Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
The LIPI building, with its modern round tower, impressive from the highway, turned out to have a bureaucratic tarnish inside, as of a place not personal to anyone. Dewi’s office was on the eleventh floor. The waiting room, a segment of the circular floor, was in shape like a piece of a pie that had been cut down and across, with a little arc of external wall like a kind of crust at the side. There were Indonesian wooden puppets on this wall, together with a picture of a temple in multicolored, crinkled batik; on another wall there were bows and arrows. Dewi’s office was across the corridor. It was on the wrong side of the round tower for an afternoon meeting; the sun was fierce; we needed a blind.
Dewi had an academic background. Her father—who had recently died—was a professor. He had done his higher degrees at Columbia and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her mother was a teacher of history at the university in Sumatra.
When Dewi was a child the family lived in Bandung. She was three and a half—and her father was away, studying in Scotland—when relations from Sumatra came visiting, and one of them said to her, “But you should see what you have in Sumatra.” This made Dewi passionate to see what she had in Sumatra, and she went back with these relations to what she realized, even as a child, was her ancestral land.
There was a family house in Sumatra, one of the fabulous Minangkabau traditional houses with horn-shaped roofs. But it had been neglected for twenty years and more, and was empty, and there was talk of spirits. Dewi didn’t even like going near it. She lived with her mother’s maternal uncle. He didn’t live in a traditional house.
Dewi said, “He was an ulama.” A Muslim religious teacher. “In Java they call it a kiyai, in West Sumatra they call him an ulama. I lived with him for a year. He had a small mosque where he lived. It was called a surau, because it was not a public mosque. He had students coming to study with him. He had his youngest wife living with him. This was unusual, but because he was an important man—and his wife was actually one of his students at an earlier time—he didn’t go to live with her. Polygamy was quite common in those days, but this was the only wife he cohabited with. Before my time he had one or two wives at the same time. He always returned to his surau after being with one of his wives. By the time I was there he had his youngest wife living with him, and she brought me up.”
Dewi spoke in her open, lyrical way. And it was interesting that, with a father studying in Scotland (and probably fending off jokes about Muslims and their shuffling about of four wives), his very young daughter should be discovering and accepting, through an adored and pious older relative, the very same idea, but as an aspect of a beautiful old world.
“When my father came back from Scotland I went back to Bandung. I stayed in Bandung for two years. And when different relatives came from West Sumatra to stay with us in Bandung I decided to ask them to take me back with them. I was five and a half.”
I asked, “Can you remember why you liked the place so much?”
“It was a very beautiful place. Wide open spaces. And we were somebody. When we are there our family is deferred to. I had no competition. My great-uncle simply doted on me. He was very fierce, but to me he was very loving. My great-uncle’s wife was very loving. She used to protect me from my great-uncle’s wrath. I was very fortunate, because my great-uncle wanted someone to carry on the family name. West Sumatra is a contradiction. It is very Islamic, but it is also matrilineal. And I was the daughter of my mother, who was the last female in the line. For this I was very precious to the family. I was expected to show the flag.
“My great-uncle took it upon himself to educate me. He was an ulama, very conservative, all orthodox. But he did not want me to be deprived of modern education. He did not want my mother or my father to blame him for my lack of education. That was why he said he hadn’t wanted me to come back to West Sumatra. But in fact I wanted to wear this head covering and to go to the village school—in the religious village school you had to wear a sarong and a head scarf.”
“You thought of the sarong and the scarf as pretty clothes?”
“I didn’t think of it like that. I thought it was right. But my great-uncle put his foot down. He said that those village schools taught Islam badly and had a poor modern curriculum. He taught me Islam at home himself—when I went to the normal school. So I learned the Koran, and he read various stories from the hadith, the supplementary traditions.
“He would also take me around on a Sunday during the holidays to look at our family lands, so that I would know where they are and who worked them. Paddy fields are scattered all over the place. And coconut groves too. Most of the water and the arable paddy fields are at the bottom of the valley; the people at the top of the valley have to walk miles and miles to their paddy fields. My branch of the family tends to control more of the land resources. That is because the women didn’t have too many offspring. If a clan becomes very large the land is parceled out between many people. The land is not alienable, but it has to be divided among the users, the heirs. When an heir dies the land goes back to the nearest female relative.
“So, going round our land, I was being given knowledge of family kinships as well. Because the people who work our land are mostly relatives. And it is important to get to know boundaries. So one acquired a whole picture of village networking.”
From five and a half to fifteen Dewi lived in West Sumatra. Her father visited once, when she was about eight; and her mother visited with some friends two years later. From the age of twelve Dewi went every fasting month holiday to Bandung. So the village was her world.
“Living in the village is a total experience. It wasn’t only about going to school or learning the Koran or finding out about your family or knowing about your property. It is about learning the village way of seeing, and their idiosyncratic beliefs, not always rational, and yet very important. You ignore them or discard them at your peril.
“It happens that my family belongs to a clan—Pitapang—which is famous for its various taboos. They are famous in the village. People say, ‘The Pitapang can’t do this. The Pitapang can’t do that.’ A lot of people from other clans do not realize that there are things we cannot do.”
My hearing began to play tricks. I didn’t always hear “Pitapang” when Dewi spoke the word. I sometimes heard “Peter Pan.”
“There is a belief that the Pitapang is one of the older clans. The Pitapang ancestors probably moved into the area when it was virgin jungle or forest. In the pre-Islamic tradition it was believed that all those forests and springs and rivers were occupied by spirits. Of course, the humans who come to clear the land had to make a compromise with the original spirit inhabitants. So the ancestors had to abide by a code of behavior. Basically designed to ensure a balance in the environment.”
Though that idea of balance and the “environment” was a later, borrowed idea, growing out of another kind of knowledge and logic, and did not have the force of the earth reverences Dewi was talking about. She herself seemed to say something like that almost immediately.
“In conducting our everyday lives there are other factors we have to consider. We always have to ask permission when we cut down a big tree, or drain a spring, or build a house. We have to follow certain rituals, ceremonies, to appease the guardian spirits.”
This village idea about the spirits of trees and springs seemed idolatrous and irreligious to her great-uncle, the conservative ulama. He already felt that Islam was badly taught in the village religious schools, and had personally taken on the religious instruction of his great-niece.
“My great-uncle basically didn’t want to follow these un-Islamic practices. He knew about it and probably believed some of it, but most of the time he believed that making offering to spirits was un-Islamic. The clan, and some of the older people in the village, believed that if a taboo is transgressed by someone of the Pitapang clan, someone in the clan usually suffers the consequences: a child becomes ill, or something unpleasant happens. My great-uncle paid
little attention to the taboos. So I was often ill, and his wife and his friends kept saying, ‘Ah, your great-uncle must have done something again.’ As happened when they used the rice-granary timbers to build a latrine.”
The rice granary would have been a dependency of a main house, and it too would have been horn-roofed, a miniature, on stilts, broader at the top than at the bottom, perhaps with decorated gables, with walls of variously patterned woven-bamboo panels, and with a ladder rather than steps. Rice, the staple, the subject of every kind of old reverence and fertility rite, had always to be treated with respect; to use the timbers of a rice granary, even an old or derelict one, to build a latrine was to set two opposed ideas together, and was a serious kind of desecration.
Dewi said, “I had been ill for a couple of days. They gave me village medicine. My datuk, my great-uncle, also had knowledge of village medicines, and had very little faith in doctors; he refused to go to a doctor. Most of the villagers believed he had the ability to talk to some of the guardian spirits. So when children became ill a lot of people came to him for medicine.
“After people asked whether my great-uncle had done ‘something’ in the past few days, my great-aunt remembered that maybe building the latrine with the granary timbers wasn’t appropriate. So my great-aunt and a young man took a big axe and went down to the latrine, and they claimed they saw a creature like a black monkey jumping into the water when they started cutting the bridging plank to the latrine.”
I asked Dewi, “What water did the monkey jump into?”
“A fishpond. After that I became well. People claimed that while I was hallucinating I said all kinds of things.
“There are a lot of things I would hesitate to do, even though I have moved away. For instance, if I go back to the village I would never dip a pot straight from the stove into the water. This is considered taboo. The logical explanation is that the soot might dirty the water.
“And: in fishponds, to protect the fish, we need to have all kinds of material put in the water, and the most common is the bamboo with sharp branches.” Tall bamboos with the branch ends sharpened to spikes: a hidden obstruction, dreadfully mangling. “This possibly protects the fish from poachers. And occasionally, when people drain the fishponds, people will take the bamboo out, and careless people will lean the bamboo against the wall of a house. If a Pitapang does that, it is considered transgressing a taboo, and we must never do it. I was taught that if we did that in the evening, the spirits will be angry and the house will start to shake.
“In the village these taboos are like the equivalent of traffic lights in the city—things you have to obey.”
Most of these taboos applied only to the Pitapang clan. This was why Dewi believed that the Pitapangs were one of the oldest clans and that at the very beginning, when the rice lands were being developed in the jungle, it was they who had made the early compromises with the guardian spirits of the trees and the springs. These compromises had to be honored even now.
At the time of Dewi’s wedding, for instance, there were strange “goings on” (this was Dewi’s word) in the ancestral long house. But custom required that one of the big wedding occasions had to be in there. So the house was opened up, and preparations started for the great feast. Strange things then began to happen. Furniture was moved in inexplicable ways and food disappeared. A cousin of the maternal great-uncle who had brought Dewi up—a cousin, not the ulama himself, who would have washed his hands of the whole thing—said, “Oh, maybe we have forgotten to make offerings to the spirits.” They had forgotten. Since spirits do not live in clearings, but in big trees or springs, meat was thrown into the bush about fifty yards from the ancestral house. That was enough to appease the spirits. There was no trouble after that.
It was believed in the village that in the beginning there were three clans. The Pitapangs were one of the three. The three clans were descended from three cousins; they did not intermarry. It was these three clans who observed the original taboos. And the Pitapangs had an added gift: they were rain-makers.
Dewi said, “I have noticed in my experience that whenever I have a big party, that during that one day there would be some rain, if only for an hour or half an hour. I got married in April. A dry season. The first day the reception was in my husband’s house.”
“He belongs to one of the clans?”
“Different clan, but same village.”
“Arranged marriage?”
“A personal choice. In my husband’s house they were having problems with water. My husband’s house is on the higher ground, very dependent on rain to fill their water tank. So they had to be careful with water. During the first day of the wedding it was completely dry. The next day the party was going to be at our ancestral house.” It had not been used for many years and was in bad repair. “At three in the morning on the big day the rain started to pour, and everybody got wet in the house. The outdoor kitchen was totally flooded. But then in the morning the sun shone beautifully, and everything was nice until eleven o’clock, and the groom came, and the guests. When they were in the house it started to pour again for about an hour. That kind of thing happens at every wedding.
“There was a mistaken belief that when we left the village this kind of Pitapang association with rain would disappear. But such is not the case. An aunt of mine married off her youngest daughter in Jakarta. So, fearing it would rain, she actually took the trouble to go to a medicine man, a dukun, in Banten in West Java—which is famous for its medicine. And the dukun promised that it wouldn’t rain on the great day. And my aunt paid the dukun to make some offerings to prevent the rain on that day. It’s quite common here. When they were catering for Singapore National Day they had a dukun to ensure it wouldn’t rain. At the APEC meeting [one of the international conferences Dewi was connected with] a lot of medicine men were called.
“My mother and I said that we didn’t believe that the Banten dukun was strong enough to overcome the Pitapang tradition of rain during a family wedding. My uncle, my aunt’s husband, came from another part of Sumatra; he didn’t believe a word of our Pitapang beliefs. He said, ‘It is not going to rain.’ So he didn’t cover the lawn with an awning. He had all the tables done nicely. They worked all day on it. At three or four on the morning of the wedding the heavens opened, and all the nice tables were ruined. He believed too much in the Banten dukun. My mother and I at the time were quite pleased.”
Religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy. Perhaps only shut away tribal communities can have strong and simple ideas of who they are. The rest of us are for the most part culturally mixed, in varying degrees, and everyone lives in his own way with his complexity. Some people manage things instinctively. Some, like Dewi, can be self-aware at the same time. She valued all the many strands of her background. She said, “My life is rich because my different worlds converge.”
When, after ten years, she left her Sumatran village, it was to go to England, to be with her academic parents. She was fifteen. She had spent very little time with her parents; but she found she had no problems with them. There was no generation problem. The years in the village had made her religious and conservative; she thought that her parents were too liberal, and sometimes she found her mother’s skirts too short and tight. In time her political attitudes were to change, but her personal values remained conservative; though, because of the matrilineal traditions of the Minangkabau, this conservatism gave her a degree of self-esteem as a woman that was not strictly Islamic.
In many ways, then, her love of the ways of her village appeared to expose her to the old fundamentalist conflict of the region. It was as though the bloody thirty-year religious war of the last century (which had destroyed the Minangkabau royal family and their palace, and had brought in the Dutch as rulers) had settled nothing. Something like this, or some related theme, must have been in Dewi’s mind—there might, perhaps, even have been recent academic seminars or conferences on the “plural” society: there is no end
of these conferences in Indonesia: they are a kind of harmless substitute for a free press—because, without any prompting from me, she went on to make an almost formal statement about the true faith and the old ways.
She said, “When it comes to relations between men and God one should adhere to the pure form of Islam, not the syncretic form. We cannot be a good Muslim and adhere to polytheistic or animistic beliefs and practices. But when it comes to ordering the relations between man and his neighbors—how we live in society—each grouping has different needs and customs. I do not believe that a universal religion or a national ideology should attempt to eradicate customary practices, as long as those practices do not violate the basic tenets.”
It was a restatement of what she said had been agreed about the relationship between Islam and the adat, the traditional ways, after the bitter religious war of the last century.
“Islam was put at the top, the highest body of law, to which the adat would be subordinated. The saying is: ‘The adat would lean on the sharia [Islamic law], and the sharia on the Kitab.’ ” The Book, the Koran. “Practices explicitly violating Islam were to be forbidden—drinking, gambling, cockfighting, marrying more than four wives. But other aspects are considered O.K., because there is nothing in the Koran or in the sayings of the Prophet against the matrilineal system.”
Yet, though in Dewi’s mind all was clear, the relations between men and God would not always be separate from the relations between men and their neighbors. There would always be ambiguities, even about the position of women, and these ambiguities of the faith in West Sumatra were again awaiting a fundamentalist rage.
I stayed all afternoon in Dewi’s office. When I left, LIPI offices were closing, and the bureaucratic round tower, with many of its inmates now apparently running away, seemed more impersonal than ever. On the avenue just in front I waved down a street taxi. Easy enough to do; but the taxi was dilapidated, with open windows and without air-conditioning, and it was the rush hour. Rush-hour traffic in Jakarta was always bad; this was very much worse than usual because some streets in the center near the presidential palace had been closed off that day in preparation for the celebrations of RI50—the official shorthand for the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence. For many minutes, in an absolute jam, the hot air quivering with fumes and car-body glitter, I faced the back of a small van: