Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  THE statues of war and revolution in Jakarta were overemphatic; some were absurd. But they commemorated recent history; and that history was heroic and dreadful, and dizzying to read about.

  It was the Japanese who, when they occupied Indonesia in 1942, abolished the Dutch language. They ordered all Dutch signs to be taken down or painted out; and overnight, after three hundred years, Dutch disappeared. The Japanese established Sukarno and other Indonesian nationalist leaders (imprisoned or exiled by the Dutch) in a kind of Indonesian government during the war. The Japanese organized the Indonesian army. This was the army that fought the Dutch for four years after the war, when the Dutch tried to reassert their rule. And this was the army that afterwards, during the twenty years of Sukarno’s presidency, held the scattered islands of the archipelago together, putting down Muslim and Christian separatist movements in various places.

  Independence was not easy for Indonesia. It didn’t come as regeneration and five-year plans. It came as a series of little wars; it came as chaos, display, a continuation of Sukarno’s nationalist rhetoric. Sukarno’s glamour faded. The army’s power grew. It was the army that eventually, in 1965, deposed Sukarno. The army claimed that the communists were planning, with Sukarno’s passive support, to take over the country. And after the chaos and frustrations of independence, there was a terror then greater than anything the archipelago had known.

  A hundred thousand people were arrested. There was a massacre of Chinese (resident in Indonesia for centuries, and traditional victims of pogroms: the Dutch themselves killed many thousands in Jakarta in 1740). And it is said that in popular uprisings all over the archipelago half a million people thought to be communists were hunted down and killed. Some people say a million. Indonesians are still stunned by the events of 1965 and later. When they talk of 1965 they are like people looking, from a distance, at a mysterious part of themselves.

  Now the army rules. The khaki-coloured army buses are everywhere; and Jakarta is dotted with the barracks of kommando units (strange, that this particular Dutch word should be retained) that fly the red-and-white Indonesian national flag. The army has made itself into a political organization, and it has decreed that it shall be powerfully represented in every government.

  It is the army that holds the archipelago together. And army rule—after the Sukarno years of drift and rhetoric—has given Indonesia fifteen years of rest. In this period, with the help of Indonesian oil, Jakarta has sprouted its skyscrapers; the main roads have been paved; the beginnings of services appropriate to a big city have appeared. In this period of rest there has also grown up an educated generation, the first generation in fifty years to know stability. But the army rule chafes. And already—the trap of countries like Indonesia—with stability and growth there is restlessness.

  The restlessness is expressed by the new Islam, the Islam that is more than ritual, that speaks of the injustices done to Allah’s creatures and of the satanic ways of worldly governments: the Islam that makes people withdraw, the more violently to leap forward.

  IT is dizzying to read of recent Indonesian history. And to look at it in the life of one man is to wonder how, with so little to hold on to in the way of law or country, anyone could withstand so many assaults on his personality.

  Suryadi was in his mid-fifties. He was small, dark-brown, frail-looking. He was born in East Java and he described himself as one of the “statistical Muslims” of Indonesia. He had received no religious training; such religion as he had was what was in the air around him. He wasn’t sure whether he believed in the afterlife; and he didn’t know that that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.

  He belonged to the nobility, but in Java that meant only that he was not of the peasantry. The Dutch ruled Java through the old feudal courts of the country. But Java was only an agricultural colony, and the skills required of the nobility in the Dutch time were not high. Suryadi’s grandfather, as a noble, had had a modest white-collar job; Suryadi’s father was a bookkeeper in a bank.

  It was possible for Suryadi, as a noble, to go to a Dutch school. The fees were low; and Suryadi, in fact, didn’t have to pay. The education was good. Just how good it was was shown by the excellent English Suryadi spoke. And recently, wishing to take up German again and enrolling in the German cultural centre in Jakarta, the Goethe Institute, Suryadi found that, with his Dutch-taught German of forty years before, he was put in the middle class, and he was later able without trouble to get a certificate in an examination marked in Germany.

  Early in 1942 the Japanese occupied Java. The message from Radio Tokyo was that the Japanese would give Indonesia its independence, and there were many people willing to welcome the Japanese as liberators. Suryadi was in the final year of his school. The Dutch teachers were replaced by Indonesians, and the headmaster or supervisor was Japanese. For six months classes continued as they would have done under the Dutch. Then—and it is amazing how things go on, even during an upheaval—Suryadi went to the university. The lecturers and professors there were now Japanese. But the Japanese simply couldn’t manage foreign languages. They recognized this themselves, and after a time they appointed Indonesians, who worked under Japanese supervisors.

  The Indonesians used the classes to preach nationalism. Already much of the good will towards the Japanese had gone. It was clear to Suryadi that the whole economy was being subverted to assist the Japanese war effort. Thousands of Indonesians were sent to work on the Burma Railway (and there is still a community of Indonesians in Thailand, from the enforced migration of that time). Radios were sealed; the radios that had once brought the good news from Radio Tokyo could no longer be listened to.

  Two incidents occurred at this time which made Suryadi declare his opposition to the Japanese. The university authorities decreed that all students were to shave their heads. It was the discipline of the Zen monastery. And Suryadi felt it as he was meant to feel it: an assault on his personality. And then one day on the parade ground—students were given military training—a student was slapped by a Japanese officer. All the Indonesians felt humiliated, and Suryadi and his friends held a protest demonstration in the university. Thirty of them, teachers as well as students, were arrested by the Japanese secret police and taken to jail.

  In the jail they heard people being tortured for anti-Japanese offences and even for listening to the radio. But Suryadi’s group were treated like political prisoners; and they continued to be disciplined in the way of the Zen monastery. They were beaten with bamboo staves, but it was only a ritual humiliation. The bamboo staves were split at the end; they didn’t hurt; they only made a loud cracking noise. After a month of this Suryadi and his friends were released. But they were expelled from the university. So Suryadi never completed his education.

  They had got off lightly because the Indonesian nationalist leaders were still cooperating with the Japanese. Sukarno never believed that Japan was going to lose the war, Suryadi said; Sukarno didn’t even believe that the atom bomb had been dropped on Japan. It was only after the Japanese surrender that Sukarno and the nationalists proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. And four years of fighting against the Dutch followed.

  What events to have lived through, in one’s first twenty-six years! But Suryadi was without rancour. The events had been too big; there was no one to blame. He had no ill-feeling towards either Dutch or Japanese. He did business now with both; and he respected both as people who honoured a bargain. The Japanese had the reputation in Southeast Asia of being hard bargainers (there had been anti-Japanese riots in Jakarta because of the Japanese domination of the Indonesian market); but Suryadi had found the Japanese more generous, if anything, than the Dutch.

  Suryadi was without rancour, and it could be said that he had won through. But there was an Indonesian sadness in him, and it was the sadness of a man who felt he had been left alone, and was now—after the Dutch time, the Japanese time, the four years of the war against the Dutch, the twenty years of Sukarno—without a ca
use. More than once the world had seemed about to open out for him as an Indonesian, but then had closed up again.

  He had lain low during the later Sukarno years. Army rule after that had appeared to revive the country. But now something else was happening. A kind of Javanese culture was being asserted. Suryadi was Javanese; the Javanese dance and the Javanese epics and puppet plays were part of his being. But he felt that Javanese culture was being misused; it was encouraging a revival of feudal attitudes, with the army taking the place of the old courts. Suryadi had the Javanese eye for feudal courtesies. He saw that nowadays the soldier’s salute to an officer was more than an army salute; it also contained a feudal bow. It was a twisted kind of retrogression. It wasn’t what Suryadi had wanted for his country.

  And he had lost his daughter. She had become a convert to the new Muslim cause—the Malaysian disease, some people called it here. At school and then at the university she had been a lively girl. She had done Javanese dancing; she was a diver; she liked to go camping. But then, at the university, she had met a new Muslim, a born-again Muslim; and she had begun to change. She went out with her hair covered; she wore drab long gowns; and her mind began correspondingly to dull.

  Suryadi and his wife had done the unforgivable one day. They had gone among the girl’s papers, and they had come upon a pledge she had signed. She had pledged to be ruled in everything by a particular Muslim teacher; he was to be her guide to paradise. She, who would have been a statistical Muslim like Suryadi and his wife, was now being instructed in the pure faith.

  Suryadi didn’t take it well. He thought now he should have been calmer in the beginning; by making his dismay too apparent he had probably pushed the girl further away from him. He said to her one day, “Suppose someone asks you to go out camping now, will you say, ‘I can’t go, because I have no assurance there will be water for my ablutions before my prayers’?” He had spoken with irritation and irony. But later she came back to him and said, “I have checked. In the Koran there is nothing that says it is obligatory if you are travelling.” And Suryadi understood then that she had become impervious to irony; that she had become removed from the allusive family way of talking. The intellectual loss was what grieved him most. He said, “But don’t you have a mind any longer? Do you have to go to that book every time? Can’t you think for yourself now?” She said, “The Koran is the source of all wisdom and virtue in the world.”

  She had married the born-again Muslim who had led her to the faith. She had a degree; he was still only a student at the university; but, like a good Muslim wife, she subordinated herself to him. That was the new sadness that Suryadi was learning to live with: a once-lively daughter who had gone strange.

  Still, recently he had found a little cause for hope. He was driving her back one day to her in-laws’ house, where she lived with her husband. He said, “I have bought that little house for you. Why don’t you go and live there? Why does your husband want to keep on living with his parents? It isn’t right. Why doesn’t he make up his mind to act on his own?” She had said then, “He’s got an inferiority complex, Father.”

  And this little sign, the first for some time, that his daughter still had a mind, was still capable of judging, was a great comfort to Suryadi. She had seen what was clear to Suryadi: that the boy was a poor student, didn’t have the background, couldn’t cope with university life. He was still some way from taking his degree and wasn’t giving enough time to his work. During the month of Ramadan, the fasting month, he had given up his work altogether, fasting all day and going to the mosque in the evening to pray. That was easier than being with the difficult books; and his religious correctness was admired by his Islamic group at the university.

  Suryadi’s daughter had seen this on her own. That was some weeks ago. And it was now what Suryadi was waiting for: that in time she might see a little more.

  At the end, just before we separated, Suryadi said, “But I’ve been lucky. I haven’t been like so many others in Indonesia, switching to another wavelength under pressure.”

  “Another wavelength?”

  “You know how people are like here. But perhaps you don’t. They turn mystical. Logical, rational people. They start burning incense or sitting up at night in graveyards if they want to achieve something. If they feel they are frustrated, not advancing in their work or career.”

  “Do you call that mystical?”

  “I don’t know what else you can call it.”

  ISLAM was the formal faith of the people. But below that were the impulses of the older world, relics of the Hindu-Buddhist-animist past, but no longer part of a system. The ninth-century temples of Borobudur and Prambanam—the first Buddhist, the second Hindu—were a cause for pride. But they were no longer fully possessed by the people, because they were no longer fully understood. Their meaning, once overpowering, now had to be elucidated by scholars; and Borobudur remained a mystery, the subject of academic strife. It was the Dutch who rediscovered Borobudur and presented it to the people of Java: that was how Gunawan Mohammed, a poet and editor, put it. Gunawan—a Muslim, but in his own, Indonesian way—said, speaking of the past, and making a small chopping gesture, “Somewhere the cord was cut.”

  They were a people to whom the past was at once living and dead. And—whether they were talking about the killings of 1965 or about sitting up at night in a graveyard—they talked as though they remained mysterious to themselves.

  And now, with the army peace, with the growth of industry and learning, with the coming to Indonesia of the new technological civilization, the world had grown stranger. I walked one Saturday evening in the market area of central Jakarta, the Pasar Baru, the New Bazaar, with the broken pavements, the mud, the shops full of imported goods, the food stalls, the amplified records. In this atmosphere of the fairground I came upon a bookshop. It was a well-lit shop and it had books on two floors. There were books in English on technical subjects—medicine, psychology, engineering. There was also a large section of English books on mystical or occult subjects—Taoism, I Ching, Paul Brunton’s searches in secret India and secret Egypt. This was how the new civilization appeared: technical skill and magic, a civilization without its core.

  After the dizzying history of the last fifty years, the world had grown strange, and people floated. Whether they moved forward, into the new civilization, or backward, like Suryadi’s daughter, towards the purer Arab faith, they were now always entering somebody else’s world, and getting further from themselves.

  2

  Sitor: Reconstructing the Past

  Indonesia opened slowly, and when I met Sitor Situmorang I did not take in all of the man. He was a poet; he had been connected with the later days of Sukarno and, after the military takeover, had been imprisoned for ten years, from 1965 to 1975. At our first meeting—and it was hard to credit later—I missed the political side of the man, and the ten years’ imprisonment, when he hadn’t been allowed to write or read anything. I believe I missed that side of him because at our first meeting Sitor wished me to overlook it: perhaps at that moment that part of his past wearied him.

  He came across as a writer, humane, reflective. His talk was of an autobiography he was writing and having trouble with. He was a small man of fifty-six, with a small bony face, Chinese-Negrito, with bristling eyebrows; a canvas shoulder bag with books gave him an odd touch of contemporary undergraduate style.

  He came from the north of the large island of Sumatra. Sumatra was physically more wild than Java. The Muslims were more Muslim; the Hindu-Buddhist influence was less; there were Christian areas; and there were still animist tribes. Sitor came from one of the tribes; he was a Batak. And his tribal origins lay at the heart of the trouble he was having with his autobiography.

  I thought of the difficulties Shafi had in making a pattern of the events of his much shorter life, his progression from village to town. And that was part of the problem for Sitor. But Sitor’s tribal past was further away; he had lost touch with it; and h
e had found that to write without an understanding of what he had come from was to do no more than record a sequence of events. That was why for some time he had put aside the actual writing and had concentrated instead on understanding his tribal background. He had gone back to his village in North Sumatra with a young Canadian woman anthropologist. She had helped to give him back some of his tribal past; and that had been like an illumination.

  This was what came out at our first meeting. It was a short meeting; we both had other things to do. I was still at that time trying to get in touch with Muslim groups—they were being secretive.

  Sitor went with me to one office; it was on his way. I thought he moved with the authority of a man who was known. But when someone waved to him from the window of an upper floor, Sitor drew my attention to it. He said, “I don’t know him, you know.” And even then I didn’t fully take in how important it would have been to Sitor—after his ten years’ imprisonment, his ten years’ silence as a writer, from the age of forty-two to fifty-two—to have these little proofs that he was still a name.

  The Muslims were elusive. Taxi rides before and after lunch, in the humid heat, led to nothing. Travel fatigue and hotel fatigue fell over me in the afternoon. My room was on the fifteenth floor. I began to feel I had lived with the silent, air-conditioned view for a long time: red tile roofs and trees, skyscrapers, a sign for Xerox, planes coming in to land at the domestic airport to the left, traffic on the roads on either side of the hotel garden, fumes hanging over the highways like a brown mist, rising and mingling with the clouds that held more rain. Jakarta was not a city for taking afternoon walks in.