Among the Believers (60 page)

Prasojo said to me, “You were asking about the
langsat
complexion. She is
langsat
.”

The colour of the
langsat
fruit was considered the perfect colour for an Indonesian woman. The fruit was pale-ochre, a pale adobe colour; and the girl on the scooter had a clear, southern-Chinese complexion.

The girl was embarrassed by the scrutiny. When our driver played his headlights on her, her escort, already preoccupied by the traffic, became agitated; more than once he turned around to scowl. When at last they swerved away the
langsat
girl, slippers dangling, wickedly smiled, and Prasojo said, “Did you
see?
Did you
see?
”

We had to ask our way, street by street almost, to the institute and the mosque. It was in the older, colonial part of the town: impressions, in the darkness and lamplight, of wide, silent streets, houses set back, and of a big administrative building in whose carved roof Java had become only an architectural motif, a piece of Dutch colonial exoticism.

The cylindrical tower of the mosque was “modern.” It was past seven, and in the open paved spaces between the mosque and its ancillary buildings, groups from the mental-training class, boys and girls, were waiting for the evening session to begin. Soft girls’ voices called from the shadows, “Prasojo! Prasojo!” The success of that boy! Girls liked Prasojo as much as he liked them; and now they thronged about him as though he had been away from them for weeks. The gaiety of the group was like the gaiety of campers. They were Jakarta young people, children of the middle class. They were not like people of the
pesantren
, or like the more austere, closed Muslim groups.

Imaduddin was telephoned, and someone led us to his house. Before we could get out of the car, Imaduddin himself came out of his house to greet us, a man of medium height, broad-shouldered, wide-faced, smiling, open; and he swept us inside.

It was the house of a university lecturer, with plain chairs, shelves, but also with an Indonesian feature: two girls, relatives or servants, sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. They rose just after we came in and went away, no doubt to prepare the tea of welcome.

Imaduddin read the letter of introduction Prasojo had brought. His face lit up as he read; he said he was honoured. He looked less than his forty-eight years. His skin was smooth, his dark eyes bright, and he had a wide, humorous mouth. He was attractive, full of welcome. But how, he asked, had I got to hear of him? I mentioned the name of a Jakarta journalist, and Imaduddin said, with a laugh, “But tell him I am still fighting for my freedom! After five months. The institute hasn’t given me any duties this year.”

“Why do you think they are afraid of you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they’re afraid of my popularity with the students.”

I asked about his name.

He said, “It’s Ima-dud-din. It means the pillar of the faith.”

“Did you take it yourself?” Some Indonesians did that. Prasojo had given himself a name, and told his parents about it afterwards.

“No, my father gave it to me. He was a student at Al-Azhar in Cairo. I have been Ima-dud-din all my life.”

The tea of welcome came, in china cups, not glasses. The food of welcome was biscuits, of two kinds, in jars. This was not the hospitality of the village.

The interrogations had been tough in jail. The first had lasted twenty hours, but Imaduddin had no stories of maltreatment. Among his fellow prisoners there were some famous men. Imaduddin had met and talked with Dr. Subandrio, who had been foreign minister at the time of the army take-over in 1965. Dr. Subandrio had been accused by the army of plotting a communist coup with others, and he had been sentenced to death. Three days before the execution Queen Elizabeth of England had made an appeal for his life, and he had been reprieved. And for all this time—virtually forgotten by the world—this former colleague of Sukarno’s had been in jail: it was not an easy thing to contemplate, sipping tea in Imaduddin’s university house.

And it was strange, too, to think of Imaduddin, the new Muslim, and Subandrio, the old man of the old left—their causes opposed, and both causes deemed harmful to the Indonesian state—coming together amicably in the army-run jail.

How had Imaduddin been allowed to talk to Dr. Subandrio? The warders had become friendly after a time, Imaduddin said; and he had been given certain privileges. The time in jail didn’t sound so bad. And, in fact, for Imaduddin it hadn’t been all that unwelcome. Just before he had been picked up, Imaduddin had visited certain Arab countries. The Arabs had fed him and fed him. Nobody had told Imaduddin that when you ate with Arabs you had to eat very slowly, that you watched your host, because while your host ate you had to eat. So, seventy kilos, 154 pounds, when he had gone among the Arabs on his Islamic business, Imaduddin had risen to 172 pounds, seventy-eight kilos, when he left them. That was his size when the police had come for him; that was the weight he was still trying to lose. He had lost some in jail; the army doctor who had examined him had been pleased with his progress.

But he hadn’t been given any duties at the Institute of Technology after his release. All he was doing now was his Islamic missionary work among the young. His mental-training courses were well known. He had started them seven years before and had even done a few for Muslim student groups in England. The demand in Jakarta was high. Sixty-seven
people had applied for this particular course; he had been able to take only forty-seven.

A further sip of tea, a bite on a biscuit, and then it was time momentarily to split up—I to look for a hotel, in this difficult holiday season, Imaduddin to go to his mental-training course.

Prasojo said, “You can see why he is so popular. Did you notice the way he shook your hand? He shook my hand as though he had known me a long time, as though he was really pleased to see me. I suppose that is how I should behave, if I want to get on with people.” Prasojo’s American experience was strong on him. He had brought albums of photographs of his time with the American Field Service in the United States: international student parties, the Grand Canyon, snow.

T
HE
mental training had been going for an hour when I got back. The class was in the shedlike clinic building attached to the mosque. The floor was tiled; the green blackboard was written on already; the lights were fluorescent. The trainees sat on folding metal chairs with broad shiny backs. There were more girls than boys, and the girls sat on the right, the boys on the left. The girls wore head scarves or head-covers in pretty colours—yellow and green and lilac and pink and purple and white. Every trainee carried his name on a green card. The instructor was a small, moustached young man in a flowered shirt.

Imaduddin was sitting at the back of the room. He told me when I went and sat beside him that we were witnessing an exercise in “communication.”

Four or five trainees were sent outside, and the instructor, a tape recorder in his hand, read out a story—an account of a motor accident—to a young man. One of the students outside, a girl, was then called in. The young man began to tell her the story. She asked questions; he became confused; the class laughed. The trainees were used to the puppet shows; they had the instincts of actors. The mental-training class became more and more like a puppet show; and the hilarity increased as the story was passed on, more and more distorted, from one trainee to the next.

Imaduddin said, “All this is being recorded. At the end it will be played back, so that they can see how much the original story has
changed. It is to help them when they go out into the world to start preaching Islam.”

But the exercise never got to the playback stage. It wasn’t necessary. The puppet-show instincts of the trainees took over; and the point—the distortion of a tale twice and thrice told—became the subject of much comedy.

Then it was time for the serious part. And like good trainees, who had had their fun and were now willing to find virtue in that fun, the trainees settled down and told the instructor what they had learnt from the exercise. They had learnt important things: the value of inquiry, rational analysis.

It seemed to me that the deductions might work against them, because the message they were going to take to the world was extraordinary: a divinely inspired Prophet, arbitrary rules, a pilgrimage to a certain stone, a month of fasting. But we were well within Islam now, and its articles were beyond question. Inquiry and analysis were for internal matters: the
hadiths
, the traditions and reports about the Prophet. Some
hadiths
were more reliable than others; people who went by unreliable
hadiths
could easily find themselves committed to un-Islamic ways. And the trainees had gone straight to the point: the game they had played had led their thoughts directly to the
hadiths
and even to certain passages in the Koran. These passages were read out. And the
langsat
girl on the back of the scooter seemed far away, part of another, frivolous world.

The moustached young instructor with the Japanese tape recorder was pleased. Imaduddin was also pleased. He hadn’t made the game up himself; he said he had got the idea from various sources. But the Islamic adaptation was his own idea.

The instructor spoke again. The trainees stood up and the metal chairs were noisily rearranged by them in roughly circular groups of five—five was the Islamic number. I had so far seen only the backs and coloured scarves of most of the girls; now I saw their faces. There was nothing like a
langsat
complexion among them. Most of them seemed to come from Sumatra, more Muslim than Java.

I said to Imaduddin, “I believe I have identified six stages in the game. The instructor tells the story; the story gets distorted; the class comments; the inference is drawn about the
hadiths
of the Prophet; the
relevant verses are read from the Koran; and now the trainees sit in groups of five.”

“That’s right. But this sitting in groups of five is a new game.”

They were given envelopes. Each envelope contained variously shaped pieces of paper, and the point of the game was to make squares with those pieces of paper. No single envelope contained a complete square, but the pieces had been distributed in such a way that a group of five, using all the pieces it had received, could make five squares.

Imaduddin said, “They have to cooperate without talking. No one is allowed to take a piece of paper from anyone in his group. But he may accept what is given.”

We walked among the groups of five, their heads bent close together, with here and there a clown, a boy, exaggerating his puzzlement, deliberately making absurd patterns. One boy, I was happy to see, did a swift cheat, taking a piece from a neighbour and adding it to another’s pattern. There was a shout and clapping from a group of girls: they had completed. It was like bingo. More shouts, friendly squabbles between boys and girls: the air was charged with adolescent sexuality. And then, once more, the serious side: the chairs rearranged, the instructor calling for comments. One by one the comments came. And it was amazing what they had got out of the little game, how far it had taken them along the way of Islam.

The instructor wrote the comments on the green blackboard. Imaduddin translated for me. They had learnt five things—five was a sound Islamic number, there being five Islamic principles. “Cooperation indispensable for the common goal. Those who give up easily cannot achieve. You have to give others without asking. Knowing each other is also indispensable. Perseverance.”

I said, “But they have already said that about perseverance. ‘Those who give up easily cannot achieve.’ ”

Imaduddin agreed.

But the trainees had only momentarily lost their way. A girl with a saffron head-cover raised her hand and spoke; the instructor wrote at the bottom of the board; and Imaduddin said, “This is important. The sense of belonging.”

All that had come to them from the game. Even with the little cheating that had taken place they had gone straight to the Islamic idea
of unity or union: men abased together before the creator, and bound by rigid rules. There was an unspoken corollary: everything outside that community was shut out, everything outside was impious, impure, infidel. They were the righteous and the secure; they were happy in their reinforced faith. And again pertinent verses from the Koran occurred to some trainees. Again there was that display of scholarship and inquiry as the pages of the book were turned, and trainees and instructor read various verses.

Some duplicated foolscap sheets were passed around by the chattering instructor, and Imaduddin said, “The instructor is calling upon me to read a poem. It is by Iqbal. This is the last session of the mental-training course, and I always end it by reading that poem by Iqbal. I choose it because it is very emotional. It was written in Urdu, as you would know. Translated into Arabic by Effendi, and translated from the Arabic into Indonesian by Mohammed Natsir.” Iqbal, the ideologue of Pakistan; Natsir, once the leader of the banned Muslim party of Indonesia.

Imaduddin—Indonesian courtesy making him delay while he explained the poem to me—then went to the desk. He put on his glasses and began to read, and he was transformed. All his social graces, all his apparent humour, were submerged in this new personality, not of the actor or the puppet-master, but the mullah, the man in a mosque, reciting the Koran on some day of Muslim passion. He had said the poem was emotional; and as he read his voice broke. At times he seemed about to sob: Islam as anguish, hell, heaven, redemption. And that, as I understood, was the theme of the Iqbal poem: how, without the Prophet or knowledge of his mission, could the world be endured?

He had said the poem would take six minutes. It took more than ten. It was now past ten-thirty. The mental-training class had been going on for more than three hours. The course was at an end. But the trainees had to be up again at three in the morning. Not, as I thought, for the discipline and self-denial that encouraged union; but because, as Imaduddin told me, it was laid down in the Koran that special prayers should be uttered in the middle of the night, and the middle of the night meant between midnight and six.