Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  At eight he was taken to an office and he began to be interrogated by a lieutenant colonel in uniform. There was no hint or threat of abuse or violence. As a lecturer at the Bandung Institute Imaduddin would have been considered of high official rank and had to be handled correctly.

  After the lieutenant colonel there was a man in plain clothes. This man gave his name. Imaduddin recognized it as the name of a state prosecutor.

  He asked Imaduddin, “Are you a Muslim?”

  “I’m Muslim.”

  “Is that why you think this country is an Islamic state? Do you think so?” He was an educated man, a lawyer, perhaps five years younger than Imaduddin.

  Imaduddin said, “I don’t know what to say. I have never studied law. I am an engineer. You are a lawyer.”

  The prosecutor said, “The government has spent so much money building mosques and many other things for the Muslims. It has built the national mosque. But still there are Muslims who would like to turn this country into an Islamic state. Are you one of those Muslims?”

  “You tell me what you think of this country.”

  “It is a secular state. Not a religious state.”

  Imaduddin said, “You are wrong. You are dead wrong.”

  “Why? You said that as an engineer you don’t know the law.”

  “Some things I know. Because I have studied in the States. The United States you can call a secular state. But you have told me that the government here has spent so much money to build things like the national mosque. What kind of government is that?”

  For two hours they argued, saying the same things over and over. Then Imaduddin was taken to the headquarters of the military police. There they brought out his file, and from there he was taken with his file to the jail.

  The jail had been built for his political enemies by Sukarno, the first president of independent Indonesia; many famous people had been there before Imaduddin. It was a compound of fifteen acres, with a double wall and barbed wire and other jail apparatus. The buildings were of concrete.

  Imaduddin was given a large room, twenty feet square, with a special Muslim bathroom. There were eight such rooms in the jail. They were for people of rank, and Imaduddin was considered a person of rank. Imaduddin knew that he was going to spend a long time there. So, with the confidence and briskness of his great belief—and the curious simplicity: he could with equal ease have been an inquisitor or a martyr—he asked for a broom to clean the place up. He thought it was dirty: as a religious man he had certain standards of cleanliness. He even scrubbed the bathroom. Apart from everything else, the bathroom was important for his ritual wash before the five-times-a-day prayers.

  He settled into the jail routine. There was a small mosque in the middle of the prison. When he went there for the Friday prayer he met the jail’s most famous prisoner: Dr. Subandrio, one of the Indonesian old guard, by profession a surgeon, a political associate of Sukarno’s, once Sukarno’s deputy prime minister, once foreign minister.

  Subandrio had been in prison since 1965 for his part in the very serious communist plot to kill the generals and take over the country. The crushing of that plot had altered the political balance of the country. It had brought the army and young Suharto to power; it had led to a bloodletting so widespread that at the end the Indonesian Communist party, in 1965 one of the largest political groupings in the country, had been all but destroyed. Hundreds of thousands had been sent to labor camps and had later been denied full civic rights. The memory of the 1965 plot had not been allowed to fade; the strange paternalism of military rule under President Suharto, always set against this background of latent communist danger, had been institutionalized.

  Subandrio had originally been sentenced to death. But he told Imaduddin that on the day of his execution Queen Elizabeth had made a plea for his life—Subandrio had been the first Indonesian ambassador to Great Britain—and President Suharto had commuted the death sentence to imprisonment for life.

  And there, in the jail Sukarno had built for another kind of political person, Subandrio had been all this time, for thirteen years, simply living on, while the world outside changed, and Subandrio and his great adventure became part of the past, and he himself was taken further and further away from the man he had been. He who had once been at the center of so much now depended for social stimulus on new arrivals at the prison, people like Imaduddin, a kind of human windfall from beyond the high double walls.

  The two men met every day. They went to each other’s rooms. There was a kind of freedom for prisoners before eight in the morning, and again in the afternoon, when the warders went to their own quarters. The two men were not alike. Subandrio was about sixty-five, Imaduddin thought; Imaduddin himself was forty-seven. Imaduddin, describing Subandrio, mentioned the older man’s fitness, his small size, his training as a surgeon, his Javanese background. The background was important. The Javanese are known as feudal people with courtly manners and special ways of saying difficult things. Imaduddin was from North Sumatra, blunter in every way, and in the matter of Islam far more puritanical and aggressive than the Javanese.

  And Imaddudin would have had no sympathy for Subandrio’s pre-1965 politics. He had told me in 1979 that he could not have been a socialist when he was a young man, however generous the socialists were to him, because he was “already” a Muslim. I believe he meant that all that was humane and attractive about socialism was also in Islam, and there was no need for him to take the secular way and risk his faith.

  Thirteen years before, Imaduddin and Subandrio would have been on opposite sides. But the jail was an equalizer. And Subandrio had also changed. He had become a religious man. He said to Imaduddin at their first meeting that he wanted to know more about the Koran, and he asked Imaduddin to help him. This was more than Javanese courtesy or the result of the social starvation of jail life. Subandrio was a true seeker. Imaduddin became his teacher.

  They also talked every day about politics. They talked specifically about politics in Javanese culture.

  Imaduddin said, “He learned from me how to read the Koran. I learned from him about Javanese culture.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “The importance of paternalism. Not in the Western sense, but a mix-up of feudalism, paternalism, and nepotism. You have to know what to say and what not to say. You have to know your position in the society. Your ability sometimes had nothing to do with it.”

  Subandrio also got to know Imaduddin’s story, and it was easy for him to see where Imaduddin was going wrong. Running together everything he had heard from Subandrio over fourteen months, Imaduddin put these words of political advice in Subandrio’s mouth: “In politics you must not expect honesty and morality right through. Keenness and smartness are not important. In politics the question of winning is the end result. So if you put your idea into the mind of your enemy, and he practices it, you are the winner. Above all, you must remember that you must never confront the Javanese.”

  Confrontation: Imaduddin recognized that it had been his own political method. This wasted time in jail was part of the price he was paying; so were the many years of exile that were to follow. During those years he never forgot Subandrio’s advice; and when his time of expiation was over, and he had come back to Indonesia, he set himself to learning the Javanese way of moving in an ordered society, the Javanese way of saying difficult things. He learned that he shouldn’t try to act on his own. He found a patron, Habibie; he shot up; and as if by magic people he had thought of as remote and hostile became sources of bounty and favor.

  On the day before the fiftieth anniversary of independence, and six days after the N-250 did its inaugural flight around Bandung, Dr. Subandrio—now nearly eighty-two—was at last released from jail, after an unimaginable thirty years, and a full sixteen years after Imaduddin had been freed.

  The announcement had been made three weeks before by President Suharto. A Jakarta Post reporter went to the jail. He found Subandrio suffering from a herni
a and blood pressure. The old man wished now only not to die in jail, and (a remnant of the fitness Imaduddin had noticed sixteen years before) he kept himself going—for the little freedom he might yet have, and the little life—with the help of yoga and long walks in the jail compound.

  The reporter asked Subandrio whether he intended to take up politics again when he was released.

  Subandrio said, “It is useless.” His thoughts, he said, were only of the hereafter.

  The reporter asked whether he had an opinion about his release.

  He didn’t. He didn’t want to say anything at all until he was absolutely out of the jail. He said, “I’m afraid of a possible slip of the tongue, because it might backfire on me.”

  So now, almost at the very end, taking care to talk only of the benevolence of God and the generosity of President Suharto, Subandrio remained mindful of the Javanese advice he had given Imaduddin sixteen years before.

  Imaduddin gave un-Islamic and modern-sounding names to his Islamic ventures. So in Bandung in 1979 he gave “mental training” courses to middle-class adolescent groups. One of the modern games he made them play was to sit in groups of five and attempt to make squares out of variously shaped pieces of paper that had been handed out in separate envelopes. The thing could be done only if the groups came together and exchanged pieces of paper. In this very attractive way they learned about the need for cooperation, perseverance, knowing one another, the sense of belonging. And since Imaduddin here was preaching to the converted—otherwise those adolescents, some of them from Jakarta, wouldn’t have been allowed by their parents to come to Bandung for those mixed, late-night sessions—everyone knew that those virtues were Islamic ones; and some of the young people even had supporting quotations from the Koran.

  If that, in 1979, was an aspect of mental training, it was possible for me, knowing about Imaduddin’s current success and glory, to have an idea what was behind YAASIN, which was the stylish Indonesian acronyn Imaduddin had chosen for the foundation he now ran: Yayasan Pembina Sari Insan, the Foundation for the Development and Management of Human Resources. “Human resources” would have meant people; their development meant their becoming devout Muslims; the management of those devout people would have meant weaning them away from old loyalties, whatever these were, and getting them to follow the technological-political line of Imaduddin and Habibie.

  The office of the foundation was on the ground floor of a small block some distance away from the center of Jakarta. It wasn’t easy for the visitor to find. But Imaduddin was a busy man, with his weekly television program and his work for the Association of Muslim Intellectuals—in a few days, besides, he would be going to the United States and Canada, and traveling there for two months, visiting twelve universities to do his mental training work among Indonesian students—and he thought that his office was the best place for us to meet.

  When he came out to the hall to greet me I didn’t absolutely recognize him. It wasn’t only the effect of the years. His manner had altered. In Bandung he had seemed to me to have the university lecturer’s manner, not unattractive, the semi-informal, semi-confiding manner of a man used to going around the seriousness or awkwardness of a subject to win the allegiance of people who were not yet his peers. Now he was like a man of affairs, without a jacket but quite staid: the green-striped shirt, the tie, the pen clipped to the shirt pocket, the beige trousers belted to hold back the firm beginnings of middle-aged spread.

  In the office, the first open space, to the right as you entered, had a low raised platform, with cheap rumpled rugs; and on the floor were slippers and shoes. This was where Imaduddin’s visitors and employees or neighbors faced Mecca and prayed. Two or three people were already there, sitting quietly, waiting for the correct prayer time; in this setting they were a little like office trophies or diplomas, virtue on display.

  As we tiptoed past these still people, the woman diplomat who had come with me (and had provided the car for the difficult journey) asked whether we too shouldn’t take off our shoes before we went any farther. Imaduddin, with something of the preacher’s bonhomie, said it wasn’t necessary. He spoke as though he knew, out of his experience of the outside world, that this taking off of shoes would be a burden for us, and he was half in sympathy with us; but he spoke at the same time as though what was a burden for us was pure pleasure for him.

  After this was the secretary’s office, with a flickering computer screen and shelves and files; and after this, at the end of the corridor, was Imaduddin’s office, against the outer wall of the building—the sunstruck street and the smoking traffic just outside. It looked like an office where a lot happened. There was a tarnished laptop on the glass-covered desk. On one side of the laptop was a well-handled Koran; on the other side was a pile of shoddily produced paperback books, perhaps a foot high, of similar size and in electric blue covers, which had been published in Egypt and might have been a very long commentary on the Koran: no doubt like meat and drink to Imaduddin.

  And it was there, in that atmosphere of mosque and office, that Imaduddin began to tell me of his adventures after 1979, and the changes in his thinking that had led him from persecution in Bandung, where he hadn’t been allowed to give his lectures on electrical engineering, to his success here in Jakarta, with his foundation and his ideas about human resources.

  Though in 1979 he was in his late forties, he still kept up with two international Muslim student organizations where he had held important positions. These organizations were known, in an impressive modern way, by their initials: IIFSO of Kuwait, the International Islamic Federation of Student Organisations, and WAMY of Saudi Arabia, the World Association of Muslim Youth. It was through WAMY that he got a grant from the Faisal Foundation. He didn’t use this to go to a Muslim country, where as a defender of the faith he might have found solace of a sort. He went instead to the heart of the United States, to Iowa State University. Always out there, the United States, an unacknowledged part of the world picture of every kind of modern revolutionary: the country of law and rest, with which at the end of the day a man who had proclaimed himself to be on the other side—in politics, culture, or religion—could make peace and on whose goodwill he could throw himself.

  It was at Iowa that Imaduddin made the great break with his past. He found a new subject of study, industrial engineering, and he gave up electrical engineering, which he had taught for seventeen years. He had decided to go into electrical engineering when he was a young man, he said; it was part of the uncertainty of the time; he had the haziest idea how the country could be best developed. Now at Iowa he began to see more clearly.

  Imaduddin said, “I discovered at that time that this country needs human resource development rather than high technology. I realized that the problem of the country was not technology. Technology can be bought if you have the money. But you cannot buy human resources who are dedicated to doing things for their country. You cannot expect Americans to come here to do things for this country. As secretary-general of IIFSO I traveled a lot. And one day in 1978, when I was in Saudi Arabia, I saw that they had established a very modern hospital, the King Faisal Hospital, but all the doctors, even the nurses, were non-Arab. The doctors were Americans, the nurses were Filipinos and Indians and Pakistanis. Saudi Arabia can buy AWACS, but the pilots are Americans.”

  “You hadn’t thought of that before?”

  “Not really. But approaching it.”

  Though I half knew that the scientific-sounding words Imaduddin was using would have a religious twist, I had also given them a half-scientific interpretation. I thought he was speaking as a scientist and was saying, very broadly, that technology without the supporting science was useless, and I thought he was using Saudi Arabia as an example of technological dependence. But the very next thing he said made me feel I had missed the true line of his argument.

  He said, “When I applied for the scholarship from Saudi Arabia I was thinking of shifting from electrical engineering. I though
t there must be something more important than technology.”

  I had lost him for a while. He appeared to be saying that in order to develop technology it was necessary to give it up. I cast my mind back over what had been said. He talked on, and it was a little time before I saw that he was not speaking with detachment, laying down the principles of technological advance for Indonesia, but was speaking more personally, of his career, and of the intuitive stages by which he had given up electrical engineering, given up naked technology, and become a full-time preacher and missionary, and how, through this apparent professional surrender, he had reached the heights: the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, Habibie, the splendors of the N-250, and, indirectly, the president himself. In his mind there was no disjointedness or lack of logic. There was only clarity. A country could develop only if its human resources were developed: if the people, that is, became devout and good.

  My questions would not always have been to the point. He handled them civilly, but as interruptions; and, like the seasoned politician or preacher, always went back to his main story without losing his way.

  He said, “With the Saudi grant I shifted to industrial engineering. In electrical engineering we study just engineering. No human being is concerned. Except, when you study high voltage, of course you must think of safety. In industrial engineering you combine industrial system and human system, and management. I did this in Iowa. I met a very nice professor who is an expert in human behavior. I asked this professor to be my major professor, and he very gladly agreed. Starting from this I concentrated my resources on behavioral approach.”

  He had no trouble giving up his old subject. “I am interested in something only when I am learning about it. Once I know everything about it I don’t like it anymore. It’s one of my weaknesses or bad behaviors. An example. Show me any motor or electrical machine. I can tell you about the behavior of this machine. An induction motor is an induction motor. It doesn’t matter where it comes from. I can tell you about it completely. When I get my two babies, each baby has its own individual behavior. You cannot treat them like machines. Human beings are always enigmatic to me, always interesting.”