionaries in the alien land. “I met him at the airport. He hugged me and said, ‘I have read many of your articles and books and I am happy to meet you today. You are Indonesian. I strongly believe that the Malay-speaking Muslims will lead the revival of Islam in the twenty-first century.’ I picked up his bag and escorted him to the car and asked him why he believed that. He said, ‘I am serious. You will lead the revival. There are three reasons. First, the Malay-speaking Muslims have become the majority of the Muslim world, and you are the only Muslim people to remain united. We Pakistanis failed to do that. The Arabic world is divided into fifteen states. You have only Sunnis, no Shias. Second, you have a Muslim organization, Muhamadiyah, with the slogan, Koran and Sunna.’ Because Fazel-ur-Rehman strongly believed that only the Koran can answer modern questions. ‘Third, the position of women in Indonesia is just as at the time of the Prophet, according to the true teaching of Islam.’ ”

  I asked Imaduddin, “What are the modern questions that the Koran can solve?”

  “Human relations. Sense of equality. Freedom from want, freedom from fear. These are the two things people need, and this is the basic mission of the Prophet Mohammed.”

  He had told me in 1979 that he could not be a socialist when he was young because he was “already” a Muslim. It could have been said then that devoutness did not provide the institutions. But this could not be said now that the faith alone did not bring about freedom from want and fear, because the faith Imaduddin propounded was anchored to Habibie’s technological program, whose glory was expressed in the flight of the N-250.

  “Science is something inherent in Islamic teaching. If we are backward it’s because we were colonized by the Spanish, the British, the Dutch. Why were men created by God? To make the world prosperous. In order to make the world prosperous we have to master science. The first revelation revealed to the Prophet was ‘Read.’ ”

  It seemed part of what had gone before. But when I got to know a little more of the politics of Indonesia I was to see that this was where Imaduddin was taking the war to the enemy, and making an immense power play on behalf of the government.

  In Indonesia we were almost at the limit of the Islamic world. For a thousand years or so until 1400 this had been a cultural and religious part of Greater India: animist, Buddhist, Hindu. Islam had come here not long before Europe. It had not been the towering force it had been in other converted places. For the last two hundred years, in a colonial world, Islam had even been on the defensive, the religion of a subject people. It had not completely possessed the souls of people. It was still a missionary religion. It had been kept alive informally in colonial times, in simple village boarding schools, descended perhaps as an idea from Buddhist monasteries.

  To possess or control these schools was to possess power. And I began to feel that Imaduddin and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals—with their stress on science and technology, and their dismissing of old ritual ways—aimed at nothing less. The ambition was stupendous: to complete the Islamic takeover of this part of the world, and to take the islands to their destiny as the leader of Islamic revival in the twenty-first century.

  Imaduddin said, “Formerly they used to read the Koran without understanding the meaning. They were interested only in the correct pronunciation and a certain enchanted melody. We are changing this now. Now I’ve been given a chance to give lectures through TV.”

  Later we went out, past the now empty open space with the rumpled rugs. Imaduddin’s wife was there, waiting for him: a gracious and smiling Javanese beauty. It was something in Imaduddin’s favor that he had won the love of such a lady. It was she who had packed the jail bag for him seventeen years before, and she reminded me that I had come to their house in Bandung on the last day of 1979.

  I went to the bathroom. Ritual ablutions from a little concrete pool had left the place a mess, except for people who would take off their shoes and roll up their trousers.

  When I came back there was a tall middle-aged man in a gray suit standing with Imaduddin’s wife. As soon as this man saw Imaduddin he went to him and made as if to kiss his right hand. Imaduddin made a deflecting gesture.

  The man in the gray suit was in the Indonesian diplomatic service. He had met Imaduddin when Imaduddin had come to Germany to do his mental training courses for students. He looked at Imaduddin with smiling eyes, and said to me in English, “He is himself. He fears only God.”

  And I knew what he meant. And for a while we stood there, all smiling: Imaduddin, his wife, and the man in the gray suit.

  Imaduddin told me later that it was the custom of traditional Muslims to kiss the hand of a teacher. The diplomat looked upon Imaduddin as his teacher. Whenever he met Imaduddin he tried to kiss his hand. “But I never let him.”

  2

  HISTORY

  THE MAN whom Imaduddin and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals had in their sights more than anybody else was Mr. Wahid.

  Mr. Wahid didn’t care for Habibie’s ideas about religion and politics, and he was one of the few men in Indonesia who could say so. He was chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the NU. The NU was a body based on the Islamic village boarding schools of Indonesia, and it was said to have thirty million members. Thirty million people resisting mental training and the Association of Mu
slim Intellectuals: this made Mr. Wahid formidable. And Mr. Wahid was no ordinary man. He had a pedigree. In Indonesia, and especially in Java, this mattered. His family had been connected with the village boarding schools of Java for more than a century, since the dark colonial days, when Java had been reduced by the Dutch to a plantation, and these Islamic boarding schools were one of the few places to offer privacy and self-respect to people. And Mr. Wahid’s father had been important in political and religious matters at the time of independence.

  The Jakarta Post, choosing its words with care, said in one report that Mr. Wahid was controversial and enigmatic. There was a story behind the words. Imaduddin believed that it might have been God, no less, who had made President Suharto more of a believing Muslim in these past few years, had sent him on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and had made him a supporter of the technological-political-religious ideas of Habibie. Mr. Wahid had other ideas about that. He believed that politics and religion should be kept separate, and one day he had allowed himself to do the unthinkable: he had criticized President Suharto to a foreign journalist. Only someone as strong and independent as Mr. Wahid could have survived. He had, remarkably, been re-elected chairman of the NU. But in the eight months since then he had not once been received by President Suharto, and it was now known that Mr. Wahid was in the line of fire.

  It was no doubt this scent of blood that made people say I should try to see Mr. Wahid. One note from a foreign journalist described him as “a blind old cleric with a following of thirty million.” This gave Mr. Wahid a comic-book character and confused him with somebody else in another country. Mr. Wahid’s eyes were not good, but he wasn’t blind; he was only about fifty-two or fifty-three; and he wasn’t a cleric.