Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  This was the need she took to her own marriage; this was her faith in her husband’s new-man energy and ambition. Yet she never talked about religion to her husband. He was not especially spiritually minded. He performed the rites; that was all.

  She had been too hard on him; she felt that now. She had looked to him for strength; she had discovered he was insecure in his own way. She said, “That was very frightening. I stress insecurity first, because if he wasn’t insecure he wouldn’t have depended on his family for everything.” He talked about his career with his mother, not with Nadezha. He didn’t talk to Nadezha about his financial problems. He was all right now. He was successful. He was manager of a stockbroking firm, and he had married a girl from his own state of Negri Sembilan. He had made a new life for himself, and Nadezha thought he might still be regretting his foray into something he never knew.

  She said, “It must have been a nightmare for him. He’s still under a coconut shell. He moved out of his element and didn’t like what he saw.”

  Something like that could be said on both sides.

  3

  THE BOMOH’S SON

  THE BOMOH—healer, or shaman, or magic-man—was a year old older than the century. He was of mixed Chinese and Indonesian parentage. His father had left China towards the end of the nineteenth century, part of the spilling out of the poor and unprotected from the collapsing empire; and he had fetched up in one of the islands of the Indonesian archipelago, at that time ruled by the Dutch. There he had found some kind of footing, and he had married (or as good as married) an Indonesian woman. They had nine sons.

  They were very poor. They moved at some point to a northern state in what was then British-ruled Malaya. The eighth son hardly had a childhood. He went out to work when he was quite young. When he was thirteen or fourteen he was driving a truck. Life was not easy; and at about this time the mystical, Indonesian side of the boy’s personality began to assert itself. He became aware of his powers, and he began to train as a bomoh. There would have been a teacher or encourager of some sort, but I didn’t ask about the teacher, and wasn’t told.

  This training as a bomoh would have begun in 1914–15. (While, far away, Europe was fighting the great war that indirectly weakened the British and Dutch empires in Asia; and, a little nearer home, Gandhi, after his twenty years in South Africa, was going back to India with his very special political-social-religious ideas.) The boy or young man learned very fast. He became a full bomoh when he was seventeen; and he practiced for nearly seventy years. He had a big following, and he had disciples. There were certain things he couldn’t do when he became physically infirm, but his powers as a bomoh never failed him.

  He married twice, to two Malay Chinese sisters, with five years between the marriages. He had seventeen children altogether, and they all lived in the same house.

  Rashid was the bomoh’s eighth son. He was born in 1955. He was sent to good local schools from the start; and in his eighteenth year—with every kind of tenderness for his father’s feelings, and every kind of respect for his father’s powers as a bomoh—Rashid began to turn away from his father’s magical practices, and the rituals of the house. With education and self-awareness Rashid had begun to feel the kind of philosophical and spiritual need that Philip, the Chinese Christian convert, felt; and, indeed, for some time, picking up and repeating what he had heard from some friends at school, Rashid talked and behaved as a Christian, even at home.

  Then he discovered Islam and the Koran, and he stayed there. He became a Muslim in his own mind, without being formally converted, and he took the Arab name of Rashid. He had started and dropped more than one career since then. Now he was a successful corporate lawyer, close to people with power. He was only forty. He had traveled far and fast, like the country. He had lived in, or had access to, many different spiritual worlds.

  People brought all kinds of problems to his father, Rashid said. Payment was often in kind, four or five chickens, fruit; and it wasn’t like settling a bill. Payment, once it started, went on as a regular voluntary tribute.

  People came simply to be blessed, or to be cured of pains, or to have amulets blessed. Rashid remembered that once a famous local martial arts man, an elderly man, an exponent of jujitsu, came and knelt before his father and asked to be granted inner strength. The bomoh was known for his great strength. He was short, five feet four and a half inches, but well built. He could bend six-inch nails between his index finger and thumb, without having to go into a trance, which was what he normally had to do when he dealt with people’s problems.

  When he was in this trance people who wanted to be blessed knelt before him, and he touched them on the forehead, the shoulders, the solar plexus. Then he made them turn round and he touched them on the back of the head and the shoulders. When people were in pain he touched them on the part of the body that hurt.

  Every year the bomoh’s followers made a special pilgrimage to the bomoh’s house and brought amulets to be blessed. These followers were of all communities and all classes, rich, poor, educated, ordinary. Rashid as a child of eight remembered hearing many languages during one of these pilgrimages: English, Malay, Hokkien Chinese, Baba or Chinese Malay.

  The bomoh would go into a trance and in this trance he would take off his shirt. He would start shivering, because at that moment he would be focused in his trance on the snow deity, one of the three deities from whom he drew his powers. His assistants would hand him a bundle of flaming joss sticks. He needed the flames to warm himself, and he would appear to be outlining his body with the joss sticks. He would do this for a minute or so. When he was sufficiently warmed, he passed the sticks back to his assistants. They would then dress him in his special shirt and cover him with his cloak. The shirt was important; only the bomoh could wear it; he had blessed it on the altar of the shrine.

  When he sat down his assistants gave him a glass of water. He would speak some incantations, blow on the water, drink it, and spew it out. His sword would then be passed to him. This was a real sword, five feet long and double-edged. He would stick out his tongue, and use the sword to make a deep enough incision in his tongue for the blood to flow. The yellow slips of paper for the amulets would be ready. His assistants would pass him the slips one by one and he would drip blood from his tongue on each slip. He would keep on blessing slips in this way, losing blood all the time, until Rashid’s mother said, “That’s enough.” By then he might have blessed a hundred slips.

  When the sword was put away he would be covered up and, still in a trance, he would start giving his consultations. Women wanted to know whether they would get husbands, men whether they would get mistresses. Women who were being badly treated by their husbands wanted to know what they should do. Mothers or fathers wanted to know about those of their children who had gone astray.

  The bomoh would speak in a language Rashid didn’t understand. This was the special Javanese the bomoh had brought from the Indonesian island where he was born. He also spoke in Mandarin. It was only on these occasions, and in that trance, that Rashid’s father spoke Mandarin.

  The sword was special. It was the bomoh’s own. An assistant went into a trance one day and tried to use the sword to cut his tongue. The sword wouldn’t cut. When the bomoh was old, though, he allowed his tongue to be cut with the sword by one of his assistants. (But Rashid’s language was ambiguous. I wasn’t sure, when I looked at my notes some time later, whether the assistants cut their own tongues, or used the sword to cut the bomoh’s tongue.)

  The assistants were the bomoh’s disciples. They didn’t live in the house, but they were at the bomoh’s beck and call. They came to the house every day, and they had to work. One of the things they did was to clean the altar. They were not paid. They were in no way the bomoh’s employees. In fact, they had to bring offerings to the bomoh. Sometimes they even offered money—which the bomoh refused.

  There were no statues on the altar. There was only a yellow cloth, with representations of the
bomoh’s three deities on a triangle: the snow-mountain god at the peak, with the deities of fire and sword at the base. Snow, fire, sword: the bomoh’s ritual followed that sequence. He told his children on many occasions that he had masters of some kind. He had a master in China and another in Indonesia, and (just as his followers came in pilgrimage to him once a year) he regularly made his own pilgrimage to these masters. He did so by astro-traveling. Rashid never doubted what his father said; he could find no other way of explaining his father’s manifest powers.

  The bomoh’s wives—Rashid’s mother and his aunt—were Baba-Nonya, overseas Straits Chinese, people of Chinese origin who had adopted Malay culture and the Malay language. The food in the house was Baba food, Malay-Chinese food, very spicy, and they ate with their hands. They didn’t use chopsticks.

  Rashid’s mother, Chinese though she was, worshiped a Malay ancestor, the datuk. Many other Babas did that. Offerings to this datuk were made on the altar by Rashid’s mother. The offerings were of Malay-style food: rendang ayam, curried chicken, rendang daging, curried beef, sticky rice: food to be eaten with the hands.

  Once a month everybody in the house would have his cheeks pierced with a steel needle by the bomoh. This cheek-piercing was done as a form of purification. There was a different needle for everyone; the older the child, the longer and thicker the needle. The child whose cheek was pierced first would have to endure it the longest: the needle would stay in until everyone’s cheeks were done. Sometimes, on special occasions, photographs were taken of the family, the seventeen children and the mothers, all with needles in their cheeks.

  Up to the end of the second war the bomoh and his family lived in a kampung in a kampung-style house. Afterwards they moved to a resettled area, to a two-story terrace house. This was the house that Rashid had grown up in. There were three bedrooms upstairs and one bedroom downstairs. Rashid’s mother and one or two of his sisters were in the room downstairs. Rashid’s grandmother was in one room upstairs, with all the other girls. An uncle and his whole family lived in one room. All the boys slept on the landing. At any one time twenty people could be found living in the tiny house. And, with all of that, the bomoh practiced his profession downstairs, in the living room, which was also the temple.

  The bomoh’s powers were known in the neighborhood, and people were careful not to cross the family. As an aspect of his success, the bomoh also had a certain social standing in the community, and he was concerned to live up to it. He was particular about his dress when, relaxing from his bomoh work, he went out, as he sometimes did, to his Chinese clan clubs in the town. He dressed in the colonial way then, in a suit and with a bow tie. He would have a game of cards, and an occasional pipe of opium. One of the bomoh’s brothers was an opium addict, and died from his addiction. But the bomoh was not an addict.

  The bomoh had never gone to school. He alone knew how much he had suffered because of that as a child and young man, in that far-off time before and during the First World War. And now, in a changed world, he wanted all his children, daughters as well as sons, to be properly educated. He did the best he could for all of them.

  Rashid was sent to a local primary school, and then to one of the most reputed colonial secondary schools in the district. Rashid didn’t say it, but he would have known when he got to the secondary school that he was in another sphere. At home Rashid was proud of his father’s powers, and liked them to be talked about locally; but he never talked about them at the secondary school. He never thought to “brag”—he used the schoolboy word—about his father there.

  It was at this school that Rashid became aware of other religions. A friendly Tamil boy engaged him one day in “a very basic discussion” about big issues. The Tamil boy said, “Look at Hitler. Look at all those brutalities. You think these people are going to go scot free when they die? And who do you think will punish them? God will punish them. You think all of us are here without any purpose?”

  The Tamil boy was a Christian. He didn’t push his faith too hard at Rashid. He was just very friendly, and it was because of this boy that Rashid joined a school Bible class. At the same time Rashid began reading the King James Bible. He liked the language, the pace of the stories, the movement. Other Chinese boys were doing the same thing. The Chinese boys were Buddhists, like Rashid; but they wanted more than they got from the Buddhism of their parents.

  Rashid’s little terrace house was full of rituals, with his father’s temple downstairs, its festivities, the annual pilgrimage, and his mother’s daily worship of her Malay datuk. But these rituals couldn’t give answers to the bigger questions that Rashid was now beginning to have. His father’s three deities didn’t offer anything like “the ecumenical love” (the words were Rashid’s) he was discovering in Christianity. “Ecumenical love”: it was like the idea of grace that had overwhelmed Philip, the Chinese Christian convert. The deities of snow, fire, and sword, and the temple rituals, offered Rashid no comparable philosophy, no “big picture.” What happened in his father’s temple was private. People just came there day after day to his father’s temple with their practical problems.

  And Rashid couldn’t question his father about what he did. It was inconceivable, for instance, that he should ask his father whether God existed. His father was a bomoh; he had mystical powers. To question him about religion, to express doubt, would be to show disrespect, and that was the last thing Rashid wanted to do.

  One of Rashid’s brothers was more than halfway to being a Christian. He was going to church regularly. And Rashid was going to the school Bible class. Sometimes at home, in the living room of the terrace house, where the temple altar was, they sang hymns together in the evenings. The bomoh might then be relaxing, watching television. The hymn-singing in his temple didn’t worry him; he paid no attention.

  At school Rashid and the Tamil boy had many talks about Jesus and the Trinity. Rashid wasn’t actually converted, but he went around saying to people, “Why don’t you start reading the Bible?” He preached at them the way the Tamil boy had preached at him. He talked to them about the purpose of life.

  He did this to one of the bright girls at the school. The girl was a Pathan; Rashid was attracted to her. She said to him, “Have you ever read the Koran?”

  He was prejudiced against Islam at that time. He thought of it as a backward religion; he associated it with Malays, whom at that time he considered a backward people. But he wanted to have something to talk to the girl about. So he began reading the Koran, in the Marmaduke Pickthall translation. He was fascinated by the introduction to the opening chapter; he thought it the equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer. He liked, too, the constant reference to God as the Most Beneficent and the Most Merciful. This went against the idea he had of Islam and the sword.

  But he had doubts. He didn’t like the idea of polygamy and what he could gather from his reading about the position of women in Islam. He asked the Pathan girl why the Prophet had married more than four wives, and the Pathan girl couldn’t answer. Still, he kept on reading the Koran, and it began to appeal to his heart. He felt humbled by it. He liked the repeated references to God’s guidance and man’s need of it. “Show me the straight path”: that, the fifth line of the opening chapter, went deep into him.

  He began thinking of himself as a Muslim. To be a Muslim was to bear witness that there was no God but God, and the Prophet was his messenger. This should have created problems in his own mind about his father’s practices as a bomoh. But it didn’t. Rashid never associated religion with what his father did.

  He was still seeing the Pathan girl. To him she was a living Muslim, an exemplar, and he began to follow her dietary habits. He was able now to recite Koranic verses. He didn’t think it was enough for him; he thought he should read the Koran properly, in Arabic. He set himself to learn the Malay Arabic script; it took him two years to do sight reading.

  By this time there was worry about him at home. Rashid’s parents didn’t like it when he refused to touch pork
and refused to hold the joss sticks and perform rituals before the altar. He refused to eat cooked food and even fruit that had been offered up on the altar. To avoid trouble he made himself scarce when the rituals began. His parents knew now that one day he would take a Muslim name. That upset them a great deal. They were Taoist-Buddhists, and as a bomoh Rashid’s father had a position in the community. Rashid was as conciliatory as he could be; he didn’t argue. He never wanted to hurt their feelings.

  All this was in 1973. Rashid was in his eighteenth year.

  It occurred to me, hearing his story, that four years before, in 1969, there had been terrible racial riots in Malaysia between Chinese and Malays. I asked Rashid about that time.

  He said, “All of us were affected. I was in form two. The riots started on May the thirteenth. I was thirteen plus. Thirteen years, six months. I remember cycling to school and finding the place deserted, the streets deserted. And then we saw some people coming back this way, and they all called out to me, ‘Go back! Go back!’ This was very early in the morning. By eight or nine everybody knew what was going on.”

  The family had to survive for some months on what they had at home. Rice, salted fish, salted black beans. They had no fresh food. Rashid’s father had no savings. Because of the curfew people couldn’t come to him. So he had no income, no tribute. It was a time of great hardship for the family. After a few weeks the curfew was lifted, but the fear was so great that for three months people didn’t leave their houses. There were stories of Malays rounding up Chinese people, loading them onto trucks, executing them, and then dumping the bodies. There were stories, too, of Malays being hacked to death by Chinese gangsters.