Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  The whole matter, of the teacher’s pesantren and the teacher’s mission, had been taken out of the teacher’s hands. He remained only the teacher, as he was now, standing and smiling among the children, saying good-bye.

  We took the train back to Jakarta. The Dutch-built railway station was well kept—Java was not like India—though a Dunkin’ Donuts stall, in its international livery, was like an oddity. In the executive class coach, which was air-conditioned, there was a noticeable taint of spicy food on everything. An attendant turned on the video screen high up in one corner; the film was Little Buddha, which Budi had seen. In the fading light the train ran slowly over gorges in the forested hills outside Bandung: gorge after gorge, bridge after bridge, the track winding all the time, so that sometimes, looking ahead, looking back, you could see two or even three white-painted bridges, the curving metal supports, very broad, showing up in the dusk like decorative swags against the dark green of forest. The little terraced rice fields, irregular patterns of bund and water on the steep hillsides, caught the fading light and were like leaded stained glass, dark or gold or red, sometimes with seedlings planted out in rows.

  Budi said that the rice-growers didn’t see the beauty we saw. Often they had to walk for hours up and down hills to get to a main road. When we passed a village he showed what he meant. In those villages a thousand rupiah, fifty cents, was a lot of money. (A thousand “roops” was what he said, “roops” for rupiah being part of the curious jauntiness of his speech.) An ear of maize fetched no more than fifty “roops” there, two and a half cents; so that for a great labor, not least that of carrying the crop to market, a farmer might get only five dollars. A little later he showed the forested land where he said a relation of Habibie was going to build nine hundred houses for IPTN people; the aircraft business had its ramifications.

  He said he knew it was strange that he, who was now on the other side, should be talking like this about the poor. But he quarreled every day with his partner over some new piece of corruption he saw or thought he saw. He couldn’t help it; though he knew he depended on the partner (and his ways) to get the big jobs that came their way. It was something he had also taxed the teacher with: that he accepted corrupt men as his followers.

  What had the teacher said?

  He said he knew the stories about people. But he couldn’t go by that; he could judge people only by what he saw of them. Which was as good an answer as the one he had given when Budi had asked about his half-Arab clothes. Yes, the teacher had said, they were extravagant, but they were meant to be: they made him conscious of himself, so that while he wore those clothes he couldn’t do anything bad.

  Budi said, “I left you for some time with him, after Hani came. I went to pray. It was the time of day. While I was praying I discovered I had lost my wallet. The actual loss wasn’t important. But it was going to be troublesome. Telling the cards people. The ID card was going to cause problems; to get a new one would take months. So just after praying I had these worries. And I thought, ‘If I lose them it is God’s will. It means that more things will come to me.’ And then I went out to you and the teacher and saw the wallet on the carpet beside you.”

  So for Budi this visit to the teacher had yet again had some element of religious experience: loss, panic, resignation, faith, immense relief, new faith. But, Budi being Budi, the religious moment also contained a practical lesson. “Never keep your wallet in your side pocket. It will slip out some time. Always keep it in the back pocket.”

  The sky became dark. There was no longer a view outside. The fluorescent light of the coach was faint; the windows threw back reflections. The enclosed dim light, the motion, the noise of the wheels—and Little Buddha on the video screen, going on all the time—led Budi into deeper, personal talk.

  He told me about the uncle, his mother’s younger brother, who had loved him and done so much for him. This was the uncle who had rescued him from his poverty and despair in Surabaya, had brought him to Jakarta and set him on his feet, and shown him the world. Budi had lived with this uncle, who was a lawyer and university professor, for four years. But then there had been a quarrel. Budi, when he had first talked to me of this uncle, had left out the quarrel. But the quarrel had marked him, and partly explained his present solitude.

  The uncle had had a pre-university Dutch education in Indonesia; and though he was a good Muslim, and said his prayers four times a day, he had never lost his admiration for the culture of the Netherlands; he went there every other year. Budi was able to list—as though he had done it many times before—all the things he had learnt from this uncle. He had learnt to go to restaurants; he and his uncle went three times a week. He had learnt to drive (his uncle sometimes lent Budi his car); to do photography; to buy books other than schoolbooks; to go to the Koranic school; to dress well, to wear Marks and Spencer blazers and Bally shoes, for instance, never sneakers or jeans; and, curiously, to paint a house.

  After four years there was the quarrel. It had to do with girls, with Budi staying out late, sometimes with the car, and lying about the girls. It didn’t have to do with any particular girl; it was an objection to Budi’s way of life at that time. Budi did a strange thing when the quarrel blew up. He took the girlfriend of the moment away from her family and put her in the house of another girlfriend. After two days the girl’s family went to the police. The police came to Budi’s uncle to ask about Budi. The uncle dealt with them and asked Budi afterwards, “Do you know where this girl is?” Budi said, “Of course.” The uncle said sternly but without anger, “If you aren’t careful you’re going to get into trouble.” And Budi, though he didn’t say, might then have given his uncle some pledge.

  One evening some time later the girl telephoned the house. Budi’s uncle answered. Budi had feared that this would happen. And now the uncle was truly enraged. He said to Budi, “Don’t you realize you are nothing? Look what happened to your father. That’s a good example for you. He’s not living in a house. He’s living in a bird’s nest.” (“And it’s still true,” Budi said, telling the story. “I can take you to the house.”) The uncle gave his ultimatum: Budi had to leave the girl or leave the house.

  Budi said he would leave the house. His aunt pleaded with him. She even got into Budi’s bed and held him and asked him to go and apologize to his uncle. But he left the next day.

  Budi told me, “There was one more reason for leaving. My family is very, very poor. I live in a very wealthy environment. Very often I am thinking about my family. Every time I spend money on myself I remember that amount of money will be useful to them if I can send it to them. I am wearing Bally shoes, eating in those fine restaurants, buying expensive books, and sometimes they can’t even find things for lunch.”

  He went to stay in the house of a college friend. A younger brother of the friend was made to give up his room to Budi. That first week, through another college friend, Budi got a small job as a clerk, and earned thirty thousand rupiah, about ten dollars. At the end of the second week he found a place, as a simple computer operator, with a big computer company. He was to stay, and succeed, in this company for ten years. So, in this quick and unexpected way, he had started on his true career. It was what his uncle had been training him for; but now his uncle wasn’t there; and there was no one as close or as concerned or as informed to whom Budi could take this kind of news about himself. He began to feel his solitude.

  There was a further sourness for Budi, with the friend from the computer school in whose family house he had gone to stay. The friend wanted Budi to do his homework; then he got Budi to write an examination for him; then he began to ask Budi for money. Budi couldn’t complain to anyone in the house; and when at last he left the house he created a bad impression all round.

  He sent a third of what he was earning to his father and mother in Surabaya, assuaging some of that old pain. Four years after he had left his uncle’s house Budi’s mother began to press him to make it up with his uncle. She said to Budi, “You are
younger. Your uncle can’t apologize to you. You must apologize to him.” At last he agreed. She came from Surabaya to Jakarta for the festival at the end of the Muslim fasting month, and she took him to his uncle’s house. They went early in the morning and they stayed in the house all day; but the uncle never came out of his room to greet them. The following year, for the same festival, Budi’s mother came again and took Budi to the house. This time the uncle came out of his room. But the relationship had been broken. It couldn’t be the same again.

  It appeared to be the pattern of Budi’s life: the friend, the rescuer, always turning, as in a legend, into an enemy. And—remembering the off-hand partner with his elegant family in the four-wheel-drive in Bandung—I wondered whether that pattern wasn’t going to repeat now, with the business associates Budi had found among the enormously wealthy people of the Indonesian boom. I put the point to him.

  He said, repeating some of my words, “There is a possibility now that friends become enemies. If you hear bad things and say nothing, some day you will blow up, like my uncle.”

  He was vulnerable. He had no protector. And I discovered now that, with all the luxurious tastes in clothes and shoes and imported dark glasses which his uncle had trained him in, tastes which he still had, he didn’t have a house or an apartment. He lived in rooms in friends’ houses, rotating the houses; and there was a place in his office where he could sleep. He said he couldn’t afford a house. I told him about the thousands of houses I had seen in the big new satellite cities of Jakarta. He said only corrupt people like policemen and accountants could afford to pay the 20 percent deposit on a forty-thousand-dollar house; when you lived in those places you knew you were among crooks. But then he said he didn’t want a house in a satellite city because he would have to have a servant in it all day to look after it, and that would be a burden for him. A little later he appeared to say that he wouldn’t be able to endure the solitude of having a house of his own.

  He was tormented by his solitude. His destitute parents in Surabaya had not been able to do much for him socially. And since he had not gone to a university he had been cut off from a whole generation of his peers. The girls he might have married had married other people. Even when he was rising in the computer company he hadn’t been able to find girlfriends among his colleagues because he didn’t have their kind of background or confidence. Before the Bandung teacher had made him go on the pilgrimage to Mecca he had had lots of sex, but without “environment”—his computer word for a suitable social life. Now, after his vow, even the sex had gone.

  He had hundreds of friends. But loneliness, he said mysteriously, had no direct relationship with happiness; and the loneliness he suffered from was “not knowing what to do.” He got on with his parents, but they thought Budi far above them; and there was no real conversation with them, as there had been with his uncle.

  “My father doesn’t regret about the bankruptcy. He never regrets. He likes to wear very old shirts, even when I buy him new ones. He is very Indonesian that way. He has no desire for luxury. He is happy with the bird’s nest. I told him what my uncle said, and he laughed. He said, ‘So you ran away from the house because he said that?’ I said, ‘It was humiliating.’ He said, ‘But it’s true. The house is like a bird’s nest.’ ”

  At the new Japanese-built railway terminus in Jakarta, which was far finer and more attractive than anything in India, with its clean open areas and its tempting food stalls, Budi bargained hard and for some minutes with the taxi drivers. I offered to pay, but he wanted to bargain. He beat one man down to a price which I thought very low. When we were in the taxi he said he intended to double the agreed payment, to show his appreciation of the courtesy of the man.

  Something of the mystery and oddity of his father had passed on to him. His fear of solitude had committed him to living as he did, in the houses of friends and in his office; and this style of life was ensuring his solitude.

  His office was a large room in a modern block in central Jakarta. This room was divided by partitions into smaller spaces. In the principal area there were five executive chairs. A cupboard attached to this area was where Budi slept when he was not staying with friends. The cupboard had a bunk bed and clothes rails, and since there was no air-conditioning he slept with the cupboard door open. In drawers in the executive office area were those of his clothes that were not on hangers. The clothes were as expensive as his uncle had taught him clothes should be; and on shelves close to the cupboard there were books—meant for nighttime reading—like those his uncle had taught him to buy, among them the Koran in Indonesian and English, a number of religious books, and a set of Heinemann Asia business-management books which he had bought after our day at Bandung.

  In a small space outside the executive area was his expensive American mountain bike with shock absorbers back and front: cycling, in Surabaya an aspect of his great need, converted now to sport and luxury. At the side or back of the area for employees, as packed as a classroom, was a green-carpeted mosque recess with a prayer rug at an angle to indicate the direction of Mecca.

  I was reminded—though the scale here was smaller—of Imaduddin’s office. It turned out that Budi followed Imaduddin’s religious programs on television (remembering especially an interview Imaduddin had done with a murderer who had turned to Islam in jail). And when I sat through one of Budi’s regular staff-training sessions I thought he had adapted some of Imaduddin’s mental training exercises; though both might have had an American corporate origin.

  A friend of Budi’s, a man of twenty-five, an ITB graduate, working in his family’s telecommunications business, had recently visited the office. He was an expert in martial arts. He was also known for his ability to see spirits and to divine people’s illnesses and auras. He saw that Budi’s partner had a kidney problem, and he saw that Budi suffered from sinusitis. When Budi, impressed, took him to his sleeping cupboard the seer said, “In that sleeping room there is the spirit of a very old woman. But she’s not bothering you. So just let her stay there.”

  I asked Budi, “What is this old lady like? Did he see her?”

  “I asked him what you asked me. And he said, ‘The old lady is of transparent material. Like what is in the movie Casper, the Friendly Ghost.’ In an Egyptian book I’ve read it’s stated differently. The spirits in that book can imitate themselves in the form of human beings. Can also transform into an animal.”

  I said, “I didn’t know you were interested in these things.”

  “I’ve always been interested in these things.”

  At our last meeting Budi had gifts for me, books—his uncle’s style still with him. They were books about the first nine teachers or spreaders of Islam in Indonesia, and they were given to remind me of our visit to the teacher in Bandung. They were books for children; but Budi thought them suitable, because they contained the folk stories about those teachers.

  Budi translated the story of Kali Jaga for me. Kali Jaga’s reputation was that he was the teacher who had fitted the old Hindu epic of the Mahabharata to the story of Islam for the puppet theater. In that way he took Islam to the people and taught them to worship God and not stone.

  Kali Jaga’s father was a minister or regional ruler in the Majapahit empire, the last Hindu empire in Java. The father’s domain was in the north of Java, where there was already some Islamic influence. Though he was himself a believer, he didn’t want his son to teach Islam; he didn’t want to antagonize the Hindu ruler of the empire. When Kali Jaga grew up he became unhappy about the gap between the rich and poor in his father’s domain. He began to steal rice and other food from the state warehouses and gave it to the poor. His father caught him one day and asked him to leave his domain. Kali Jaga became a robber in the forest, robbing for the poor.

  One day he saw an old man walking in the forest with a stick with a gold handle. Kali Jaga went and seized the stick from the old man, and the old man said, “What do you want? Do you want gold? If you want gold, look at those
trees.” Suddenly the trees the old man pointed to turned to gold. Kali Jaga ran to the trees to get the gold, and the old man went on his way. When the old man disappeared the gold on the trees turned to leaves again, and Kali Jaga realized that the old man was a powerful man.

  In fact, the old man was Sunnan Bonang, one of the nine teachers, a man of great power; he could fly and call up water at will. Kali Jaga ran after the old man and begged the old man to accept him as a student. The old man said, “I’m busy. But if you really want to be my student, take this stick of mine and sit here beside the river and wait until I come back.”

  The teacher went away. He forgot Kali Jaga for many years. When one day he passed that way again he found Kali Jaga sitting beside the river, with long hair and beard and whiskers and nails, and still with the teacher’s stick. Vines had grown over him. So the old man gave Kali Jaga much knowledge and power, and told him to go out and start preaching Islam to the people. Kali Jaga found it hard to preach to the people, who were Hindus. So he stuck as much as he could to Hindu stories and ceremonies, but changed the words. Instead of the Hindu mantras he recited the Koran.

  Budi said, “This preaching was in Tuban, about two hundred kilometers from Surabaya. A big city today, with a harbor.”

  “Do you have a date?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A century?”

  “I would relate this to the fall of the Majapahit empire. This book is meant for children. They don’t put the year and so on.”

  The fall of Majapahit is put at 1478. Fourteen years, that is, before the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, and fourteen years before the discovery of the New World. So while Islam was arrested in the West, in the East it was spreading over the cultural-religious remains of Greater India. India had been ravaged by centuries of Muslim invasions; its light, in places like Indonesia, had been put out.