Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (49 page)

Islam, too, had for several years been putting entertainment value ahead of social engagement, at least among the middle classes. When I lived in Jakarta I used to keep an eye on the schedules of celebrity preachers as a routine part of planning my movements around town. If Aa Gym – young, good-looking, turbanned – was speaking in a posh South Jakarta hotel, Mercedes and BMWs would be lined up around the block, disgorging richly groomed women in Hermès jilbabs and Manolo Blahnik shoes and causing a traffic jam that might last for an hour.

Abdullah Gymnastiar, aka Aa Gym, fell out of favour with his adoring female congregation when he lied about taking a second wife, but there have been plenty of other turbanned preachers to take his place. Their recipe is more or less identical to The ROCK’s: take two parts entertainment, blend in one part demand for funding, season with audience participation and cook up into a promise of dreams delivered.

This dish can be served up on all sorts of platters. Islamic televangelism is such big business that some stations run talent shows to find new faces: last year’s winner of one show, an eight-year-old girl, was booked solid for sermons through the fasting month. A Texan convert to Islam named Craig (Abdurrohim) Owensby, who used to be a Mega Church preacher in Jerry Falwell’s fold, has made a fortune in Indonesia by working with Aa Gym and other popular televangelists to deliver daily doses of the Koran and accompanying preach-bites by text message.

Koran-reading contests are as popular in Indonesia as visits by Manchester United’s touring team. When I was in Sumatra, just before I went into the shrinking forest with the Rimba, I was invited to one of these extravaganzas. For a whole week, the Muslims of Jambi province had flooded the city of Bangko to witness their local celebrity chanters compete for a place in the national Koran-reading championships. Crowds of families, parties of schoolchildren, courting couples swirled around the fairground where the competition was held. Some peeled off to buy popcorn or candyfloss, to ride on the bumper cars or to check out the booths promoting the glories of Jambi’s various districts. But most of the crowd was transfixed by the main event.

At one end of the central square, the current contestant knelt behind the Holy Book on a raised dais, surrounded on all sides by Plexiglas – a little air-conditioned pool of soundproofing in the steamy sea of fair-goers. Beneath, people strained to see her, to judge her composure and any other visible attributes of her piety. The singer’s image was also relayed on a vast digital screen in the middle of the fairground, like a simulcast from the Royal Opera House into London’s Trafalgar Square of a summer evening, without the champagne. Here, though, the audience was more engaged; there was much opinionated discussion of the contestant’s voice, which blasted out of loudspeakers all around the square. ‘It’s the biggest social event of the year,’ said Ira, who had invited me to the competition.

Many of Indonesia’s televangelists have no religious training to speak of – one of the most popular started out as an actor in a religious-themed soap opera. And indeed many of them behave more like entertainers than like clerics. The Indonesian Broadcasting Commission reports a stream of complaints from traditional keepers of the faith who accuse celeb preachers of being more salacious than holy.

Middle-class women, the sort of women who have jobs in banking or PR and children in private schools, seem especially likely to enjoy this fare. Jilbabs have become an astonishingly complex fashion item among the richer set – is it okay to accessorize a Dior headscarf with a Chanel pin? Elaborate head-dresses layering a cone of purple silk over a sweep of lilac gauze are now quite the norm in workplaces where, when first I lived in Indonesia, most women went bare-headed. Indeed at every level of society, more Indonesians are manifesting the symbols of piety now than when I arrived in the late 1980s.

The boom seems to have started with the loosening of the bonds of national unity of the Suharto years. By the time I went back to Jakarta in 2001 to work in health, I noticed more of my Muslim friends and colleagues praying five times a day, fasting over Ramadan and dressing like Arabs; more of my Christian friends wearing crosses and going to church. Election rallies around the country started with a prayer (though many covered their bases with lewd dangdut dancing as well). Even workshops in which we taught prostitutes to distribute condoms to their peers began with a little religious blessing.

Keeping tabs on the sex trade had been part of my job at the time. Every now and then I’d get on my bike and negotiate the clogged highways leading to Jakarta’s port area, then thread my way through to the tumbledown red-light districts beyond, just to see what was going on. I usually went around lunchtime; before that there was no one around, but if I waited until mid-afternoon the dangdut music would be shaking the wooden walls of the brothels and it would be hard to chat.

One day I wandered down past the stalls selling condoms and antibiotics and found the lean-to brothels more deserted than usual. One of the girls offered me a coffee. ‘Bad day?’ I asked. ‘It’s Friday,’ she replied. Of course, the Muslim holy day. ‘All the clients are still at the mosque for prayers.’

I asked if she thought that sermonizing in the mosque might make clients think again about buying sex. She laughed. ‘Why would it?’ she said. ‘They’re not doing anything wrong.’ She explained that if a client was particularly pious, he would take the time to perform a wedding ceremony before getting naked. ‘Then we get on with the sex business, and an hour later he divorces me.’ By following the letter of the religious law, she said, the client could claim still to be a good Muslim.

Today’s commodified, by-the-book forms of religion are not driving social change in Indonesia. In fact, it’s the reverse. Urbanization and mobility are diluting the tribalism and collectivist cultures that underpin much of Indonesian life. Religion recreates the comfort of a known universe; it is a visible badge of identity which suits the need to clump together, so very pronounced in clannish Indonesia. Modern Indonesians are signing up for orthodox religions as never before.

In those parts of Indonesia that still live closer to their traditions, religion actually puts the brakes on progress. Because really, what’s the point in thinking ahead, in making plans, in working towards a different future if everything is in God’s hands? ‘Around here,’ said a friend who runs a dive lodge in a part of the country as yet little touched by the modern world, ‘planning is almost an atheist act.’

Almost exactly a year after I had set out on my eccentric voyage around Indonesia, I took a boat from the equatorial city of Pontianak in Kalimantan to Java. As I looked forward to the last month of my travels, I started to worry about the mismatch between what I was reading during my forays into internet cafes and what I had found in my conversations with most ordinary Indonesians. Had I missed some great upsurge of angst about religious extremism? Sitting on deck, heading for the island that is home to most Indonesians, I resolved that I would make deliberate trips to places which had a religious flavour to them, I would start to ask people what they thought about ‘rising religious intolerance’. It was that resolution that took me to the city of Solo, in the very centre of Java, a place known as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. The men accused of the bombings in a nightclub in Bali in 2002 studied in Solo, for example.

I found a city with a split personality.

At Solo’s centre stands the
kraton
, the Sultan’s palace. It’s a whole town-within-a-town. The solid white wall which surrounds it is punctuated by elegant arched gates, painted pale blue. These lead to the small family compounds of the Sultan’s many retainers. In the surrounding streets, pitched-tile roofs slope into pretty verandas that are often graced with bougainvillea or passion vines. At the local coffee stalls, large tin kettles with stubby spouts bubble over charcoal fires; from them wafts the scent of ginger tea so typical of Central Java. The city also specializes in milk drinks, many of them concocted only to appeal to Indonesians’ love for contractions and wordplay. I couldn’t resist ordering a rather disgusting concoction of sweet ginger, coffee, syrup and milk whose ingredients –
JAhe MAnis, KOpi, siRUP, Susu
– can be contracted to
Jaman Korups
, the ‘Age of Corruption’.

Outside the walls to the west is a maze of streets that smells quite different, of honey and paraffin. This is the batik quarter. Small back rooms are dotted with tiny woks balanced on pint-sized braziers. Into one of these, a woman will dip an instrument that looks a bit like a pipe. She fills the copper bowl of the pipe with warm beeswax, blows on the nib that protrudes from it, then patiently traces golden lines on to the white fabric in her lap. She’s laying out the design, the first of at least fourteen steps in the torturous process of making a single sarong. Except for the electric light-bulb over her head, the scene could come from pre-colonial times.

Step out of the kraton walls to the east, however, and all semblance of gracious Javanese living evaporates. This part of town is positively Middle Eastern. There are two giant mosques in the Saudi style, practically side by side. I wondered that there were enough worshippers to fill them both, then realized that one was actually a hospital, built in the style of a mosque. Almost every shop offered something that smacked of orthodox Islam: pilgrimages to Mecca, or souvenirs from Mecca sold to pilgrims who had already been there, but hadn’t been able to fit all the necessary presents for the family into their luggage and were in need of top-ups. There were Muslim hotels that didn’t allow drinking or visits from unregistered guests; I went into a few of these to see if they’d give me a room, but all said they were full. There were schools teaching Arabic, and shopfront after shopfront filled with mannequins in jilbabs and full-length dresses. This part of Solo is about as orthodox Sunni as it gets. And yet the city sits in a part of Java that for centuries had a very different religious sensibility.

Until the late nineteenth century, Islam in Indonesia was a localized affair. It was strongest in the big trading ports, places like Makassar in South Sulawesi and Aceh and the other ports of Sumatra. But in rural areas such as Central Java, the Islamic religion was little more than a veneer daubed over traditional beliefs in the spirits of volcanoes, rivers and village guardians.

Then the Dutch invested in ports and steam ships, and the pilgrimage to Mecca became popular. By 1885, visitors from ‘Jawa’ – a generic term for South East Asian Muslims in Arab records – were the largest pilgrim population in Mecca. These Hajis came home with a renewed enthusiasm for orthodox Islam, and new (and, for the Dutch, dangerous) ideas about pan-Islamic politics.

The newly returned Hajis wanted to purge their home religion of all the flavours it had picked up while stewing for centuries in the rich cultures of the islands. The superstitions and mysticisms, the rituals of planting, harvesting and village life that had fused with Islamic prayers and orthodoxies over the years – all these must be dispensed with in favour of a return to pure, Identikit Arab Islam. The reformers favoured rational interpretations of the Koran; they set up an important network of schools that focused firmly on teaching science and the secular skills needed in a modern state.

Their rationalism put them at odds with the home-grown Javanese Muslims, whose spiritual heirs I found at Gunung Kemukus, Kemukus Mountain, a small hill about an hour north of Solo, where worshippers pray at the grave of a Muslim saint revered for his business acumen. On peak nights (every thirty-five days, when the seven-day Islamic calendar intersects in a certain way with the five-day Javanese calendar) thousands of men wearing batik shirts and women wearing their best jilbabs stream up to the saint’s grave on Gunung Kemukus, hoping for a helping hand with their finances. The day I was there was an off day, and there weren’t more than a hundred pilgrims all evening. Each of them bought a banana-leaf full of flowers, and a plastic container of holy water; together these would set them back 100,000 rupiah, about ten dollars. They knelt and mumbled their troubles to a Muslim cleric outside the shrine. They handed over the flowers – these were wafted over a brazier of incense and handed back – and an envelope full of cash, another 100,000 rupiah, which was pocketed. Next, they went into the little shrine which covers the saint’s grave, prostrated themselves, sprinkled holy water, rubbed their flowers up and down the lozenge-shaped ends of the grave, and mumbled their troubles all over again, this time to the dead saint.

Then they emerged from the shrine, and looked for a stranger to have sex with.

It’s this anonymous sex that seals the saint’s blessing and restores people’s business to health. ‘Where there’s a womb, there’s God,’ a Javanese writer told me when I expressed my surprise at the goings on at Kemukus. ‘Sex and spirituality always go together.’

The local government at Gunung Kemukus appears to disagree. They have put up a sign, spotted over with mould but still legible, that reads: