Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was not long before the partner introduced Budi to the religious teacher.

  “The first time I met him he was in a very simple house which was also a mosque. It was his own house, in Bandung. My partner took me. He was going a week later to Mecca, and so we asked the teacher for his blessing and advice for my partner on the pilgrimage. The first time I saw him I don’t believe him. He is very young. Then, after I discovered how deep his knowledge is, I never underestimate young people any more. He spoke to about ten people in his house. They sat on the carpet. A simple carpet. He said the secret of life is: Let God decide what’s good for you. He didn’t mean that we should give up, but that whatever we did we should do to the very best. You have to assist your destiny, but you can’t go beyond it.

  “The first meeting lasted one hour. I thought he was very interesting, but I wasn’t converted yet. Several months later my partner offered me a proposal to invest several thousand rupiah to build a mosque that would be coordinated by the teacher. My partner said that everyone should pay for two square meters. I hadn’t seen the teacher since our first meeting. My partner invited me to the opening of the mosque while it was still under construction. I met the teacher again. I saw how the simple house had been converted into a beautiful mosque.

  “Altogether I met him about thirty times. I don’t learn the details of the religion from him. I needed someone to do other things: how to balance between living in the world and the afterlife, only very heavy things. People appeared to think that he had a supernatural power, but I don’t believe that. I saw the evidence—the little house becoming the big mosque—but I don’t believe it. I believed more in his teaching: Let God decide what’s good for you.”

  The teacher had been seven times to Mecca. He had never paid. Someone always paid for him. And something like that happened to Budi, after the teacher said he should go to Mecca. He didn’t have the money, but when he told his partner the partner paid.

  On Saturday we went to Bandung to see the teacher. We went there by a CN-235, which was an earlier and smaller plane built (with Spanish collaboration) by Habibie’s aerospace organization. In the first-class waiting room at the domestic airport the chairs were carved and gilded; I imagined they were like the chairs Widarti Goenawan said Femina didn’t like.

  It was a short hop to Bandung, but the little CN-235 was very late. The day which had appeared so long, so full of promise, began to shrink. Nerves began to go. And then the plane itself, which was really very small, was very warm while we waited on the asphalt; the paneling was like rough carpenter’s work; and it was so noisy and trembly when we took off that I wondered why, since many of its vital components would have been imported, such a plane had been made at all.

  Budi said, “I am proud that it flies. Don’t ask me about its economic viability and so on.”

  And Bandung came up so quickly now that at the end, after all the strain, I felt something like that too.

  Budi had said that his partner was working at Bandung that Saturday and would meet us at the airport. He wasn’t there. We saw him later, quite by chance, in a new four-wheel-drive packed with his family. This was on one of the now crowded avenues of the Dutch-built hill station, where colonial-style administrative buildings and small residences were being altered and extended for commercial use, and where shade trees had grown old, scant-leaved, with swollen trunks (whitewashed at the base) making pavements uneven.

  The partner stopped readily for us, but he was unabashed. He said simply he had forgotten to meet us. The moment passed; Budi appeared not to have noticed; but I felt that in his too-quick friendliness for me, a visitor, possibly without credentials, he had overreached himself, asking his partner, an important man, to meet us at the airport. The partner was friendly but un-noticing with me. He was short and stocky and blunt-featured; he would have passed in an Indonesian crowd. He was a year or two younger than Budi, and Budi said he was already worth thirty million dollars. His family in the four-wheel-drive were elegant, with a maid for the children; his wife was pale, with sharper features, and an almost Indian beauty.

  We began to drive up and up, to where the teacher was, on the edge of the town. We passed the old landscaped grounds of the Institute of Technology, still Dutch-looking: built in 1918, famous as Sukarno’s old school in the 1920s, and ever since then the focus of so much Indonesian ambition. The Salman Mosque on the campus was where Imaduddin had reigned as preacher in the 1970s; it couldn’t be missed. Partly because of Imaduddin it had outgrown the colonial Dutch intention; and, as if in deliberate contrast with the colonial restraint of the setting, it was now a big concrete building in very bright colors. On one shady road we passed a brisk line of matriculates in white clothes, and with a kind of comic hat. Budi, whose dream at one time had been to be a matriculate like that, didn’t know the origin of the clothes; and perhaps they might have been a transplanted Dutch tradition.

  As we drove away from the institute and the Dutch town, Budi added to what he had said about the teacher. The supernatural power that some had attributed to him had blessed him with further great success. He had a supermarket now; a car-hire business; a garment factory; a bank, a computer-rental service. These things attached themselves to him, grew around him. He remained as he had started: a teacher. A foundation set up by disciples looked after the business side. All this had been achieved in three years. It was the success in which others—and Budi now as well—saw the divine hand.

  When we arrived there was a further surprise, a further adjustment: the words used by Budi for the business ventures of the teacher or his foundation were too grand. We were now far from the colonial town, in a simple country village, with informal houses and yards and gardens on both sides of a narrow asphalted lane. And the computer-rental service was a little stall; the supermarket was a kind of country shop; and the big mosque (atop the shop) was not very big. All the buildings of the commune were modest. They were, in fact, in spite of all the new concrete and paint and clay roof tiles, the higgledy-piggledy buildings of a kampung, spontaneously assembled here into a pesantren, a religious boarding school; though here the pupils were also disciples of the teacher, and dedicated to his service.

  The pesantren had the village road cleaned every day; and though there might be unavoidable drifts of dust against the broken edges of the lump-laid asphalt on the road, every fifty yards or so there was a pole fixed with a colored plastic bucket for rubbish, so that there might be no rubbish on the road. The buckets were rather small. But, just as the old-fashioned beggar’s matches were not meant to be actually sold, so I felt the colored small buckets were more like a heraldic device, an emblem of service and piety, and not meant to be stuffed with real refuse or anything very dirty.

  The teacher’s house—his current house, not the original house, which had been rebuilt as a mosque and shop—was in a short lane off the main village road. The lane, between two of the houses of the commune, led to a courtyard. The teacher’s house was on one side of this courtyard. It was of one story, raised a few feet off the ground, and the walls—which would have been of concrete, Budi said—were decorated with woven-bamboo panels in a striking dark brown and beige diamond pattern.

  Just as we got to the courtyard the teacher came out to the verandah of his house. And he made an impression: he was leading a plump, blind boy in a long blue tunic. He was very small, perhaps not taller than the boy, and a good deal thinner. There were farewells; the blind boy was handed over to someone else and led down the two steps to the courtyard. One audience was over.

  We took off our shoes and went up to the verandah. In Jakarta Budi had told me that the teacher was “skinny.” But that didn’t suggest the overall fineness of the small man: the pared-down face, the thin moustache, the wispy beard, the small lively eyes, which were now assessing us. He had an unexpectedly full, well-defined mouth, with the merest tuft of hair below the center of the lower lip. His skin was a smooth clear brown, and he was dressed in white or off-white, in a
kind of Arab dress which he had established as his religious costume and which Budi had told me about: a turban of some quilted material, with a long tail, and a long tunic over a dark-blue sarong. In spite of his dress, and vocation, and the blind boy, it wasn’t a solemn house. It was a family house, as we could hear and partly see, with playful children, and busy women happy to be connected with the teacher.

  He sat down with us on the green nylon carpet, which was hairy, not fixed to the floor, and not flat. The verandah rail—bamboo uprights between timber crosspieces—was very low; the teacher could lean on it. As he did now, in an abrupt moment of abstraction: leaning on the rail and looking away from us and down at the little pool just below, with running water and a rockery of nicely cut lava blocks—an unexpected touch of elegance in the courtyard.

  Helpers in white caps, young men, pesantren students, were beginning to unroll cheap machine-made rugs—various colors, floral patterns—on the concrete courtyard for the afternoon sermon. No doubt it was from this verandah, as from a pulpit or a ruler’s dais, that the teacher spoke. Budi had told me that the teacher’s sermons drew crowds of a thousand; now, with his own growing excitement (prayer time was getting near, and Budi offered all the five prayers), he said two thousand. Everybody couldn’t fit here, but for the overflow crowd, in the road, and even in some of the neighboring houses, there was closed-circuit television.

  Budi said, “He’s high-tech.”

  But the teacher didn’t want Budi to interpret. He wanted to talk to me on his own, and in English; and that made things difficult, especially as he wasn’t sure what I had come for. I wanted to hear about the beginning of his ministry or vocation. I don’t believe he understood that. He wanted to stay in the present, to talk about the commune that had grown up around him, and the various gifts of his disciples, part of the favor of God—and I felt that the pond and rockery below the verandah at which he looked from time to time, so finely made, so separate from the setting, might have been one of those special gifts.

  When I pressed him about the first preaching, he talked generalities. “Many people don’t have nice life. They have money but no happiness. Their soul is floating.” When the language let him down he tried to make up for that with an intensity of voice and expression and gesture, bunching up his thin fingers. Once or twice I had a sight, quite affecting, of his small bare feet below his sarong.

  I thought I should try a smaller question. I asked about his father. He said his father was a soldier; he left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel; all his service had been in Java. “I thought of joining the army. Macho. Like my friends.” He laughed. “Now I am in the army of Allah. My friends are in the green beret of the army. Now I am in the white beret or turban of Allah.”

  I tried again. Budi had told me that the teacher had been an ITB dropout, and before seeing the light had lived a “naughty” life. So now I asked the teacher about his education, and found that Budi had got it wrong. He had tried to create the teacher too much in his own image. The teacher wasn’t a dropout at all; he thought of himself as versatile and successful. He had studied many subjects, administration, electronics, and he had taken a degree in electronic engineering at ITB.

  “God gave me success in most of the things I did. Writing. As a speech-maker. I was elected commander of the student battalion. But after all the successes I felt empty. I was twenty-four or twenty-five. I tried to find what is the most important thing in life.”

  I wanted to hear about that.

  “I was the eldest of four children. The third child of the family died from multiple sclerosis. I carried him on my back to school. But in spite of his pain he was always happy. Happier than the doctors, happier than us. Something is important in him. What is the secret?”

  There was a new visitor, a big young woman in an off-white Muslim headcover and a long black gown. She was round-faced, without make-up, with something like old pain at the back of the smiling eyes. This was Hani. She worked in IPTN, Habibie’s aircraft organization, and was famous for being the only woman worker there in full Muslim clothes. The teacher welcomed her and introduced her, explaining that in Islam she was not allowed to touch men.

  She squatted before us on her knees and heels, her thighs spreading wide below her gown. She said she had worked in France for eight years. She had studied in Poitiers.

  Budi said, “She’s a high-tech lady.”

  She said, modestly, that she was working on only a “little part” of the airplane for Habibie. But when she came here, to the pesantren, she did what she could to meet the needs of the people. What did she actually do? She said she made garments for Muslims. It was a way of saying she made clothes; she was finding pious words for something quite simple.

  From the inner room of the teacher’s house women helpers brought out plates of bright yellow cakes and some sort of red liquid in china cups. The cups sat unsteadily on the hairy, rumpled carpet.

  Hani said she came back to Indonesia because she had a contract with IPTN. She had had a scholarship from Habibie. Fifty people were sent every year, and the scholarships were mainly in the aeronautical business.

  I asked the teacher to finish the story about his brother.

  “He died and said, ‘We cannot work together in the world, but we will work together in the afterlife.’ ”

  Hani, squatting in her way, smiling, her gown spreading about her, looking quite big and upright beside the teacher, said of him, “When I came back from France and went to work at IPTN, and heard him for the first time, I began to cry.”

  “Do you remember what he said?”

  “He said our work here was temporary. If we worked hard we would have a good afterlife. He gave me the courage to wake up and work harder. He never says the same thing twice. God works in his mouth.”

  And at last—prayer time now, Budi gone, chanting coming from somewhere, a sound system for the afternoon sermon squawking and booming as it was being set up, a green-veiled woman or girl sweeping the porch of the house on the other side of the courtyard, thin pesantren cats walking about, slack bellies swinging—at last, as if led on to it by Hani’s words, the teacher told me about the first preaching. He spoke in a mixture of English and Indonesian; Hani translated the Indonesian.

  It was when he was twenty-five; it would have been after the death of his brother. It was in his father’s house. He simply began to talk to people. At the first preaching there were ten. Then he left his father’s house (he didn’t say where it was) and came here and rented a room in a house which had now become the pesantren mosque. When he had forty people listening to him he began to worry. He thought: Why are those people listening to me? He lost some friends. For three years it was difficult for him—though he didn’t say how. All his friends left him, except for one. He didn’t mind.

  “I know Allah watch me all the time. I know Allah listens to me. So I cannot lie. It is enough for me. I just liked to talk about good things. And some people said it is nice, very beautiful. I didn’t feel it was beautiful. It is very difficult for me to talk about these things. I just opened my heart. I talk from my heart, not the brain.”

  This no doubt was what Hani meant when she said God worked in his mouth.

  I felt that, if I had the time, and if I could get the teacher to answer a lot of small questions, there might have been more to learn about his mission; but not much more, and nothing that would alter what had been said. This was as far as one could go without the language, and without faith, and the needs of faith.

  I asked about the blind boy.

  “I give the blind boy a place to stay here with other students. But now he is working for a government hospital. He stayed here for about three years.” What did he do? “There is an orphanage here. Only four of the children here are my own. I take care of the orphans here.” How many? “About six or ten.”

  Strange imprecision; but it might only have been a trick of speech. We had heard the children in the house; and now some of them, one or
two with white caps, boys, not girls, were rolling about in the courtyard on the rugs where in a short while the faithful were to sit.

  Budi had come back; it was time to leave. The watchfulness had gone out of the teacher’s eyes; our meeting had gone well. He went down to the courtyard and the lane with us. He was happy to pose for photographs: long turban tail hanging down, a pen clipped to the pocket of his tunic, his delicate feet showing below his sarong. He called to the children (white caps for the boys, white headdress for the girls), their nurse (in a saffron sarong and black headdress), Hani: he wanted them to pose too. At the end everyone was laughing.

  As we left we saw, two or three houses up the road, food being ferried in from a car by white-capped pesantren students. The food would have been a gift from a follower, like so much else we had seen: like the green carpet in the verandah, the china cups for the red drink (and perhaps the drink itself), the woven-bamboo panels on the house wall, the pool and rockery in the courtyard: everyone giving according to his means. It was as Budi had said: the faith of his followers had caused the pesantren and all its enterprises to grow. And since his success proved his divine favor, his success, and the number of his followers, grew.

  He didn’t offer simple faith. He would have offered versions of the “very heavy things” he had offered Budi: guidance spiritual and worldly (“Let God decide what’s best for you”), together with the path to absolution. He offered solidity and reassurance to everyone according to his need; and the needs of the important were great. At least one relation of Habibie’s was a follower, Budi said. He even suggested that the great Habibie himself was in touch with the teacher. But Budi, as I had grown to understand, liked to feel that he was in the thick of things now; and this might have been one of his over-excited stories.