Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Furqan said, “When he was young he wore very simple clothes and could still feel confident.”

  I felt that there was a tremulousness about Mariman. He was aware of the clothes he wore, and perhaps they made him nervous. Perhaps they made him worry about pride and the vanity of transient things, and awakened in him, almost in a religious way, some Javanese-Muslim idea about luck and success bringing the greater danger of a fall.

  Furqan said, “Now he feels proud to wear nice clothes, but he doesn’t think that’s all to do.”

  I asked to see Mariman’s CIDES card. It was the standard CIDES namecard (Furqan had one, and Dewi Fortuna Anwar), with the CIDES lettering big in the bottom left-hand corner. Mariman’s name was printed in small underlined letters in the top right-hand corner:

  MARIMAN DARTO

  RESEARCHER

  It was part of the change that had come to him, but he wasn’t letting it go to his head. He wasn’t forgetting his kampung.

  Furqan said, “There is no one like him in his kampung now. But he can talk with them. And many of the people are proud of him, because he is still humble, although he lives in Jakarta. He goes back twice a year. If there is an event in the kampung he will go back. He fulfills all the prayer obligations. He feels that prayers are important, especially when he feels he is very distant from his mother and his father. Because of his religious feeling he is special in his village. Some of his friends have lost confidence as men and have begun to drink in the city. Most of these people are of low education. His religion makes him feel different from his friends.”

  “What does he think will happen in the village?”

  “He has an ambition through education to alter the village and the disparities. Nowadays his kampung is changing because of him, his prestige.”

  In this, as in his education, he was an extension of his father, the buffalo-dealer, who had been the first man in the village to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  I asked, “Are people following him in the religious way?”

  Furqan said, “Many of his friends feel that the key of his success is his education and not his religion.”

  I was struck by the frankness: I felt that Mariman was still his own man.

  Furqan added, “But after education they go back to religion.”

  “Is there a difference between education and religion in his own mind?”

  “There is. But with education he can also show the performance of a religious person.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He can be a better religious person.”

  “So he shares Professor Habibie’s ideas about religion and technology?”

  “He’s read in a magazine that Habibie fasts twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. So Habibie can combine success and religious spirit.”

  “Religious spirit is necessary for success?”

  The answer was roundabout, but perhaps Furqan hadn’t understood the question. “Many people in the village fast two times a week, but when they went to high school they stopped fasting and became bad people. They even gave up Ramadan fasting. So he, Mariman, made an innovation.”

  “Became bad people? In what way?”

  “Working hard in the factories, they feel they are not strong enough to fast.”

  Our talk had become circular. It might have been that the third person, the interpreter, was a constraint; or it might have been that we had really come to the end of what was arresting and original in Mariman’s story.

  “Is he still studying hard?”

  “He is still studying hard.”

  “What would he like to be?”

  “An expert in economy.”

  “He sees Islam as a continuing source of strength to people?”

  “He is sure that Islam can be a source of spirit in the future. So he is trying to make education for people in the kampung. This is the concept he is trying to propagate in the kampung.”

  I said, “A modern kiyai?” A pesantren head.

  He understood the word, and he began to laugh. In English he said, “Thank you, thank you.”

  Later I remembered something I didn’t ask. I telephoned Adi Sasono on his mobile phone, and he, busy as he was, passed on the question.

  “What about the sheep he didn’t sell? He had twenty-two, and he sold two to go to school.”

  Two days later, on a noisy CIDES line, Furqan said, “He gave them to his brother. But he doesn’t want his brother to continue in that way of life.”

  The new wealth was great, and to the government’s credit it had gone down far. A big new middle class had been created, and the new housing developments outside Jakarta for this middle class were so many and so vast, and so sudden, that some country roads seemed for long stretches to be like film sets, with old kampung streets—a general effect of low buildings, pitched corrugated-iron roofs, and fruit trees—kept whole in front of the hard new treeless lines of ocher-colored concrete and glass and red-tile roofs going up at the back. So that two kinds of life seemed to be going on at the same time in the same place, extending the idea that had come to me on the first day, of history here existing in layers, of having speeded up to such an extent in the last fifty years—the Japanese occupation, the war against the Dutch, the events of 1965, and now the immense manifest wealth—that most people, whether in the new developments or the kampung-style road, were only two or three generations away from kampung or agricultural simplicity.

  In anthologies of Indonesian writing I looked at while I was there this nearness to the village came over as an unworked-out feeling of loss. It expressed itself in simple tales. It is possible to create a composite tale. The old peasant gets off the bus in the city; he has a gift perhaps for a relative, once known as a village person, but now a famous general or an important civil servant. The peasant, gaping at the city sights, might be jostled and insulted by people in the street crowd. Various memories play in the peasant’s head as he approaches the presence. The peasant, getting nearer and nearer, is staggered by the trappings of power. The general or the civil servant is welcoming or cold—it depends on the politics or sentimental inclination of the writer: but at the end the peasant knows that the past is finished.

  Sustained great writing, rather than polemic, can only come out of societies that offer true human possibility; and in Indonesia we have, instead, a pastoral people who have lost their history; who have been involved in prodigious, often tragic, events, but are without the means—the education, the language, and above all the freedom—to reflect on them.

  Abstractions: consider this from an editorial in the Indonesia Times. “Materialism is still pervading the Indonesian society. Some of the religious leaders in Indonesia view the emergence of people with low moral character as the result of indiscriminate adoption of Western values.… The best way to cope with increasing materialism and individualism is to intensify built-in control in tandem with instilling moral teachings. The development of religious ethics should be intensified in order to counter materialism.…” And so on, that single idea (rather like Mariman’s) repeated over nine paragraphs.

  Abstractions: the theme of the RI50 celebrations, as given in the Jakarta Post, reporting or summarizing a speech by Emil Salim, executive chairman of the celebrations committee. It begins like the program of a Beethoven symphony. “Under the theme of ‘Expressing Reverence and Gratitude for Independence by Enhancing the Roots of Our Republic’s Populace,’ the planned celebrations fall into three categories.” The first category will include programs to reflect the five tenets of the state ideology: belief in God, national unity, consensus through deliberation, humanism, social justice. To deal with the God tenet, the Indonesian Ulamas Council will be urging Muslims to “perform a bow of thanks following the Friday prayers.” The humanism and social justice tenet (or tenets) will be dealt with in the Indonesian way: with a national seminar on human rights. No seminar for the democratic principles tenet, though: the French business community of Jakarta will deal with t
hat by putting on a laser show. A sailing extravaganza will make a statement about national unity. Then there is social solidarity; that can’t be left out. It isn’t certain where it fits into the—now—almost Buddhist complexity of the five tenets and the three categories; but it will be handled in this way: Emil Salim will be calling on businessmen to “give something back to the community by decreasing their profit margins to benefit the public in a giant sale. And this discount shouldn’t be on used or defect goods either.”

  A simple people involved in great events. And on an occasion like RI50 many words have to be used, but few will have meaning; since the reality, which all understand, needs no words. With religion, the consoler, as recommended in the editorial in the Indonesia Times, adding to the simplicity—as, thirty years before, in a poorer, darker time, communism did.

  I talked to Goenawan Mohamad about the abstractions of language. Goenawan was a universal man of letters, in the Indonesian way, a practitioner of all the forms; but he was best known as an essayist, admired not only for his independent thinking and knowledge and elegant mind, but also for his use of the Indonesian language.

  He was born in 1940 in a small fishing kampung. In 1946 his father was killed in the Dutch war (but Goenawan bore no grudge). His mother, who couldn’t read and write, brought the children up. Such money as she made came from dealing in eggs. She bought the eggs in Central Java and sold them in Jakarta. Goenawan’s orphaned background was like Mariman’s (though for different reasons, and in a much more unsettled time); and, as with Mariman, there would have been more to the family than poverty and struggle. Goenawan’s family was clearly uncommon. Both of Goenawan’s sisters became teachers; a brother became a doctor; and Goenawan worked through, as journalist and writer, to being very much his own man.

  He stayed away from the communists in the 1950s and early 1960s, as he was staying away now from the religious people. This independence would have been more than a political or personality quirk. It would have been related to Goenawan’s quality and self-respect as a writer. Good or valuable writing is more than a technical skill; it depends on a certain moral wholeness in the writer. The writer who lines up with any big public cause like communism or Islam, with its pronounced taboos, has very soon to falsify. The writer who lies is betraying his calling; only the second-rate do that. In a country like Indonesia the true tragedy, the lasting corruption, of the lost post-war generations, communist once upon a time, and now fundamentalist, is that kind of second-rateness.

  Goenawan said, “I don’t think educated Indonesians speak any language which can be used to express and develop their thinking. In Sukarno’s time the language was steered into a totalitarian use, and in Suharto’s time it has been bureaucratized. I wrote poetry in the 1960s, and I discovered that all the language had big abstract connotations—nation, people, revolution, socialism, justice. I was so lonely. When I was sitting in the old gallery I saw birds, sparrows. I had forgotten this thing, the small, transient thing. Everything fits into this. Even some adopted liberal ideas. Like free market. They are dead, not derived from experience, the soil, the street.”

  The surviving local traditions were not strong enough to deal with these borrowed ideas. “People have moved very fast. There is no city life. People have the brain, the fear, the trauma, the attitude of their past. They will go back trying to find a community. That is why religion is important—the number of young people going to the mosque, the church! The old local traditions—not Islamic or Christian—have been eroded.

  “My brother-in-law was getting married into a Javanese family. They wanted a wedding done in the Javanese fashion. But he didn’t know anything about it. So what did he do? He hired a consultant. There are a number of these wedding consultants. They’re making a lot of money now. They remain—the old traditions—like a beautiful memory.

  “My wife has an uncle, half-educated. He spoke Dutch. A military officer in the old days, just after the revolution, in the 1950s. He read English. He read Dutch. But what he presented as his thinking was a confused mumbo jumbo. Like: three or four or five years ago we had this total eclipse of the sun, and people went to see it at Borobudur.” The seventh-century Buddhist pyramid. “Borobudur under a total solar eclipse. And this uncle—I call him my uncle—told me that people went to Borobudur to find a book there which has the secret of life. Can you believe it? There are many like that.

  “This uncle was not exactly prepared. He never did any critical thinking about people. Democracy is not about voting. It is about debate, the quality of intellectual life. The narrowing of the mind is not orchestrated by Habibie or anybody else, but by this new influx of students coming from provincial backgrounds who want some certainty in this confusing time. The regime offers no ideas. So there’s no debate. Ideas fall into their own boxes, and remain there, undeveloped.”

  6

  BELOW THE LAVA

  I WENT TO the old royal city of Yogyakarta in the south of Java to see Linus. Linus was a poet whom I had met in 1979. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight then; and though (as I understood) he hadn’t yet published anything important, people knew about him. The culture and spirit of old Java were said to be his inspirations, and he lived in a village not far from Yogya.

  One of Linus’s older encouragers was Umar Kayam, an academic and writer and a tremendous attender at seminars and conferences; and it was Umar Kayam (not a pen name: Umar had been given the name by his father) who took me one day to Linus’s village. We went to Linus’s house and met Linus’s mother and others; and then for the rest of the morning Linus walked about the village with us and introduced us to people.

  Linus was deferential with Umar, who was about twenty years his senior, and I had the impression that Linus was just about making a start as a poet. It wasn’t absolutely like that. I learned now from people in Jakarta that at the time of that meeting Linus had in typescript a very long narrative poem, “Pariyem’s Confession.” And I was also to learn now, from Linus himself, that Umar, who had been reading the poem as it was written, had been worried about the length. At one stage he had said, “Enough. It’s quite long enough already. It’s getting like an old nineteenth-century Javanese poem.” Like many other writers looking for encouragement, Linus had preferred to follow his own heart and had written on. A year or so after our meeting in his village he had published his poem. It had had a great success; it had sold twenty thousand copies; it was still Linus’s best-known work.

  Now, in an English-language anthology, Menagerie, I read a translation of a section of the poem that would have been on both Linus’s and Umar’s minds as we had walked through the village. The poem—which had a village heroine, and a village setting perhaps like the one we were in—was elegiac about the ways and private calendar of old Java. Even the good and painstaking translation (by Jennifer Lindsay) showed—away from the inevitable erotic passages—how very hard it was for Linus’s elegiac sense, and all the cultural particularities it implied, to be understood outside its setting. Only Javanese words could describe certain Javanese things, and only those words could unlock Javanese sentiments.

  My father was in a ketoprak troupe in Tempel

  he used to come home once a week

  And the gamelan was lively loud, fast

  Playing in a slendro-sanga mode

  A sign that the gara-gara had begun

  And the moon was leaning to the west

  a sign that it would soon be daybreak

  A different climate, a different use of the hours, different associations of music and theater and time and landscape: all this was to be extracted from a description of something as well-known as the Javanese shadow play. There would certainly have been more intricate reaches of sentiment and belief and ritual which were beyond translation, where only Javanese could speak to Javanese. And it was perhaps for a similar reason that in West Sumatra a rice culture as rich and complete and organized as this—and without the need of record—had, after a thousand or two thousand years
, left no trace apart from the taboos and the clan names. Once the old world was lost, its ways of feeling could not be reconstructed.

  In 1979 Java had given me—perhaps too romantically—the feeling that it was of itself alone, still a complete civilization. Linus’s village had contributed to that pastoral idea; and over the years fantasy had elaborated on the details: the rice fields coming up to the houses, the village vegetation where everything had a purpose, the shrines of the rice goddess, Linus’s elegant mother. In my memory she had remained as she had been that morning, returning in her finery from an expedition to the town, a woman of a high civilization, exchanging long courtesies with Umar Kayam, in the old language of the court (as Umar said), talking with her head thrown back, complaining in a well-modulated torrent of speech about Linus’s idleness, refusing to take the business of his poetry seriously, since in her mind (as part of the perfection of her world) all poetry had already been written, and new poetry was an absurdity.

  It was that pastoral morning that I wished to experience again. And then I learned that Linus had recently been in trouble with the Muslims of Yogya. They had objected to something in a column he had written and had wanted his blood. Linus signed his name Linus Suryadi AG, and the AG was not a local decoration, as it appeared to be, but an abbreviation of Agustinus, which was Linus’s way of announcing that he was Roman Catholic. I would have known that about Linus in 1979 but wouldn’t have been able to give it its proper value or understood its context: the competition between the two great revealed religions for the soul of the half-converted, colonized country that had lost touch with its own beliefs, its own wholeness.