Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V. S. Naipaul
He said, “We have to kill a lot of people. We have to kill one or two million of these Javanese.” Everybody who had risen, like himself, had to be killed: everyone in the government, the good jobs, the universities, the nice houses. “I feel in Jakarta I have lost my sensitivity. I have an office on the ninth floor of one of these big new buildings. It is centrally air-conditioned. I go to the office in an air-conditioned car. Going back to my place, I stay at home reading. I look at television. Where am I living? I cannot grasp poverty. How can I grasp the complaint from the society?”
There was too much injustice. Too many people were unemployed, and their number grew year by year. Not enough jobs were being created by the government, the multinationals, the Chinese entrepreneurs from Singapore and Hong Kong. Rage was the response of this man: rage, seemingly political, that was really Islamic, an end in itself; and racial rage.
“Most of the Ph.D.’s are Chinese. They are like a cancer cell, ever growing and powerful, and they will destroy their surroundings, and we cannot stop it. If these people enter any system they always outdo and outsmart.”
“But you need gifted people.”
“These people”—and he was talking now not only about the local Chinese, but also about people from the multinationals and all foreigners—“are actually like electric current with 220 volts. However, the existing wiring of the society is capable only of 110, so any direct contact with the 220 will spoil the 110. You need a transformer. The transformer is supposed to be the government sector and the young intellectuals. However, due to impatience to attain material goods, this sector most of the time affiliates with the 220 volts instead of with the 110. Because these young technocrats, if they’re starting to drive, they want Rolls-Royce or, if not that, Volvo.”
So it all had to go. “The fight that’s coming will be between the people in the universities and the people in the pesantren. One day the students from the pesantren will come to Jakarta and burn down this nice hotel. Islam can become a cocaine. It makes you high. You go to that mosque and you get high. And when you get high, everything that happens becomes Allah’s will.”
It had happened before in Indonesia, this mass slaughter. In 1965 the communists had been wiped out. A million people had been killed, he said, not half a million, as was now given out. And more should have been killed: there were two and a half million communists at the time. So a million and a half had escaped killing, and many of them were still around.
I said, “If the killing starts, you may go yourself.”
“I might. I hope not. But I might.”
“I was told that in 1965 some people took out the gamelan when they went killing.”
“Of course. To add to the beauty.”
It was after tea, and the Brasserie of the Borobudur Intercontinental—gardens behind the glass—was full of the people he was talking against: local Chinese, well-to-do Indonesian businessmen, the middle-aged men from the multinationals. He was speaking loudly, and in English.
I said “Do you talk like this when you talk to the government people?”
“No. I talk to them of facts and figures, plans and studies.”
“Why do you talk to me like this, then?”
“You are not a scientist. You want to find out about me. You are playing a game of chess with me. So I talk to you of the other side.”
I was playing no game of chess with him. He had been told before he came what my purpose was. Perhaps he didn’t believe. He was unusually small, with a slight but noticeable facial disfigurement. It would have worried him; in Indonesia they loved beauty. He wished in the Brasserie to draw attention to himself. He had the Indonesian feeling for drama. But his rage was real enough; and his fantasy of violence could become reality. Nineteen sixty-five had occurred.
I talked one day with Gunawan Mohammed, editor of Tempo, the leading weekly magazine of Indonesia, about the 1965 killings. Gunawan was twenty-five at the time. (Indonesians have lived through so much: it was only later that I remembered that on another occasion Gunawan had told me that in 1946, during the revolution, when Gunawan was six, his father had been executed by the Dutch. But Gunawan had no ill-feeling towards the Dutch. He said, “It was a war.”)
Gunawan’s explanation of the killings of 1965 was simple. “Fear. I cannot tell you how frightened people were of the communists. They were so strong, and nobody knew what they were going to do.” The communist youth building was not far from Gunawan’s house, and during those days of fear Gunawan sat with a gun in his house. “I believe I would have killed, if I had to.”
AN Indonesian book preceding those days of fear came my way. It was Contemporary Progressive Indonesian Poetry, an anthology of Indonesian communist poetry in English translation, and it was published in 1962 by the League of People’s Culture. Old history, it might have seemed; but everything issued by the league was still banned. And it was only in December 1979, while I was in Indonesia, that the most famous writer connected with the league, Pramoedra Ananta Toer, was released from confinement, together with the last of the twenty thousand (the official figure given) who had been detained since 1965 as communists—the Indonesian government, it was said, yielding to pressure from President Carter.
Pramoedra’s later life scarcely bears contemplating: imprisoned at forty-one, returned to the world at fifty-four, his early books banned, the years of his maturity wasted. He was like Sitor Situmorang, whom I had met only a few days after I had arrived in Indonesia, whose history I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time, and whose intellectual and social graces I had taken too much for granted.
In 1962 Sitor was a man of power in Indonesia. He had made his name with his early lyrical poems. He was now more political, general secretary of the League for National Culture; and he was represented in the anthology by three poems he wrote after a visit to China.
Zoila is a maiden from Cuba
in Peking. With pride
she hands me the banner
of her country, celebrating
the victory of her land
over American aggression.
It was sad, and scarcely believable, that simplicity like that could have led to such pain for Sitor and his country. But Sitor was not to be reproached now: as someone had said, he had suffered too much. And I was willing to look for other things in these political poems of his.
He had said to me one day, “The people here have lost their religion.” He was speaking as a man who had been cut off from his tribal past, snatched from his village at the age of six and sent to a Dutch boarding school. He had felt the need to reconstruct or understand this past only when he had come out of jail and was trying to write his autobiography; without knowing what he had come from, he hadn’t been able to make sense of his life. And it seemed to me that in 1962 socialism or communism had given him—a man without a past or a community—a substitute wholeness. In China he had visited a commune.
Social life, solidarity and hope
I encountered and felt
in this commune. Hence:
I want to drink from the warmth
of your hopes
I want to press your hands
so busily at work.
I want to eat this bread
the bread of the commune, as a token
of social life, solidarity and
human hopes regained.
Freedom together in love, in
ideals and the reality of the socialist world.
The bread of the commune; social life, solidarity and hope: the theme wasn’t Sitor’s alone. It was the Indonesian theme, now more than ever. It was the theme of the Muslim pesantren. And that was the surprise of this communist anthology of 1962: many of its themes and moods were Muslim and Indonesian, still.
Injustice (all the translations are by Bintang Suradi, and are given with his punctuation and use of capitals):
In bali too the rice ripens for miles around
but in bali too thousands of peasants die of hunger.
<
we come to bali and there are temples by the score
both are typical of bali
we come to bali and the peasant dies
not because the crop failed to ripen
This too is typical of bali
this too has meaning
(Putu Oka: “Bali”)
The Indonesian and Muslim lament about the loss of simplicity and brotherhood:
Life should not be measured by luxury
though luxury is the aim pursued
but by whether poverty repeats its cycle
and spreads conspicuously across the earth.
in the restaurant a gentleman dines lavishly
on the ground a beggar with a tin
is there a deal of life?
(Putu Oka: “Life”)
Rage and revenge:
Lovely Periangan, burning, reddened by fire
the peasants trapped, scorched on their native earth
comrades, brothers, against this challenge the will is supreme
resistance, revenge in every heart
(Sobron Aidit: “Sad Memories of a Tijandur Peasant”)
Political pain turning to a religious wound:
Mother!
year after year you have waited
an endless longing in your heart
but your suffering has only augmented.
Sweat and toil, blood and tears
terrorists, usurers and landlords
join one another to suck out your blood.
Is it true Mother
that all creatures on earth have your love?
(Rukiah Kertapati: “Indictment”)
The saviour:
And then, when the names of paltry judges have all disappeared
forgotten, burnt or eaten by the rats
your name will still live on,—Son of the Masses
born of a powerful womb
your name will live forever, death it shall not know
for you are life itself
(M. S. Ashar: “Freedom and Prison”)
Revenge, with the promise of restored “union”:
We possess nothing
but burning hearts roughened by suffering
that may turn into lava, fire and thunder
destroying foes, grinding them to dust.
We the downtrodden shoulder freedom
without rank, nameless
we’ve kept our country from becoming a prison
(Sabarsantoso Anantaguna: “The Downtrodden Shoulder Freedom”)
And, finally, the complete faith:
The society of my class, long have I dreamed of the sunrays
of a future for Udin and for the others
who yearn for friendly love binding equals to each other
ah, how black and soiled it is today
but wait, for the boil will burst, molten fire will burst forth
the time will come when the enemy meets death at the point of the dagger
the battles for the people were not in vain
they have fertilized the sturdy seedling planted by Lenin
In the pesantren at Pabelan I had been given a copy of an interview, perhaps from a Christian magazine in the Philippines, with an Indonesian kiyai, a pesantren leader. “Now how can a kiyai help in the changing of this kind of society? How can he make the landlords and the rich give up their properties which, according to Islam, belong to Allah and must be given back to the people who are creatures of Allah? How can the kiyai make the farmers see their importance as human beings who must be given justice?”
The creatures of Allah in 1979, the creatures of the earth in one of the poems of 1962. And point by point the similarities could be seen: the true faith, injustice at home, the uncritical journeys to the lands of the achieved faith.
Imaduddin had said he couldn’t be a socialist because he could find the good ideas of socialism in the Koran. He said more than he knew. The Islam of protest was a religion that had been brushed by the ideas of the late twentieth century. Men no longer simply found union in a common submission to Allah. Men were the creatures of Allah; and the late twentieth century extended the meaning of the words: these creatures of Allah had “their importance as human beings who must be given justice.” The land and its wealth belonged to Allah and not to men: the late twentieth century made that a political rather than a religious idea.
After a generation of peace, the revolutionary current of 1965 flowed again. It was Islamic now, but it was like what had gone before: as though rage and the wish for revenge were always to be tapped in this overcrowded, once-feudal land, where many men were squeezed out, the old balance was broken, where every step forward took men further away from safety, where the new world brought new gifts but made difficult demands, and all men, whether at the top or at the bottom, lived in fear of personality loss.
REPRISE
THE
SOCIETY
OF
BELIEVERS
1
Submission
Karachi, Pakistan, six months later. Many things had happened in those six months; the Muslim world had been on the boil. The American embassy in Tehran had been seized by Iranian students and more than fifty embassy staff held as hostages. There had been a siege and gun battle in the mosque at Mecca, hinting at underground movements in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan.
In Pakistan itself there had been changes. In August and September there had been talk of elections. Those elections had been cancelled; martial law had been tightened; the newspapers were censored; there were public whippings. A well-known journalist had been arrested, had appeared in court in chains, and had been sent to jail for a year. Crowds—seeing an American hand in events in Mecca—had attacked American embassy buildings in the northern cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. A Pakistani scientist based in Europe had won a Nobel prize; but he belonged to the proscribed Ahmadi sect, who venerated their own Promised Messiah; and his visit to Pakistan had led to a student riot.
It looked like terror and despotism. But the state still proclaimed its goal to be the true Islamic way. And that had to be taken seriously. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Islam served or contained other causes. In Pakistan—though there were politicians and ambitious people among the fundamentalists—the faith served itself.
In the Muslim world Pakistan was special, the creation of the Muslims of India, a minority, who had never ceased to feel themselves under threat. And there were people in Pakistan who had taken the faith to its limit. To them Islam was more than personal salvation, more than a body of belief; it had become country, culture, identity; it had to be served, at whatever cost to the individual or the state itself. The poet Iqbal, outlining his plan for a separate Indian Muslim state, had said in 1930: “It is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.” And, near the end now of my own Islamic journey, I felt that to be so.
Karachi had been green in August, after the monsoon. No rain had fallen since then, and now, in February, the gardens were brown, the trees dusty, some of them leafless; and no rain was going to fall until June.
I thought I would go and see Nusrat. He was the journalist from the Morning News who had taken me to the Karachi courts. I remembered his abrupt way of speaking, his round cheeks, his walrus moustache. In the courts he had exclaimed about the shortage of chains for the prisoners, some of whom were being led about by ropes tied to their upper arms. He had said he was going to write about that—the shortage of chains, the slackness of the prison authorities. Nusrat was always on the look-out for newspaper stories. He worked hard; he liked his job; he was driven by some kind of anxiety. He was a man of the faith. Almost his first words to me were that he was a bad Muslim—meaning that he wasn’t good enough: because to him, as he then said, Islam and the afterlife were the most important things in the world.
I
I took a taxi to the Morning News. A long board on the upper floor spread out the name of the paper; there were a number of small shops at street level. Steep concrete steps led up from the pavement. It wasn’t like the entrance to the office of a daily paper. It was more like the steps to an unimportant government office. And that was how it felt upstairs: an old tiled floor, the colours of the tiles faded, as though ground away by dust; beaten-up office furniture; old distemper on the walls; a few men sitting without urgency at tables.
It wasn’t the building I wanted, as it turned out: it was only the advertising department. The editorial department was in a building at the back. I went down by an iron spiral staircase. The iron of the steps had been worn into holes here and there. A sweeper was sweeping the concrete steps at the side of the editorial building, sloshing down one step with blackened water from a pail, working that into the concrete, sloshing down a slower step: it explained the faded tiles in the advertising department. He paused; I picked my way up.
It was a new building, but the atmosphere in editorial, at this early hour of the morning, was like the atmosphere in advertising. In a room full of files—dusty, as though what had been filed had been put away forever—a girl was sitting at a desk. She worked for the children’s page of the Morning News. She was answering children’s letters and—as though fitting tool to the job—she was using a typewriter that was very small. She wasn’t veiled: it seemed strange. On other tables were typewriters in varying stages of decrepitude—like the machines I had seen in the typewriting stalls of the Karachi bazaar (a businessman in one stall one evening, grandly dictating to a male secretary) near the law courts. Karachi, where iron steps wore out and tiles faded, gave its own atmosphere to offices: the editorial room of the Morning News had the feel of the court registry I had visited with Nusrat.