Category Archives: Southeast Asia

So Linus [a Javanese Christian] lived with the idea of decay, a precious world in dissolution. His recent trouble with the young Muslims of Yogyakarta was like part of the new uncertainty.

“I write a short cultural essay for the local paper. I was in charge this year of the Javanese and Indonesian literature section of the Yogya art festival. In one of my columns I tried to present the Javanese music that still lives in our society but is not popular today. In the gamelan there is an instrument called the sitar, and a group called sitaran. As far as I know, people use this sitaran group at weddings and circumcision ceremonies. I tried to understand the custom of circumcision. I know from the Old Testament that the prophet Musa introduced this custom, and Musa is Jewish. Jewish in Indonesian is jahudi [= Yahudi] and circumcision is jahudi-sasi [see below]. I wanted to make a historical-cultural point. To make for a better festival. I wasn’t touching the Muslim custom only, because Christians here also practice circumcision. Today it’s not only a religious thing, but a health precaution.

“I went to the paper, the office, on Thursday afternoon, two days after, to get my money for the article. Seventy-five thousand rupiah.” About thirty-five dollars. “And the journalists told me that some young Muslims had just brought some leaflets to the newspaper. The leaflet said, ‘Hang Linus. Linus mocks Muslims.’ They were trying to stir up the students.”

I said, “Weren’t you expecting something like that?”

“I was surprised. I thought that if someone doesn’t agree he would write in the newspaper against what I had written. Maybe they have a crisis of identity as a young generation. They are young people who have not finished in the university.

“I came home, and in the morning some soldiers came here with a captain and said, ‘Linus, what did you do? Did you mock the Muslims?’ I said, ‘No.’ The captain had a copy of the article. He said he didn’t see any reference to Muslims. Then he said, ‘And now we will all go to Yogya. And follow me, please.’ We went, to the fourth level of the local command.”

It was Linus’s way of expressing the seriousness with which the army took the affair.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 82-83

Hmm. Something’s not right. My Kamus Inggris-Indonesia (Cornell, 1975) lists only two base forms for circumcision: sunatan (> penyunatan) and khitanan, and doesn’t list anything like sasi at all (except sasis ‘chassis’). The root khitan, like most kh- words, is probably from Arabic, but sunat has an interesting alternate definition: “2. skim money off the top of a budget so that the grantee gets only a portion. Anggaran y[an]g lima belas juta itu di-[sunat] lima Five million were taken from the budgeted 15 (so that the department received only 10 million of the amount allotted).” The second practice (‘skimming’) seems far more universal than the first (‘skinning’).

I wonder if “jahudi-sasi” is Javanese (not Indonesian) for ‘Jewish rite’. Compare Javanese sasi Muharram (Muharram being the first month of the Muslim year). But, in that case, the order should be sasi Jahudi because modifiers generally come after nouns in Indonesian and Javanese, as in French or Spanish.

Moreover, there is a sasi meaning ‘taboo’ that seems to be more common in Maluku and eastern Indonesia, far from Java. Could Naipaul’s Linus, the Javanese Christian, have been a Christian of Moluccan ancestry?

Sasi: a varied family of customary practices and laws (or rules) which establish limitation of access to individually or collectively controlled territory and/or resources. To place sasi on an area means to put into effect a time-limited prohibition on entry and behavior within that area. Individual trees, as well as entire regions of orchard lands or “wild forest”, might be placed under sasi (ZERNER, 1994:1118)

In the Moluccas of eastern Indonesia, customary practices to control access to resources are generally known as sasi in which harvest of selected coastal and land resources are subject to particular regulation. The function and history of sasi are diverse. For instance, sasi lola (trochus shell) spread extensively throughout the Moluccas in the mid 1970s when economic demand for the shell neccesitated control over its harvest while sasi lompa (sardine-like fish) is found only on Haruku Island and its origin may be traced back several hundred years. [Note that the modifying noun that identifies what the taboo applies to always follows sasi.]

Land and marine resource ownership in Irian Jaya is historically clan-based. But when Indonesia took over Irian Jaya in the late 60’s, the Jakarta government declared that all land belonged to the state by law. The traditional community-based system of marine resource management called sasi forbids the use of specific resources for a designated period of time in order to allow them to recover.

V. S. Naipaul has a keen sense of the palimpsest that is Indonesia.

In 1979 Mr. [Abdurrahman] Wahid and his pesantren [think madrassa], the Islamic boarding-school movement, had been thought to be at the forefront of the modern Muslim movement. The pesantren had the additional glory at that time of having been visited by the educationist Ivan Illich and pronounced good examples of the “deschooling” he favored. Deschooling wasn’t perhaps the best idea to offer village people who had been barely schooled. But because of Illich’s admiration the pesantren of Indonesia seemed to be yet another example of Asia providing an unexpected light, after the obfuscations of colonialism. And a young businessman of Jakarta, a supporter of Mr. Wahid’s, arranged for me to visit pesantren near the city of Yogyakarta. One of the pesantren was Mr. Wahid’s own; it had been established by his family.

There had followed two harrowing days: looking for the correct places first of all, moving along crowded country roads between crowded school compounds: usually quiet and sedate at the entrance, but then all at once–even in the evening–as jumping and thick with competitive life as a packed trout pond at feeding time: mobs of jeering boys and young men, some of them relaxed, in sarongs alone, breaking off from domestic chores to follow me, some of the mob shouting, “Illich! Illich!”

With that kind of distraction I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, and I am sure I missed a lot. But deschooling didn’t seem an inappropriate word for what I had seen. I didn’t see the value of young villagers assembling in camps to learn village crafts and skills which they were going to pick up anyway. And I was worried by the religious side: the very simple texts, the very large classes, the learning by heart, and the pretense of private study afterwards. In the crowded yards at night I saw boys sitting in the darkness before open books and pretending to read….

Before Islam they would have been Buddhist monasteries, supported by the people of the villages and in return reminding them of the eternal verities. In the early days of Islam here they would have remained spiritual places, Sufi centers. In the Dutch time they would have become Islamic schools. Later they would in addition have tried to become a more modern kind of school. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, where Islam was comparatively recent, the various layers of history could still be easily perceived. But–this was my idea, not Mr. Wahid’s–the pesantren ran all the separate ideas together and created the kind of mishmash I had seen.

While we talked there had been some chanting going on outside: an Arabic class. Mr. Wahid and I went out at last to have a look. The chanting was coming from the verandah of a very small house at the bottom of the garden. The light was very dim; I could just make out the teacher and his class. The teacher was one of the most learned men in the neighborhood, Mr. Wahid said. The pesantren had built the little house for him; the villagers fed him; and he had, in addition, a stipend of five hundred rupiah a month, at that time about eighty cents. So, Islamic though he was, chanting without pause through his lesson in Arabic law, he was descended–as wise man and spiritual lightning-conductor, living off the bounty of the people he served–from the monks of the Buddhist monasteries.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 22-23

The overthrow of the old religions–religions linked to the earth and animals and the deities of a particular place or tribe–by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history. Even when there are texts, as with the ancient Roman-Christian world, the changeover is hard to follow. There are only indications. It can be seen that the earth religions are limited, offering everything to the gods and very little to men. If these religions can be attractive now, it is principally for modem aesthetic reasons; and even so, it is impossible to imagine a life completely within them. The ideas of the revealed religions–Buddhism (if it can be included), Christianity, Islam–are larger, more human, more related to what men see as their pain, and more related to a moral view of the world. It might also be that the great conversions, of nations or cultures, as in Indonesia, occur when people have no idea of themselves, and have no means of understanding or retrieving their past.

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people–the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet–a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 63-64

My first eighteen years were spent two oceans away, on the other side of the globe, in the New World, on an island in the mouth of one of the great South American rivers. The island had no sacred places; and it was nearly forty years after I had left the island that I identified the lack.

I began to feel when I was quite young that there was an incompleteness, an emptiness, about the place, and that the real world existed somewhere else. I used to feel that the climate had burnt away history and possibility. This feeling rnight have had to do with the smallness of the island, which we all used to say was only a dot on the map of the world. It rnight have had to do with the general poverty and the breakdown of the extended family system that had come with us from India. It might have had to do with the wretched condition of India itself; and with the knowledge at the same time that we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather.

Later, years after I had left–knowledge of things never corning all at once, but in layers–I thought that the place was unhallowed because it hadn’t been written about. And later still I thought that the agricultural colony, in effect a plantation, honored neither land nor people. But it was much later, in India, in Bombay, in a crowded industrial area–which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree–that I understood that, whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us.

There would have been sacred places on the island, and in all the other islands to the north. On the tiny island of St. Kitts, for example, there were–hidden by sugarcane fields–rocks with crude pre-Columbian carvings. But the aboriginal people who knew about the sacred places had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were–in the plantation colony–people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents.

Too late, then, I remembered with a pang a story I had heard about when I was a child, and later read another version of (in Charles Kingsley’s At Last, 1871). Every now and then, according to this story, groups of aboriginal Indians in canoes came across the gulf from the continent (where remnants of the tribes still existed), walked to certain places in the woods in the southern hills, performed certain rites or made offerings, and then, with certain fruit they had gathered, went back home across the gulf. This was all that I heard. I wasn’t of an age to want to ask more or to find out more; and the unfinished, unexplained story now is like something in a dream, an elusive echo from another kind of consciousness.

Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness–which is more than the idea of the “environment”–that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness–rather than history and the past–that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover.

So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries–lran, Pakistan, Indonesia–the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 51-52

In his book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), V.S. Naipaul profiles an Islamic fundamentalist from Sumatra. The profile concludes thus:

Near the end of our talk that Sunday morning I asked him again about his outspokenness in the late 1970s and his troubles then with the government.

He said, expanding on what he had learnt in jail in 1978 and 1979 from the former foreign minister, Subandrio, “Never criticize Suharto. He’s a Javanese. Young people shouldn’t criticize older people, especially big people.” For Imaduddin–not so young in 1977: forty-six to President Suharto’s fifty-six–this went against the grain. “I was trained in the Dutch way and then in the American way, where criticism is O.K. And I was born in Sumatra: I can argue with my father. I had to learn the Javanese way.”

The Sumatran way, which came naturally to Imaduddin, was the forthright, religious way, the fundamentalist way. For Imaduddin it had historically been a source of Sumatran strength.

He had told me earlier, “The Dutch when they came could conquer Java relatively easily, but they couldn’t conquer Aceh and Sulawesi because the people were very religious.”

Mr. Wahid had spoken of the new steamship travel that had from the thirties of the nineteenth century made Mecca more accessible for pilgrimage and study. Out of this there had developed, in colonized Java, the new Islamic village schools, like the one run by Mr. Wahid’s grandfather.

In the independent kingdoms or sultanates of Sumatra, however, the effect of these journeys to Mecca had been more violent. Just as one hundred and fifty or sixty years later colonial students, often the first in their families to travel abroad for university degrees, were to go back home with borrowed ideas of revolution; so these Sumatran students and pilgrims in Mecca, influenced by Wahabi fundamentalism, and a little vain of their new knowledge, were to go back home determined to make the faith in Sumatra equal to the Wahabi faith in Mecca. They were determined to erase local errors, all the customs and ceremonies and earth reverences that carried the taint of the religions that had gone before: animism, Hinduism, Buddhism. There had followed religious wars for much of the century; it was what had drawn the Dutch in, at first to mediate or assist, and then to rule.

This was the missionary faith that lmaduddin had inherited. Java, rather than Sumatra, was rich in the monuments of the pagan past. But nothing outside or before the faith was to be acknowledged, not even a great Buddhist monument like Borobudur, one of the wonders of the world. One of Imaduddin’s criticisms of the government in 1979 was that the Indonesian embassy in Canberra looked like a Hindu building. As for Borobudur, that was for the international community to look after.

I asked him about that. He said–like a man whose position now required him to be more statesmanlike–that I had misunderstood. What he had said or meant to say was that money that could be used to feed “hungry Muslims” shouldn’t be used on Borobudur.

In spite of the statesmanlike softening intention, the old Sumatran unforgivingness showed through. For the new fundamentalists of Indonesia the greatest war was to be made on their own past, and everything that linked them to their own earth.