Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  It was astonishing to me, considering their opposed positions now, how much his background was like Mr. Wahid’s. But Imaduddin was from Sumatra. He was from the Sultanate of Landkat, an area which he said was larger than Holland, on the border of Aceh, which the Dutch had conquered only in 1908, a full century after their conquest of Java. That would have made a difference, would have given Imaduddin the forthright temperament which he recognized in himself as Sumatran.

  This was the story I reconstructed. In Landkat—perhaps in the latter part of the last century: Imaduddin gave no dates—there was a muezzin, a man who called the faithful to prayer. The muezzin died before his son was born. The muezzin’s widow married again, and when her son by the muezzin was six years old, he was sent by his stepfather to the house of the mufti of the sultan of Landkat. The mufti was a Muslim scholar and the six-year-old boy, following the traditional way, worked in the mufti’s house as a servant and was also a student there. The boy was very bright, and the mufti loved him.

  Ten years passed. The secretary of the sultan, who was something like the sultan’s vizier, and was the second highest man in the land, wanted someone to teach the Koran to his granddaughter. He talked to the sultan; the sultan talked to the mufti; and the mufti sent his servant and student, the old muezzin’s son, now aged seventeen or eighteen, to teach the secretary’s granddaughter. The boy didn’t teach the girl by herself, of course; that would have been improper; he taught her together with some family friends. He was a very good teacher and the secretary’s granddaughter fell in love with him. In due course—no date was given, and it didn’t occur to me to ask—they married. Their son was Imaduddin; he was born in 1931.

  By that time the old muezzin’s son, Imaduddin’s father, was truly launched in Landkat. In 1918, when travel became safe again after the Great War, the mufti persuaded the sultan to send the young man to Mecca to study Arabic for two years. After that the young man went for four years to Cairo, to the Islamic university of al-Azhar. His education so far had been like that of Mr. Wahid’s grandfather and father. And the similarity continued even after that: when he came back to Sumatra from al-Azhar in 1924 the old muezzin’s son became principal of a well-known school which the sultan had set up.

  It was only when the school principal had to educate his own son Imaduddin that the training pattern changed. When he was six Imaduddin was taken away by his father from Malay-language school where he had spent a year; and—oddly, considering his later religious development—sent for five years to a “Dutch school.” These Dutch schools, Imaduddin said, were usually closed to the children of religious people, because the Dutch were nervous of Muslims’ being educated. Imaduddin could go to the Dutch school in Landkat only because the school there belonged to the sultan.

  In 1942 the Japanese arrived. Their rule was harsh. Local food was commandeered. The school was virtually closed. To survive, Imaduddin and his father had to fish and farm and grow their own rice. Though the Japanese to some extent organized the Indonesians for what was to be their war of independence against the Dutch, there remained with Imaduddin from that time a hatred and a fear of the Japanese.

  Little of this fear and hatred had come out in Mr. Wahid’s account of the Japanese occupation. His family seemed to have dealt with the Japanese at a higher, almost political, level. Mr. Wahid’s father had founded the Hizbullah militia in 1944; his younger brother had been trained by the Japanese and made a battalion commander; the headquarters of the Hizbullah were in the Jombang pesantren itself. Far away in Sumatra, Imaduddin was only a fourteen-year-old foot soldier in the same militia.

  One day in 1946 he was marching his little militia band on the street. (On Sunday mornings now, perhaps in preparation for the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of independence, little semi-military bands like that one could be seen, in varied and colorful uniforms, on the streets of Jakarta: groups of ten, perhaps, moving in formation on the road, arms swinging from side to side, the leader separate from his group, but swinging his arms with the rest, blowing on his whistle, giving the marchers a beat.) Marching like this with his band one day in 1946, Imaduddin was stopped by his old teacher from the Dutch school.

  The teacher asked Imaduddin, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because we want independence.”

  “After independence what are you going to do? Do you know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How are you going to build this country if you don’t have doctors, engineers? You should go back to school and study. I know that a new high school is going to open in a town near here. I want you to join this school.”

  Imaduddin did as his old teacher said. He got permission and he enrolled in the new school. It was the big turn in his life. He worked at his secondary-school studies with the intelligence and application which his father had given to religious studies. He was top of his class, top of the school, and finally, in the special circumstances of the independence war against the Dutch, top of the country.

  In 1948 the Dutch occupied Landkat. They were after Imaduddin’s father (as they were after Mr. Wahid’s diabetic father in Jombang), and the family fled in five canoes down the Strait of Malacca to Aceh. There must have been some kind of larger family or community support, because Imaduddin was able to continue with his studies, at first in Aceh until the war of independence ended, and after that in the more important town of Medan. In 1953, when he was twenty-two, Imaduddin was admitted to the Bandung Institute of Technology. This meant that, even with the immense upheavals of the Japanese occupation and the war of independence, Imaduddin had been such a good student that he had lost only four years. When he was thirty he became an assistant professor at Bandung; the following year he went to the United States to do a higher degree.

  It was a stupendous career for a man born in 1931 in a small town in the Dutch East Indies; and very little of it could have been in the head of the fourteen-year-old boy marching with his little militia band in Landkat in 1946. Yet the new learning that the little boy and then the young man had mastered had always been kept in its place. There seemed never to have been any kind of cultural or spiritual dislocation in Imaduddin. He had always remained the grandson of the sultan’s muezzin from the last century, calling the faithful to prayer five times a day; and that man’s son, the mufti’s favorite, whose higher education had been in Mecca and al-Azhar.

  Mr. Wahid, with his pesantren education and pesantren family pieties, had become more internationalist and liberal. Imaduddin had remained committed to the holy war.

  Sitting at the dining table—with the two serving girls in frocks flitting about between the sitting room and the little kitchen—he had become restless. After the flight of his family in five canoes down the Strait of Malacca, his story had telescoped and lost detail. His face clouded; he looked as preoccupied as when he had come out of the massage room.

  He said, “How much longer do you want?”

  I said half an hour, perhaps an hour.

  He said, “Somebody from Oklahoma wants to be a Muslim. He is going to convert today. He is an electrical engineer. I have met him once or twice. He is going to marry an Indonesian girl. I haven’t instructed him, but I have been in touch with the girl’s family. He is waiting for me in the mosque. I should have met him there at eleven-thirty.”

  It was now a quarter to twelve, more than time to leave. It was during the good-byes that I heard from Imaduddin or from Mrs. Imaduddin, serene and lovely as always, that they were moving to a new house.

  We left in the Mercedes. The driver, Mohammed Ali, was already at his station, in the car, and the well-trained serving girls (one in a plain brown frock, one in a red), with very few words having to be said, flitted out from the low, dark house into the sunlight of the tiny garden to slide back the heavy garage door and to open the gate, and to wait until Mohammed Ali had maneuvered the big car out. The car, and the ceremony its size imposed, overpowered the house and the narrow lane. Imaduddin had outgrown
this setting.

  In no time we had turned into a main road and were driving past the Heroes Cemetery. Imaduddin was right: his house would have been easy to find if the taxi driver had taken the right road. But that wouldn’t have helped me when I got to the house: the masseur would have been there.

  We passed a row of shops with their goods almost out on the road: furniture shops, shops dealing in motor-car wheels. Imaduddin—as though, because he was now close to power, he had to explain what we were seeing—said the shops shouldn’t have been there, but it was hard to regulate them.

  A minute or two later, as though the unregulated shops might in fact have made him think of evictions, he said, “The sultan’s palace in Landkat was burned down in the war against the Dutch. Not by the Dutch. It was Sukarno’s …” He fumbled for the words.

  I said, “Sukarno’s scorched-earth policy?”

  They were the words he wanted. And again I wondered at the extraordinary events Imaduddin—barely a year older than I was—had lived through. Extraordinary events, but he talked of them easily, and did so without affectation: the events appeared hardly to have marked him. “He is himself,” his diplomat disciple had said. And there was a quality of completeness about Imaduddin, a strange innocence that appeared to have protected him right through.

  He said he had had Adi Sasono that morning on his religious television program. They had talked about the importance of the current independence anniversary celebration and its relation to Islam. It was actually very important, he said. “Islam is for freedom. It is anti-colonialist.”

  Once upon a time the government was nervous of the faith, and Imaduddin was a rebel. Now the government, though unchanged in its ruler and its political forms, said it served the faith, and Imaduddin had no trouble in making the faith serve the government. The faith was capacious; Imaduddin was learned; he didn’t violate himself.

  The Oklahoman was waiting in the Sunda Kelapa Mosque in Menteng. Menteng, though traffic-ridden and polluted, was the diplomatic and fashionable area of Jakarta, and the Sunda Kelapa Mosque served the best people.

  The name—from the Hindu kingdom that existed here—was on the wall of the mosque in large fanciful letters. The big open courtyard, full of glare, was made of concrete blocks. It was after twelve, and Imaduddin said—as if it was a stroke of luck, an unexpected blessing for being late—that it was time for the midday prayer. He intended to do the prayer and then he would do the conversion. There would be no hardship for the Oklahoman and his party; they would no doubt be doing the prayer too.

  If salvation could be compared to a banquet, prayer was for Imaduddin—from the excitement and pleasure with which he went at it—like a tasty preparatory snack taken five times a day, a kind of paradisal fast food, never cloying, always sharpening the appetite. So now, tight and belted, a thick wallet showing in his back pocket, a man completely at home and private in the openness of the main mosque, Imaduddin, after his ablutions, with a slightly tilted walk that made me think of his back and the masseur, padded to the front where the men were lined up, facing the wall, now standing, now squatting, now bowing. Far to the back, thirteen or fourteen women in white headdresses and long gowns stood in their own line.

  Among the men the Oklahoman was noticeable, even from the back, by his greater size, his height and middle girth, and by the flat black Muslim cap he was wearing, like Imaduddin’s masseur.

  Afterwards, when the prayer was done and people had left the main hall, and the Oklahoman was sitting in the sunlight on the concrete steps, pulling on his socks, Imaduddin went to him and said—with an excess of joviality, perhaps because I was present—“It’s amazing how you’ve changed. You don’t look like an American. You already look like an Indonesian.”

  The Oklahoman, straightening a sock over a foot, and looking down at it, said in a voice that didn’t carry far, “Still white.”

  After Imaduddin’s joviality the words had an ambiguous ring. They might have been defensive, from a zealous convert, or they might have been a way of letting Imaduddin know that he wasn’t to go too far. For the first time I saw Imaduddin momentarily uncertain. His smile lasted a little too long before he said, “Uncooked.” As though carrying on the joviality and the racial game; but then he let the matter drop and left the Oklahoman to his socks and shoes.

  The conversion ceremony was to take place in a room downstairs. It was small and low and air-conditioned, with walls faced with gray marble. The marble had disquieting mausoleum suggestions, and the room felt quite cold after the glare and reflected heat of the exposed big courtyard and steps. It was furnished like a lecture room of sorts. For the principals of the ceremony there was a high platform with hardwood benches or forms back and front of an altar-like table, with microphones; for the witnesses, on the floor, there were rows of classroom-style chair-desks.

  The bride-to-be—for whose sake the Oklahoman was converting—was the niece of a businessman who was also a well-known poet. Poetry here, for the most part an amateur activity, was much respected, and the people gathering in the marble chamber reflected this mixture of culture and comfortableness. Whispers subsided. The hissing of the air conditioners, always there, but now suddenly dominant, appeared to act as a fanfare for the ceremony.

  When the shufflings were done, Imaduddin, with his glasses hanging down stylishly from his neck, appeared as a central figure on the platform, on the far bench, against the gray marble wall, below an elegant brass plaque with black Arabic lettering. He sat between two men—beginning to chant from the Koran, against the air-conditioner hiss—and faced the Oklahoman and his bride across the table.

  They, the couple, had their backs to us, together with their witnesses, one on either side. The bride, Indonesian-small, looked eager and feather-light in a yellow gown and a reddish headdress. The Oklahoman, white-necked below his flat black cap, was broader, stolider. His blue trousers looked American; his green batik shirt—it might have been a gift or a new purchase—did not, on him, suggest frivolity.

  When the chanting ended, Imaduddin, smiling at the Oklahoman, said to him in English, “We welcome you back to Islam. Back to Islam, because in our belief everyone was born as a Muslim, without sin. You have come back to Islam because you have opened your heart to the truth. In everything submitting yourself to the will of God. Islam means submission.”

  Then it was time for the Oklahoman to make his declaration. He said first of all that he was speaking in conscience and without duress. He sounded shy. He had no pronounced Southern accent, and for a big man his voice was light, never rising above the hiss of the air conditioners. This might have been because he had his back to us, and perhaps also because he didn’t have Imaduddin’s microphone skills. He spoke the words of his convert’s declaration first in Arabic—this would have been a further reason for his shyness—and then in English: “I testify there is no other God than Allah and Mohammed is his last prophet.”

  Imaduddin said, with something of his lecturer’s jollity, “Ah.” As though what had just been said hadn’t, after all, been so hard. Smiling, and still with his jollity, he said to the Oklahoman, “You want to change your name?”

  The Oklahoman didn’t have time to answer. Feminine voices called from the floor in English, “Yes, yes.” And, “Better.” And, “Much better.”

  Like an impresario, Imaduddin asked, “You like the name Mohammed?”

  The Oklahoman liked the name.

  “And Adam?”

  That name was liked, as was Khalid.

  “So,” Imaduddin said, “Mohammed Adam Khalid, you are reborn as a new Adam. I hope you will be happy with the new name.”

  The main part of the ceremony was now over. The bride-to-be’s family took over. They wanted the change of name and they were happy. Mr. Khalid, the Oklahoman—a gentle, small face on his big body—came down from the platform and there was a general kissing and embracing. The women in the gathering, until then demure, became assertive. This part of the ceremony belonged to
them. There was a release of pent-up, happy chatter. Cameras flashed, and the food boxes, from a firm of caterers, which had been stacked up all the while on a chest against one wall, were taken around now by girls and offered to everyone.

  Imaduddin had appeared to suggest Mr. Mohammed Adam Khalid’s new names to him one by one, as though each name had required a separate inspiration. But this turned out to be only Imaduddin’s preacher’s or television style. He said when I asked him about it that Mr. Khalid’s names had been chosen by Mr. Khalid’s bride-to-be. So the tremulous, eager girl in yellow and red had known all along what was going to happen to the big man from Oklahoma sitting beside her on the bench.

  I learned this, about the names, in Imaduddin’s house on Sunday morning. His mental training trip to the United States and Canada had been delayed, and I was able to go and see him again. There was no trouble with taxis this time. He sent the Mercedes and Mohammed Ali to the hotel. He wasn’t absolutely sure that Mohammed Ali—as a chauffeur still a little green and shy—would know how or where to pick people up from the hotel. But Mohammed Ali was only five minutes late. The Mercedes smelled of air fresheners, like a New York taxi; and the gaudily jacketed cassettes might have been of Arab music.

  Recognizable and reassuring this time: the small, colorfully uniformed marching groups, arms swinging from side to side; the furniture shops and wheel shops almost encroaching on the highway; the Heroes Cemetery; the lane, the little house, the big garage with the sliding door, the dark room, the little Eiffel Tower and other mementos, the small sunlit garden at the back bounded by a rockery against the wall of the neighboring house with the red-tile roof; the serving girls. One of them, in a red bodice, offered me fruit and fruit juice. Imaduddin wasn’t in the room, was perhaps with the masseur again. But Mrs. Imaduddin came in to welcome me, padding about on the plain reed mats on the tiled floor, and then she went out again. She came in again a short while later to ask whether I liked the fruit and to say that her husband was “preparing.” He came out, in his sarong again, from the front room, moving briskly, looking down, not saying much, saving his talk for when he was dressed.