Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  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.

  THE 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 th
e 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.

  The trainees didn’t seem to mind. They were like happy campers, thrilled by the drama of the final early rising. They got up from their metal chairs and went away hesitantly, the girls to one part of the mosque area, the boys to another. They were children of the Jakarta middle class, people faced with the special Indonesian threat of the loss of personality. In Islam, the life of the mosque, with its rules and rituals, they found again, or reconstructed, something like the old feudal or rural community that for them no longer existed.

  IMADUDDIN said he wasn’t going to get up for the 3:00 prayers with his trainees. But he was up at three-thirty. On Mondays and Thursdays he did that, because he fasted on those days. The custom was peculiar to the Muslims of Indonesia, and I had been told that it might have had its origin in animist practice. The fast was not strictly a fast; as in the fasting month of Ramadan, it was possible to eat before sunrise and after sunset. A refinement for some on these fast days was to eat only white foods, white being the colour of purity, and also convenient, since it enabled an Indonesian to eat as much as he liked of his favourite food, rice. But I heard about the white foods afterwards, and couldn’t ask Imaduddin about them.

  He said, when I saw him the next morning in his office, which was adjacent to the classroom of the previous night, that he fasted on Mondays and Thursdays because the Prophet fasted on those days. It wasn’t in the Koran, but there was a reliable hadith about it. And Imaduddin was also concerned about his weight. In addition to his Islamic fasts, he jogged. He said he had to look after himself; he was nearly fifty. He didn’t think he had fully recovered from his Arab overfeeding. But that had occurred nearly eighteen months before. His paunchiness made me feel, rather, that twice a week, during his fasting days, he built up an overwhelming appetite.

  He was so varied. He used tape recorders and Western psychological games for his Islamic mental training. He had a mullah’s passion; but he also jogged. He had lived through a tremendous period of Indonesian history; he had been acquainted with great Indonesians. He had benefited from the independence of his country, from its stop-and-start development, from the opening up of the world for people of his generation. He had become an electrical engineer; he had travelled; he had studied for a higher degree in the United States.

  He had lived in many eras; he had been part of a great flowing together of the world. But Imaduddin was indifferent to the wonder of his life; he took his new world for granted. There was no development to explore. Imaduddin was born a Muslim in Sumatra. Everything was contained in that beginning: to that beginning there had only been added events, tools, and age.

  Imaduddin’s father, as he had told me the previous evening, was a graduate of the Islamic Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was important in the Muslim Masjumi party.

  “My father was a religious teacher, attached to a religious school run by the sultanate in the Dutch time. It was a famous school, and my father was the principal. During the revolution, the war against the Dutch, I was involved in the Muslim army, Hizbullah. I was trained for two weeks in 1946 as a guerrilla fighter, and they gave me a star and a stripe as a first sergeant. At the age of fifteen! Hizbullah actually means the soldiers of God.”

  “Why do you say ‘Muslim army’? Weren’t you Indonesians, fighting for Indonesian independence?”

  “There were so many groups in the revolutionary army at that time. The communists, the PKI, had their own army; they called it the Red Army. The socialists had their own groups. The nationalists and Sukarno owned their own. We fought each other sometimes—when the Dutch were away.

  “After we gained our independence I went back to high school. In 1947 the revolutionary government had opened the first secondary school in our area. So I went to this school and I stayed there until 1953.”

  “What made you decide to be an electrical engineer?”

  “In 1952 Dr. Hatta, the vice-president, visited Sumatra, and he talked about developing the country. He visited the largest waterfall close to Medan in Sumatra, and he gave a talk about the importance of electricity. I was spellbound by this speech. In the following year, 1953, I finished high school. I got the highest mark. When I asked my father to send me to Bandung he said, ‘I don’t have the money. But if you want to go by yourself I give you my permission—and my prayer.’

  “My mother sold one of her rings, and I went to Jakarta with just enough money to buy the ticket for the ship and to buy food for one or two months here. The ship started from Sumatra in the evening, about six. We sailed for three nights and we reached Jakarta in the evening. I was amazed by the crowds.

  “We reached Jakarta at night, but the port was closed, and we were allowed to land only in the morning. Actually there were four of us on the ship who had graduated. So early in the morning we went to the Ministry of Education, and I went straight to the scholarship department. I showed them my marks and my letter of recommendation from my high school. One of my friends had a friend in Jakarta, but he wasn’t sure whether the friend would be able to accommodate all four of us in his house. But fortunately the friend accommodated us. We slept on the floor of the sitting-room. The house was actually the private house of Mr. Sutan Sjahrir, the secretary-general of the Indonesian Socialist Party.”

  I said, “But that’s a famous Indonesian name. You can’t drop it so casually.”

  And it was astonishing that he should speak it like that: Sutan Sjahrir, one of the early nationalist figures of Indonesia, exiled by the Dutch from 1934 to 1942, and prime minister of Indonesia in the first year of independence.

  Imaduddin said, “Actually, Sutan Sjahrir had visited us in Sumatra. I was one of the leaders of the students in Medan in my high school and I met him there. He was on the look-out for promising young men—the socialists were like that. And you can imagine what it was for a youngster, talking to that great man.

  “We left Jakarta that same day and went to Bandung with an introduction to the secretary-general of the Socialist Party in West Java. And we were accommodated by him also for a few nights. And we came to ITB, the Bandung Institute of Technology, and registered ourselves.”

  “But this is a w
onderful story about Sutan Sjahrir.”

  “The socialists were like that. Always looking for supporters. Actually, I couldn’t be a socialist because I am already Muslim. The good ideas of socialism I can find in the Koran.”

  “But the Koran doesn’t give you the institutions. That’s what socialists try to do. You want more than the ideas.”

  “For the institutions, it’s up to us. Hizbullah, the Muslim army, was created by the Masjumi party. My father was one of the leaders of that party, representing his region, North Sumatra. And he sat in the highest council of the Muslim clergy. So, although I was attracted by Sutan Sjahrir and his manner and his intellectual capacity, I couldn’t be a socialist because I was already a Muslim. I admired him as one of our national leaders, but nothing more than that.”

  “Did you in Masjumi actually have a programme?”

  “They did. Decentralized government. Two chambers. Cooperative economy. The natives of a region participating in the economy.”

  “Is that Islam? Or regionalism?”

  “They stressed rural development. Most of the Muslims are in the rural areas.”

  Muslims, Muslims: he used the word where other people might have said Indonesians.

  And on his first Friday at the Institute of Technology in Bandung Imaduddin had a shock.

  “It was very secular here in 1953. You couldn’t find any mosque round here. You would have to walk three kilometres down to the village to find a mosque. Most of the professors at the institute were Dutch—and they were here until 1957, when Sukarno kicked them out. Most of the lectures were in English. That was the rule, for people who couldn’t talk the Indonesian language. I found on the first Friday that some of the professors were giving lectures during the prayer time. I was from Sumatra, and I was brought up in a strict Muslim family. So to me not going to the mosque for Friday prayers was quite a mental shock.