Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (8 page)

Mr. Wahid was passionate about this point. He came back to it again and again and always seemed to be waiting for me to take down his words. I tried to get him to talk in a more direct way of Habibie. I wanted to get a picture, some conversation, a story. It wasn’t easy.

“Habibie came to see me in hospital, and asked me to join ICMI, his Association of Muslim Intellectuals.”

I liked the detail about the hospital: it seemed to corroborate what I felt about Mr. Wahid’s health. But I couldn’t get more.

“My answer was: ‘Instead of joining your respectable group, let me stay outside the street-corner intellectuals.’ ”

This was what I noted down. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but later I decided that Mr. Wahid was speaking with extreme irony from his hospital bed, that Habibie’s respectable group and the street-corner intellectuals were the same people. Imaduddin, the preacher, the man on television, whose brainchild ICMI had been, would have been among those street-corner intellectuals, though Mr. Wahid hadn’t taken his name all afternoon.

Adi Sasono, an old supporter, would also have been in the line of fire. But this became clear only later, after I had been to see them all, and had only my notes to go by.

Adi said, near the end of our meeting in his fine office, “Mr. Wahid travels too much. He is a lecturer and an intellectual rather than a kiyai.” A kiyai, the head of a village pesantren: this would have been Adi’s way of twisting Mr. Wahid’s reputation, and pulling him down a notch or two. “A kiyai usually sits in a certain village in the pesantren and village people can come to him to ask questions. He is always with the people.”

Adi was chairman of the board of governors of CIDES, the acronym of an important ICMI “think-tank” whose full name was the Centre for Information
and Development Studies. This explained the splendor of Adi’s offices. The elegantly produced large-format CIDES brochure that Adi gave me carried a foreword by Adi. This was from the first paragraph:

“The birth of the Indonesian Muslim Intellectual Association (ICMI) three years ago established increasingly our nation’s collective awareness of the importance of the human resources quality as a major renewable asset for development. This awareness should be manifested in big efforts based on development morality which emphasizes the centrality of human dimension in both the ideas and development practices. This view has also meant that a conscious and active participation of the nation as a whole is a very basic value.…”

Here, remarkably blown up, was Imaduddin’s human-resources, missionary idea, wrapped and wrapped again in modern-sounding words, corporate and academic. Words used like this were only wrapping. What was in the box was Imaduddin’s high idea of the destiny of Malay-speaking Muslims, his wish to complete a process of conversion that Europe had stayed for two or three hundred years, and finally on this far eastern frontier of the faith to raise the flag of Islam.

3
 

H
E LIVED
near the Heroes Cemetery, in the Jalan Masjid Baru, the Street of the New Mosque. This was where he wanted me to come and see him, two days after our first meeting, at ten in the morning. I wanted to hear a little more about his past—his ancestry, the Sumatran background—and this was the only time he could manage, because he was flying off any day now to the United States and Canada to do his mental training work.

When he gave me the directions in his foundation office I knew I would have trouble finding the Street of the New Mosque. He wrote something on his card which he said would help the taxi driver. It didn’t help when the time came. The hotel taxi driver took me for many miles down a wrong road, against the inward-moving morning traffic, partly because he thought it was enough to aim in the general direction of the Heroes Cemetery, and partly for the pleasure in traffic-choked Jakarta of having a good long fast drive down a clear lane.

In a kind of penance, then, we had to crawl back with the crawl we had ignored on the way out, and after this—asking for directions all the time, ten o’clock coming and going—we had to pick our way between highways. We moved down narrow, half-paved, many-angled lanes, in a constant close play of morning light and shadows, with small new houses in
small plots, sometimes with flowering shrubs, food barrows in some of the deeper, shaded angles of the road, occasional patches of wet, dusty heaps of gathered-up leaves, children: the skyscraper wealth of Jakarta, with its global intimations, reduced here to a kind of local small change.

We came at last to the Street of the New Mosque. We turned and twisted until we came to the number on Imaduddin’s card. I paid the enormous sum showing on the meter, and the driver left me immediately, as though he was worried that I might change my mind about the money. It was about ten-thirty.

No one came out of the house. It was a small house, noticeably well kept. At the left a wide gateway led to a big, built-in garage with a sliding door: a tight fit in the narrow plot. To the right was a very narrow strip of lawn, and just beyond that, at ground level, the shiny red tiles of an open porch. I called from there, “Good morning.” Still no one came out. I went through the open door into the sitting room. It was a low room, cool and dark after the sunlight of the porch. I called again. A serving girl in a brown frock leaned out from the kitchen to the left, beyond the dining area, allowed her eyes to rest on me, with something like fright, and then pulled herself back without a word.

I said to the empty room, “Mr. Imaduddin! Mr. Imaduddin!”

Another serving girl came shyly out of the kitchen. She, as though wishing only to see what the other had seen, took one frightened look at me, and she too melted back into some hiding place beyond the kitchen.

I called, “Mr. Imaduddin! Good morning, Mr. Imaduddin!”

The house remained silent. He had asked me to come at ten. I was half an hour late, but he should have been still in the house. A large framed piece of Arabic calligraphy on one wall was very much like Imaduddin—foreign travel among the faithful: a gift perhaps, a souvenir—but I began to wonder whether I had come to the right place. I also began to wonder how, without the language and a map, I could make my way back to a main road where taxis plied.

Because of the silence I didn’t feel I should call out any more, and then I felt I shouldn’t walk too freely about the room. I stood where I was and waited and looked.

The floor was tiled, with beautiful reed mats. The low ceiling, of a composite bagasse-like board, was stained where rain had once leaked through. In the dining area there was a microwave, next to some group photographs. On the pillars of the sitting room there were two or three decorative little flower pieces and, surprisingly, a picture of a sailing ship. About the sitting room were small mementos of foreign travel, tourist souvenirs, showing a
softer side of Imaduddin (or his wife), a side not connected with mental training, if indeed the house was theirs, and if these mementos had truly tugged at their hearts (and did not, rather, preserve the memory of some pious giver): a number of Japanese things; an Eiffel Tower; above the watercooler in a corner a Delft china plate with a simple, blurred, romantic view of a winding Dutch road and a farmhouse and a church; against a pillar a dwarf red maple growing out of a white dish, the dish on a silver-fringed doily, the whole thing resting—as if casually—on a slatted magazine stand. The back window of the dark room gave a view of a sunny little rock-walled garden, bounded by the red-tile roof of the neighboring house: spaces were really small here.

I considered these details one by one, as if committing them to memory, and almost with a separate part of my mind wondered how long I should stay where I was, violating the house, and how when the time came I might get away from the curious trap I appeared to have fallen into.

Suddenly, after ten minutes, or perhaps fifteen minutes, a door to the left opened, and Imaduddin appeared, informal and unexpected in an ankle-length sarong and a dark-green shirt.

He said in a preoccupied way, “I’m sorry. I have problems.”

I thought they might have been bathroom problems, but then a tall brown-complexioned man came out behind him. The tall man had twinkling eyes and a shiny skin, and was in a sarong as well, but was less informal than Imaduddin. The bottom of his sarong moved elegantly with his slow, stately steps. He had a flat black Muslim cap and a glaucous blue waistcoat-shirt with a pen clipped to the pocket.

Imaduddin said, “I am having some massage.”

That explained the shiny skin of the man in the black cap.

The room from which they came out would have been next to the garage and would have overlooked the little lawn and the lane. They would have heard me arrive, and would have heard me call.

Imaduddin said, “Getting old, you know.”

As though that, and the trouble with his back, for which the masseur came every few days, was explanation enough. And, indeed, there appeared to be some formality about the masseur’s visit. Imaduddin’s farewell to him, some minutes later, and Imaduddin’s wife’s farewell, was full of ceremony.

When he had dressed, and was belted and tight and firm in trousers and shirt, familiar again, we settled down to talk at the dining table, between
the microwave and the group photographs on one side and the watercooler and the Dutch china plate on the other side. The serving girls, one in a red frock, one in a brown, had recovered from their fright, and were busy once more about the house and kitchen.