Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  In Hindu-Buddhist days in Java, a pesantren was a monastery, supported by the community in return for the spiritual guidance and the spiritual protection it provided. It was easy for the sufi Muslims, when the philosophical systems of the old civilization cracked, to take over such places; and it was easy for such places to continue to be counselling centres for village people. It was open to a man to go at any time to the leader or kiyai of a pesantren and ask for personal advice or religious instruction. It was not necessary to be enrolled in any formal course; in this way pesantren instruction could be said to be “unstructured.”

  In the Dutch time, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the villages began to change. Some people became rich, and they wanted to educate their children. It was these people, the newly well-to-do of the villages, who began to turn the pesantren from sufi centres into schools for children. And Islam itself was changing in Java. The sufi side, the mystical side that was closer to the older religions, was becoming less important. The opening of the Suez Canal and the coming of the steamship made Java—until then at the eastern limit of Islam—less remote. In the days of sail it took months to get to Mecca; now the journey could be done in three to four weeks. More people went to Mecca. More people became acquainted with the purer faith: the Prophet, the messenger of God, and his strict injunctions.

  In the last decade of the nineteenth century the pesantrens began to be turned into schools. The Jombang pesantren school, which we had visited, had been established in 1896. But they remained religious places. They remained places which the villagers supported and to which they could go for advice. Every thirty-five days the leaders of the pesantrens in an area met to discuss whatever issues had arisen. Recently, for instance, people had been agitated about long hair on men. The leaders had done the correct Islamic thing. They had gone through the Koran and other approved records of the Prophet’s time, and they couldn’t find that the Prophet had said anything about long hair. So they had decided that long hair wasn’t an issue. Why did the leaders meet every thirty-five days? That was a relic of Hindu-Buddhist times. The week then had five days, and the leaders of the monasteries met every seven weeks.

  It was late. But a class was going on in Mr. Wahid’s own pesantren, in the house at the end of his garden. The pesantren still kept the hours of the monastery, still required a day-and-night devotion from its inmates. We went out to the garden to watch. Boys were sprawled in the front room of the teacher’s little house and outside his door. The light in the room was very dim; the teacher’s eyes were bad. The teacher read or chanted in Arabic, never pausing, and the boys followed in their books. It was a class in Islamic law.

  Mr. Wahid said the teacher was one of the most learned men in the area. He received no salary, only five hundred rupiah a month, eighty cents. But the villagers gave him food; the pesantren provided him with transport and had built the little house for him.

  The class was over. The boys got up. Some of them hung around us. The little teacher with his thick-lensed spectacles came out of his dim little house and stood silently and meekly beside us while we talked about him. He was only thirty, Mr. Wahid said, but he knew a lot of the Koran by heart.

  I said, “Only thirty, and he knows the Koran by heart!”

  “Half,” Mr. Wahid said. “Half.”

  I didn’t think that was good enough, for a man of thirty with only one book to master. Mr. Wahid and I debated the point amicably, while the teacher stood outside his house in his own dim light, silent, hunched, and modest, waiting to be dismissed: the unlikely successor of the Buddhist monks of bygone times, still living (as the Buddha had prescribed for his order) on the bounty of his fellows, but now paying them back with Arabic lessons for their children.

  We drove back to Jombang with the English teacher. He got more than eighty cents a month, though he didn’t say how much. But he didn’t have a house and nobody gave him food. He managed, but things were tight. A bowl of rice from someone in the village cost him fifty rupiah, about eight cents; a bowl of rice with “something” added could set him back about sixteen cents.

  The Jombang pesantren looked different in lamplight, more sedate. The main gate was closed. That was to keep the boys in, the English teacher said. We entered by the open gate near the house of the leader; the boys were too nervous of the leader to use that gate.

  The lights were dim. The compound was quieter than it had been in the afternoon. But in the house called Al-Fattah they were still lounging about in their sarongs, and—as in a nature park at night, full of roosting birds—the visitor still raised a flutter. There were eight boys to a room; and the rule was that the boys—they came to the pesantren at thirteen and left at twenty-five—had to be of different ages. But there wasn’t always floor space for eight, and some boys slept in the mosque.

  Here and there in the yard, in the very dim light, boys were pretending to study. It was pretence, because the light was so dim. The boys were looking at: a book on Islamic law, An Arabic Grammar, The Story of Islam, How to Pray. The last book had eight stage-by-stage drawings of the postures of Islamic prayer; and it perhaps wasn’t really necessary, since the boys prayed five times a day. It was late in the evening; and the pesantren day began early.

  The sufi centre turned school: the discipline of monks and dervishes applied to the young: it wasn’t traditional, and it wasn’t education. It was a breaking away from the Indonesian past; it was Islamization; it was stupefaction, greater than any that could have come with a Western-style curriculum. And yet it was attractive to the people concerned, because, twisted up with it was the old monkish celebration of the idea of poverty: an idea which, applied to a school in Java in 1979, came out as little more than the poor teaching the poor to be poor.

  WE spent the night in Surabaya. An imperial or world power doesn’t remember all its little battles. But the local people remember. The British had fought the Indonesians in Surabaya in 1945, after the war. There were commemorative statues to see; and after we had seen them, Prasojo and I started on the six-hour drive southwest to Yogyakarta. We took the Jombang road again, past the unending village with the slabbed gateposts that spoke of the long-dead Javanese Hindu empire of Majapahit.

  The Majapahit museum, where we stopped, had little. But there was a temple a short way down the village lane opposite. It was a green lane, full of shade. The woven-bamboo houses were without windows. A stop sign in the lane—on a bamboo pole standing loosely in a hole—was watched by a small girl. For the hundred-rupiah fee, for which she gave a receipt, she lifted up the pole: the money was for the village.

  A big log hung loose from a crossbar in a thatched shed beside the lane. This was the village observation post; the villagers took it in turn to watch through the night. The log was hollowed out, with a vertical gap cut down one side; when it was struck with a mallet it made a booming noise. It could be used to give the time, to warn of thieves or fires; fire was the main danger.

  And just outside the shady village, in the open, was old grandeur: the high red brick tower of the Majapahit temple, undecorated, geometric, strong, the ancient style that was the source of the slabbed diamonds and pyramids on the gateposts we had been seeing all the way from Surabaya. It wasn’t much, as a monument. The statues that the tower enshrined had been taken down. But after the crowding and the sameness, small houses, rice fields in narrow strips, it gave a past to the people, and another feel to the landscape.

  Prasojo didn’t know the purpose or the significance of the temple. He was impressed only by the fact that it had been built without machines. Also, no mortar had been used. Lime had bonded the bricks together over the centuries: this had been the wonder of a German Prasojo had met.

  We had something to eat in a Chinese café. “Can you tell they are Chinese?” Prasojo asked, and I said I could. The village continued; people and their little houses were always with us. Then the land became broken and we began to wind through young teak forests, the teak growing straight, the leaves
big and round. It was the Japanese who, during the war, had cut down all the teak of Java, Prasojo said. And this was interesting; because the day before, at the Jakarta domestic airport, where there were photographs of the antiquities of Indonesia, Prasojo had told me it was the Japanese who had with their swords cut off or disfigured the stone heads of the Buddhas. The subject had come up again in the Majapahit museum, and I had told him that (trophy-hunters apart) Muslims had been the great iconoclasts of history, the greatest cutters-off of the noses of ancient statues. That hadn’t been easy for him to accept at first. But then, understanding, he had said simply, “To prevent the people praying to them.”

  It was noon, humid even in the teak forests. Prasojo fell asleep from time to time. He had the driver play pop music on the cassette player in the car; he slept to that. The land flattened, opened out to a wide plain with a line of blue hills on one side and high peaked mountains far on the other. It had rained; everything glittered. The green of the paddy fields was glorious. And against this green every touch of bright colour—in the dresses and sarongs of the people working in the paddy fields—was doubly glorious, reflected, with the sky, in the water. The rice grew in straight lines; different fields were in different stages of growth.

  As the light changed, as the afternoon heat faded, Prasojo stirred and became alert again. Sleep had more than refreshed him: he talked poetically about the country through which we were driving. He had been educated near here. He spoke of the beauty of getting up in the morning while it was still dark and walking with palm-frond torches to the road to wait for the bus. He spoke of the “dating” habits of the afternoon. Dating time was between four and six; there was nowhere to go after seven. The girl sat on the back of the motorbike with her legs to one side and held the boy around the waist: that was the recognized dating pleasure.

  “This is the best part of the day,” Prasojo said.

  The sun was red. The light was red; it came red through the trees, fell red on the road. A faint mist rose off the rice fields; the blue hills went pale; and sun and sky were reflected in the water of the rice fields.

  “For us it isn’t easy to be abroad,” Prasojo said. “We get homesick.”

  They got homesick for everything. For everything we had experienced that day, the freshness of the morning, the heat of noon, the relaxation and colours of the late afternoon. For everything we had seen on the road and in the fields: the cycle of the rice crop, the changing tasks, the men carrying loads in baskets on either end of a bamboo pole, the bicycle rickshaws, the horse carriages (different regions had different styles of carriage). To an Indonesian everything about his country was known; no detail of house or dress or light went unconsidered. Every season had its pattern; every day had its pattern. When Prasojo went to Arizona his first thought, waking up the first day, was, “I am not in Indonesia.”

  All this was drawn out of him by the fading light, the best time of the Javanese day. The road was full of people yielding to the pleasures of that time of day, relaxing, chatting. The horse carriages were busy. Boys and girls rode together on bicycles—Prasojo pointed them out to me.

  And he told me of some of the oddities of his time in Arizona. One morning he asked the man next door what, as a matter of courtesy and friendliness, he would have asked an Indonesian: “What are you going to do today?” In Indonesia the man would have said, “I will go to my rice field. I have to do so-and-so today.” But in Arizona the reply—from a man of thirty—was, “That’s my business.” Or Prasojo would go, as he might have done in Indonesia, to the house of a friend, going for no reason, only for the reason of friendship. The boy’s mother—in Arizona—would say, “What do you want?” Which, in Indonesia, was rude. “We are not as individualistic as that,” Prasojo said.

  In Java when a man wanted his paddy cut he would send a message to his fellow villagers. They would come and help and get some paddy in return. Prasojo’s grandfather, a farmer, liked to have his evening meal in the front of the house, so that he could call out to his friends as they passed, “Come and eat with us.” That, of course, wasn’t possible in the town. In Jakarta you would be full up in no time. But his mother still had the sharing instinct; and that could get her into trouble with his father and sometimes lead to tears. Though, painfully, she had learnt that she couldn’t feed Jakarta every evening, she still, when she went on a train journey, took much more food than she needed for herself and her family, simply to have enough to give to people who might be with her in the compartment.

  Yet, Indonesian as he was, Prasojo had travelled with delight. During his time with the American Field Service in Arizona he had been overwhelmed by the variety of the human race. He hadn’t liked the Dutch because of the colonial past (some weeks later he told me of a disagreeable physical encounter between his farmer grandfather and a Dutchman); but in Arizona he had met a Dutch boy and had got to like him very much, and he had been glad to shake off his feelings about the Dutch. And how nice it was to be able to call a German boy “Hitler” and have the boy see the joke; and how nice it was, when Prasojo refused pork, for someone to say, “Hey, when are you going to give up that religion of yours?”

  He had lived first with a Lutheran family, then a Presbyterian, then an agnostic; and he had got on well with all of them. But he remained Indonesian enough to be unable to answer when someone in America asked him, “Do you prefer the United States to Indonesia?” Prasojo didn’t want to wound the American who had asked the question; at the same time he couldn’t say that he liked Indonesia less than he did. Out of his Arizona experience there had come to him the wish to be a writer, and he had written a hundred-page autobiographical essay, Merden Bukan Casa Grande, “Merden is not Casa Grande.” Casa Grande was where Prasojo had stayed in Arizona; Merden was the name of his village in Java.

  At sunset we came to the temple of Prambanam. It was astonishing, after all the photographs, to see the mighty tower so near the main road, so much part of a village scene; it wasn’t easy to believe in it.

  The ninth-century Hindu temple—early photographs show only the great base, with a moraine of fallen stones—had been reconstructed by the Dutch, and not in any falsifying way: blank stones were used where the original pieces had been lost. The temple had been the centre of an enormous complex. Restoration work was still going on. The stones of smaller temples were neatly laid out and marked. Yet the village was encroaching. Outside the fenced-off monument area rubbish was burning in the remains of one of the smaller shrines which still had some carving. Prasojo said, “That hurts me.” Yet again the wonder for him seemed to be only that men had built something so big without machines, had carved so well without machines.

  A group of local girls, skittish at this time of day, ran up and down the four stone stairways, called out to Prasojo and me, and went giggling along the balustraded terrace. The sky was fading above the wet fields; the temple felt old.

  The balustrade was carved with scenes from the Ramayana, the Hindu epic that Java and other countries in Southeast Asia had made their own. A thousand years after Prambanam, the epic still lived in Java. Prasojo knew it well, from the puppet theatre. He knew the characters, the stories; he understood the moral issues they raised. Monuments like Prambanam used a difficult theology, Hindu or Buddhist, to proclaim the power and near-divinity of a king. The theology had faded; the kings and priests had gone; the softer side of the old faiths survived, as a civilization.

  Prasojo was Muslim; he had friends among the new Muslims. But he was as yet far removed from the new Muslim wish to purify, to create abstract men of the faith, men who would be nothing more than the rules. Prasojo possessed his Javanese civilization too completely for that: it was his civilization that he had been talking about during the drive.

  FRIENDS and chat were important to Prasojo. He had friends in Yogyakarta. He spent the night with them, and he said later that five of them had gone to a restaurant—for an hour—and they had had a “great” time.

  He had said
that he wanted us to get out early in the morning so that we could see the students of Yogyakarta cycling to school, seven abreast, ringing their bells and laughing. Why did they cycle like that in the Yogya traffic? “Because they are so happy.” And they were happy because it was appropriate to their time of life, and that time of morning. But it was those cycling students—and the other pedal traffic—that created the jam that delayed Prasojo. So I missed the students.

  Still, Prasojo had brought one of his friends: to me, from Prasojo’s talk, a kind of mythical figure: the friend, part of the ritual and security of Javanese life. Prasojo could not conceal his delight in his friend. He touched him; he spoke smilingly about him to me. And the friend, while he was with us, was silent, yet never bored, content to be with Prasojo.

  The Jombang pesantren had been a trial. But Prasojo had high hopes of the pesantren at Pabelan. Pabelan was the pesantren showpiece. It was the “traditional” Islamic teaching institution which had been extended into a school of a sort that some thought perfect for Java: not a diploma factory (it gave no diplomas), “unstructured,” teaching appropriate skills, a “cooperative,” self-supporting, teachers and students working together, no one strictly only a teacher, village and school sustaining each other, no one absolutely a villager, no one absolutely a student. This was how I understood it to be: an educational commune, a self-help organization, something in harmony with the village life Prasojo had told me about.

  It was an hour’s drive from Yogya, on the road to the Borobudur temple: village and rice all the way, the earth here volcanic and rich. We turned off into a tree-hung lane, and at the end saw a number of whitewashed Javanese houses in a large sandy compound, with coconut trees and royal poinciana trees. We found the office, in a roughish village house, and there my difficulties began.