Among The Believers Part 31

Out of this, as in the days of Omar and the other rightly guided caliphs, all good would flow. It was where his fundamentalism led: the need for the pious leader, not a man of individual conscience, compa.s.sion, or wisdom, but a man who lived according to the book, the man who could stand in for the Prophet, the man who knew the Prophet's deeds and revelations so well that he would order affairs as the Prophet himself might have ordered them. It was the idea of piety and goodness that separated Islam from other ethical systems.

The logic of Imaduddin's faith, and his own integrity, was simple: injustice was un-Islamic, and Indonesia was full of injustice. And the Imaduddin who grieved about injustice at home could travel without pain to Muslim despotisms abroad. To these countries he travelled as to lands of the achieved faith. In such lands you did not look for injustice; you considered only the leader, and felt cleansed by the purity of his faith.

He told me he had spent a couple of days in Pakistan. Of Pakistan's founding and history he appeared to know little. To him it was only a Muslim state, made special by the poetry of Iqbal. Of the inst.i.tutions of Pakistan, of its phantom Islamic laws, its martial law and const.i.tutional breakdown, its political abjectness, the public whippings, the censorship, the humiliation of its intellectuals-of this he knew almost nothing.

Why did he know so little? He said, "Perhaps it's because of the Western press." And it was because of his suspicion of that press that he remained uncertain about events in Iran. He received only a little information "from inside."

A Muslim editor in Jakarta, to whom I reported this, said, "Nothing's keeping them out. They can send people to find out. If they don't know it's because they don't want to know. It doesn't serve their cause."

And indeed that cause was well served by the Western press. The Revival of Islam: the English words on the tee shirts sold at the end of the mental-training course had been made familiar by the cover stories of many international English-language magazines. Imaduddin himself, speaking of the attendance at his own mosque, had referred to The New York Times.

In Jakarta the president of an important youth organization attached to a mosque in a middle-cla.s.s area, one of Imaduddin's former trainees, said that Islam was the great new movement in the world, winning converts everywhere. Both Time and Newsweek had said so. And Newsweek, in a feature, had included the Prophet and one other Muslim in a list of fifty people who had most influenced the history of the world. "It's in history now," the young man said, meaning only that it was in Newsweek. (History like a divine ledger, guarded, like so many things, by the other civilization.) He was middle-cla.s.s, the young man, tall, of langsat complexion. Since his mental-training course with Imaduddin he had become obsessed with death and the afterlife. But there was still a corner of his mind open to worldly pride.

Newsweek and Time were helping to make the history they recorded. Islam was pure and perfect; the secular, dying West was to be rejected: that was the message. But the West was taking a long time to die. And more and more people were being drawn into the new world. In this new world, whose centre seemed so far away, so beyond control, newly evolved men like the president of the Jakarta youth organization felt only their inadequacies. These men were not peasants or pesantren boys. They aspired to high Western skills; they took encouragement from, they needed, Western witness. It was part of their great dependence. This dependence provoked the anguish which (like adolescents) they sought to a.s.suage in the daily severities of their new religious practice: the five-times-a-day prayers, the unnecessary fasts. The religion which was theirs but which they had disregarded had now become an area of particular privacy. It gave an illusion of wholeness; it held a promise of imminent triumph. It was also where they became interesting to themselves-and, as the newspapers made them understand, to others-again.

Rejection and dependence: it was hard for the half-evolved to break out of that circle. One of the girls at Imaduddin's mental-training course-she had sat apart from the boys and had covered her head and had drawn Koranic lessons from the Western psychological games-one of the girls was going on to London. She said it was to model. But it was only to do a modelling course. The Indonesian-European modelling business was becoming organized. I saw a brochure. Its appeal was to the middle cla.s.s, the half-evolved. Attractive now, this modelling business, to girls and their parents, an easy step forward into the new world. But it needed little imagination to see that a girl or two might become lost, and that one day that step forward might be another source of communal pain.

7.

The Interchangeable Revolutions

To replace all this. Islam sanctified rage-rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate great convulsions.

In Iran there had been Behzad, who had shown me Tehran and the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad. He was the communist son of a communist father, and not a Muslim. But his communism was like a version of the Shia faith of Iran, a version of the Shia rage about injustice: a rage rooted in the overthrow by the Arabs of the old Persian empire in the seventh century. Good Muslims believed that the best time in the world was the time of the Prophet and the first four, good caliphs; Behzad believed that the best time was in Russia between 1917 and 1953. Darkness had been dispelled; an unjust society had been overthrown; and the jails and camps of Russia were full of the wicked. For Behzad the idea of justice was inseparable from the idea of punishment. Ayatollah Khomeini spoke in the name of G.o.d the avenger; Behzad, the communist, spoke like Khomeini.

In Pakistan, in the Kaghan Valley in the far north, I had talked to the gentle Masood. He was only sentimentally a Muslim. But, standing beside me above the gorge of the cold, green Kunhar River, he had allowed anxieties about his family and his own future to flow into a wider political despair about his country, and he had said: "Millions will have to die."

And something like that was said to me in Jakarta by a businessman. We met late one afternoon in the restaurant of the hotel. He had been described to me as an economist, someone in touch with government departments, a man planning for the future. He was all that, but he also had the Indonesian feeling of things going wrong. And he was full of rage: against the Chinese (too gifted for Indonesia, "like Rolls-Royce spare parts in a j.a.panese car"), the multinationals, the successful, the ignorant men who were now running his country.

He said, "The leaders of the developing countries-most of them-are prosperous outside, but very poor inside." And he touched his heart. "They can buy the Mercedes, but they don't have the true feeling for it-they cannot appreciate the ingenuity and the work that has been put into that appliance. There is no point in buying an IBM typewriter if your speed is forty words per minute." He was not a humorous man, but his anger (and his fondness for scientific metaphor) appeared to give him a kind of wit.

He was a Muslim from Sulawesi, formerly the Celebes, where-as in Sumatra and West Java-in the 1950s there had been a strong Muslim separatist movement. And there was more than a remnant of that rage in him, though he had benefited from the holding-together of the Indonesian state. Starting from nothing, he had become educated; he had studied abroad, in the United States; he had prospered in the business he had established; he had shared in the development of the country after the waste of the later Sukarno years. But it was not enough. His success had, if anything, been dislocating. It made him see more clearly the kind of people who had got ahead, and of all these people he wished to be rid. He wished now to pull down the state that had enabled him to rise.

He said, "We have to kill a lot of people. We have to kill one or two million of these Javanese." Everybody who had risen, like himself, had to be killed: everyone in the government, the good jobs, the universities, the nice houses. "I feel in Jakarta I have lost my sensitivity. I have an office on the ninth floor of one of these big new buildings. It is centrally air-conditioned. I go to the office in an air-conditioned car. Going back to my place, I stay at home reading. I look at television. Where am I living? I cannot grasp poverty. How can I grasp the complaint from the society?"

There was too much injustice. Too many people were unemployed, and their number grew year by year. Not enough jobs were being created by the government, the multinationals, the Chinese entrepreneurs from Singapore and Hong Kong. Rage was the response of this man: rage, seemingly political, that was really Islamic, an end in itself; and racial rage.

"Most of the Ph.D.'s are Chinese. They are like a cancer cell, ever growing and powerful, and they will destroy their surroundings, and we cannot stop it. If these people enter any system they always outdo and outsmart."

"But you need gifted people."

"These people"-and he was talking now not only about the local Chinese, but also about people from the multinationals and all foreigners-"are actually like electric current with 220 volts. However, the existing wiring of the society is capable only of 110, so any direct contact with the 220 will spoil the 110. You need a transformer. The transformer is supposed to be the government sector and the young intellectuals. However, due to impatience to attain material goods, this sector most of the time affiliates with the 220 volts instead of with the 110. Because these young technocrats, if they're starting to drive, they want Rolls-Royce or, if not that, Volvo."

So it all had to go. "The fight that's coming will be between the people in the universities and the people in the pesantren. One day the students from the pesantren will come to Jakarta and burn down this nice hotel. Islam can become a cocaine. It makes you high. You go to that mosque and you get high. And when you get high, everything that happens becomes Allah's will."

It had happened before in Indonesia, this ma.s.s slaughter. In 1965 the communists had been wiped out. A million people had been killed, he said, not half a million, as was now given out. And more should have been killed: there were two and a half million communists at the time. So a million and a half had escaped killing, and many of them were still around.

I said, "If the killing starts, you may go yourself."

"I might. I hope not. But I might."

"I was told that in 1965 some people took out the gamelan when they went killing."

"Of course. To add to the beauty."

It was after tea, and the Bra.s.serie of the Borobudur Intercontinental-gardens behind the gla.s.s-was full of the people he was talking against: local Chinese, well-to-do Indonesian businessmen, the middle-aged men from the multinationals. He was speaking loudly, and in English.

I said "Do you talk like this when you talk to the government people?"

"No. I talk to them of facts and figures, plans and studies."

"Why do you talk to me like this, then?"

"You are not a scientist. You want to find out about me. You are playing a game of chess with me. So I talk to you of the other side."

I was playing no game of chess with him. He had been told before he came what my purpose was. Perhaps he didn't believe. He was unusually small, with a slight but noticeable facial disfigurement. It would have worried him; in Indonesia they loved beauty. He wished in the Bra.s.serie to draw attention to himself. He had the Indonesian feeling for drama. But his rage was real enough; and his fantasy of violence could become reality. Nineteen sixty-five had occurred.

I talked one day with Gunawan Mohammed, editor of Tempo, the leading weekly magazine of Indonesia, about the 1965 killings. Gunawan was twenty-five at the time. (Indonesians have lived through so much: it was only later that I remembered that on another occasion Gunawan had told me that in 1946, during the revolution, when Gunawan was six, his father had been executed by the Dutch. But Gunawan had no ill-feeling towards the Dutch. He said, "It was a war.") Gunawan's explanation of the killings of 1965 was simple. "Fear. I cannot tell you how frightened people were of the communists. They were so strong, and n.o.body knew what they were going to do." The communist youth building was not far from Gunawan's house, and during those days of fear Gunawan sat with a gun in his house. "I believe I would have killed, if I had to."

AN Indonesian book preceding those days of fear came my way. It was Contemporary Progressive Indonesian Poetry, an anthology of Indonesian communist poetry in English translation, and it was published in 1962 by the League of People's Culture. Old history, it might have seemed; but everything issued by the league was still banned. And it was only in December 1979, while I was in Indonesia, that the most famous writer connected with the league, Pramoedra Ananta Toer, was released from confinement, together with the last of the twenty thousand (the official figure given) who had been detained since 1965 as communists-the Indonesian government, it was said, yielding to pressure from President Carter.

Pramoedra's later life scarcely bears contemplating: imprisoned at forty-one, returned to the world at fifty-four, his early books banned, the years of his maturity wasted. He was like Sitor Situmorang, whom I had met only a few days after I had arrived in Indonesia, whose history I hadn't fully appreciated at the time, and whose intellectual and social graces I had taken too much for granted.

In 1962 Sitor was a man of power in Indonesia. He had made his name with his early lyrical poems. He was now more political, general secretary of the League for National Culture; and he was represented in the anthology by three poems he wrote after a visit to China.

Zoila is a maiden from Cuba in Peking. With pride she hands me the banner of her country, celebrating the victory of her land over American aggression.

It was sad, and scarcely believable, that simplicity like that could have led to such pain for Sitor and his country. But Sitor was not to be reproached now: as someone had said, he had suffered too much. And I was willing to look for other things in these political poems of his.

He had said to me one day, "The people here have lost their religion." He was speaking as a man who had been cut off from his tribal past, s.n.a.t.c.hed from his village at the age of six and sent to a Dutch boarding school. He had felt the need to reconstruct or understand this past only when he had come out of jail and was trying to write his autobiography; without knowing what he had come from, he hadn't been able to make sense of his life. And it seemed to me that in 1962 socialism or communism had given him-a man without a past or a community-a subst.i.tute wholeness. In China he had visited a commune.

Social life, solidarity and hope I encountered and felt in this commune. Hence: I want to drink from the warmth of your hopes I want to press your hands so busily at work.

I want to eat this bread the bread of the commune, as a token of social life, solidarity and human hopes regained.

Freedom together in love, in ideals and the reality of the socialist world.

The bread of the commune; social life, solidarity and hope: the theme wasn't Sitor's alone. It was the Indonesian theme, now more than ever. It was the theme of the Muslim pesantren. And that was the surprise of this communist anthology of 1962: many of its themes and moods were Muslim and Indonesian, still.

Injustice (all the translations are by Bintang Suradi, and are given with his punctuation and use of capitals): In bali too the rice ripens for miles around but in bali too thousands of peasants die of hunger.

We come to bali and there are dancers we come to bali and there are temples by the score both are typical of bali we come to bali and the peasant dies not because the crop failed to ripen This too is typical of bali this too has meaning (Putu Oka: "Bali") The Indonesian and Muslim lament about the loss of simplicity and brotherhood: Life should not be measured by luxury though luxury is the aim pursued but by whether poverty repeats its cycle and spreads conspicuously across the earth.

in the restaurant a gentleman dines lavishly on the ground a beggar with a tin is there a deal of life?

(Putu Oka: "Life") Rage and revenge: Lovely Periangan, burning, reddened by fire the peasants trapped, scorched on their native earth comrades, brothers, against this challenge the will is supreme resistance, revenge in every heart (Sobron Aidit: "Sad Memories of a Tijandur Peasant") Political pain turning to a religious wound: Mother!

year after year you have waited an endless longing in your heart but your suffering has only augmented.

Sweat and toil, blood and tears terrorists, usurers and landlords join one another to suck out your blood.

Is it true Mother that all creatures on earth have your love?

(Rukiah Kertapati: "Indictment") The saviour: And then, when the names of paltry judges have all disappeared forgotten, burnt or eaten by the rats your name will still live on,-Son of the Ma.s.ses born of a powerful womb your name will live forever, death it shall not know for you are life itself (M. S. Ashar: "Freedom and Prison") Revenge, with the promise of restored "union": We possess nothing but burning hearts roughened by suffering that may turn into lava, fire and thunder destroying foes, grinding them to dust.

We the downtrodden shoulder freedom without rank, nameless we've kept our country from becoming a prison (Sabarsantoso Anantaguna: "The Downtrodden Shoulder Freedom") And, finally, the complete faith: The society of my cla.s.s, long have I dreamed of the sunrays of a future for Udin and for the others who yearn for friendly love binding equals to each other ah, how black and soiled it is today but wait, for the boil will burst, molten fire will burst forth the time will come when the enemy meets death at the point of the dagger the battles for the people were not in vain they have fertilized the st.u.r.dy seedling planted by Lenin In the pesantren at Pabelan I had been given a copy of an interview, perhaps from a Christian magazine in the Philippines, with an Indonesian kiyai, a pesantren leader. "Now how can a kiyai help in the changing of this kind of society? How can he make the landlords and the rich give up their properties which, according to Islam, belong to Allah and must be given back to the people who are creatures of Allah? How can the kiyai make the farmers see their importance as human beings who must be given justice?"

The creatures of Allah in 1979, the creatures of the earth in one of the poems of 1962. And point by point the similarities could be seen: the true faith, injustice at home, the uncritical journeys to the lands of the achieved faith.

Imaduddin had said he couldn't be a socialist because he could find the good ideas of socialism in the Koran. He said more than he knew. The Islam of protest was a religion that had been brushed by the ideas of the late twentieth century. Men no longer simply found union in a common submission to Allah. Men were the creatures of Allah; and the late twentieth century extended the meaning of the words: these creatures of Allah had "their importance as human beings who must be given justice." The land and its wealth belonged to Allah and not to men: the late twentieth century made that a political rather than a religious idea.

After a generation of peace, the revolutionary current of 1965 flowed again. It was Islamic now, but it was like what had gone before: as though rage and the wish for revenge were always to be tapped in this overcrowded, once-feudal land, where many men were squeezed out, the old balance was broken, where every step forward took men further away from safety, where the new world brought new gifts but made difficult demands, and all men, whether at the top or at the bottom, lived in fear of personality loss.

REPRISE.

THE.

SOCIETY.

OF.

BELIEVERS.

1.

Submission

Karachi, Pakistan, six months later. Many things had happened in those six months; the Muslim world had been on the boil. The American emba.s.sy in Tehran had been seized by Iranian students and more than fifty emba.s.sy staff held as hostages. There had been a siege and gun battle in the mosque at Mecca, hinting at underground movements in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan.

In Pakistan itself there had been changes. In August and September there had been talk of elections. Those elections had been cancelled; martial law had been tightened; the newspapers were censored; there were public whippings. A well-known journalist had been arrested, had appeared in court in chains, and had been sent to jail for a year. Crowds-seeing an American hand in events in Mecca-had attacked American emba.s.sy buildings in the northern cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. A Pakistani scientist based in Europe had won a n.o.bel prize; but he belonged to the proscribed Ahmadi sect, who venerated their own Promised Messiah; and his visit to Pakistan had led to a student riot.

It looked like terror and despotism. But the state still proclaimed its goal to be the true Islamic way. And that had to be taken seriously. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Islam served or contained other causes. In Pakistan-though there were politicians and ambitious people among the fundamentalists-the faith served itself.

In the Muslim world Pakistan was special, the creation of the Muslims of India, a minority, who had never ceased to feel themselves under threat. And there were people in Pakistan who had taken the faith to its limit. To them Islam was more than personal salvation, more than a body of belief; it had become country, culture, ident.i.ty; it had to be served, at whatever cost to the individual or the state itself. The poet Iqbal, outlining his plan for a separate Indian Muslim state, had said in 1930: "It is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best." And, near the end now of my own Islamic journey, I felt that to be so.

Karachi had been green in August, after the monsoon. No rain had fallen since then, and now, in February, the gardens were brown, the trees dusty, some of them leafless; and no rain was going to fall until June.

I thought I would go and see Nusrat. He was the journalist from the Morning News who had taken me to the Karachi courts. I remembered his abrupt way of speaking, his round cheeks, his walrus moustache. In the courts he had exclaimed about the shortage of chains for the prisoners, some of whom were being led about by ropes tied to their upper arms. He had said he was going to write about that-the shortage of chains, the slackness of the prison authorities. Nusrat was always on the look-out for newspaper stories. He worked hard; he liked his job; he was driven by some kind of anxiety. He was a man of the faith. Almost his first words to me were that he was a bad Muslim-meaning that he wasn't good enough: because to him, as he then said, Islam and the afterlife were the most important things in the world.

I had been aggressive with Nusrat. He had said that he wanted to go to the United States to get a degree in ma.s.s media or ma.s.s communications and then perhaps to get a job with some international body. The a.s.sumption that-while Pakistan and the faith remained what they were, special and apart-the outside world was there to be exploited, had irritated me. I had said that he wasn't qualified to do what he said he wanted to do. And that impulse of aggression towards him-so friendly, open, anxious-had worried me.

I took a taxi to the Morning News. A long board on the upper floor spread out the name of the paper; there were a number of small shops at street level. Steep concrete steps led up from the pavement. It wasn't like the entrance to the office of a daily paper. It was more like the steps to an unimportant government office. And that was how it felt upstairs: an old tiled floor, the colours of the tiles faded, as though ground away by dust; beaten-up office furniture; old distemper on the walls; a few men sitting without urgency at tables.

It wasn't the building I wanted, as it turned out: it was only the advertising department. The editorial department was in a building at the back. I went down by an iron spiral staircase. The iron of the steps had been worn into holes here and there. A sweeper was sweeping the concrete steps at the side of the editorial building, sloshing down one step with blackened water from a pail, working that into the concrete, sloshing down a slower step: it explained the faded tiles in the advertising department. He paused; I picked my way up.

It was a new building, but the atmosphere in editorial, at this early hour of the morning, was like the atmosphere in advertising. In a room full of files-dusty, as though what had been filed had been put away forever-a girl was sitting at a desk. She worked for the children's page of the Morning News. She was answering children's letters and-as though fitting tool to the job-she was using a typewriter that was very small. She wasn't veiled: it seemed strange. On other tables were typewriters in varying stages of decrepitude-like the machines I had seen in the typewriting stalls of the Karachi bazaar (a businessman in one stall one evening, grandly dictating to a male secretary) near the law courts. Karachi, where iron steps wore out and tiles faded, gave its own atmosphere to offices: the editorial room of the Morning News had the feel of the court registry I had visited with Nusrat.

The girl telephoned Nusrat's house for me. Nusrat was not at home. He had already gone out, chasing some story. That was like Nusrat. I left a message for him with the girl from the children's page. He was keen on his job, always on the go; it was strange to think that this was the room to which he brought back his hot copy.

Later he telephoned.

"I've just come in. I didn't expect you back. I thought we had put you off for good. And now you've altered my life."

I recognized his fruity voice, his brisk delivery. The hyperbole-which was the hyperbole of Urdu poetry-was especially touching. Because I had already had some idea of his misadventure.