Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Another Variety of Indonesian Religious Experience

Posted by John

As a stranger to Indonesia, I muddle through interactions with the help of rehearsed Indonesian phrases and the kindness of people who speak a few words of English. Danielle can translate between Indonesian and English, but she can’t do that when she’s across town. Consequently, the absence of sustained face-to-face contact and the give-and-take of conversation confine me to the periphery of most of what happens here.

Communicating through gesture and simplified sentiments has become a form of survival, but my learning about Indonesia remains mostly at the level of abstraction. I know, for instance, that Indonesia has more than 200 million Muslims, but this number lacks a human dimension. The call to prayer happens five times a day, women in headscarves ride buses and motorcycles throughout the city, but these are surface reflections of something happening at the core of Indonesian society. One of my language instructors is a Muslim, but I can’t grasp much of what her life is like. She’s too busy preventing me from doing grave harm to Indonesian verbs and adjectives.

This sense of isolation from Indonesia’s Muslim culture is why I jumped at the chance to join Danielle when she interviewed Kyai Muhamin, a respected Islamic cleric in the city of Yogyakarta. Kyai is the Indonesian name for a religious teacher (the Arabic equivalent is “alim”), and it usually applies to someone like Muhamin who runs a Muslim boarding school.

One afternoon after language classes, we traveled with one of Danielle’s Indonesian instructors to Kyai Muhamin’s pesantren. “Pesantren” is the Indonesian word for traditional Muslim boarding schools, which are known in Arabic as madrassa. The interview would take place in Indonesian, but I brought my notebook to take down names and words to ask Danielle about later.  

Since 1992, Muhamin and his wife have run a pesantren for teenage girls. The school currently hosts 22 girls, but has been home to as many as 60 students at a time from Indonesia, Europe and even Indiana. Most study at the school for five to six years, in some cases going on to university.

Tuition at the school is free, which has long been a selling point for pesantren in Indonesia. Poorer families are priced out of public education in Indonesia due to fees parents are expected to pay. At the pesantren we visited, girls pay for the electricity, do their own cooking and help with upkeep of the school. The school tries to uphold the principle of mandiri (“self sufficiency”), including raising its own food. The brood of baby chicks that ran across the courtyard during our arrival seemed to confirm this. 

Indonesians’ use of “kyai” and “pesantren”—Javanese words, rather than Arabic ones—hints at a willingness to offer their own interpretations of Islam rather than relying exclusively on Arabic terms and concepts. Kyai Muhamin suggested as much when he talked about the kyai’s role in society. Like other Indonesians we’ve met, he emphasized the importance of cultural syncretism in a country with significant pre-Islamic and non-Islamic traditions, and said the kyai does more than transmit knowledge about the Koran. For my benefit, he switched over to English when making this point, saying “Local wisdom, local culture.”

Even with this acceptance of Indonesian idioms, however, a significant portion of the pesantren’s curriculum focuses on Islamic law and Arabic grammar. Students pray five times a day, including a session in the evening that lasts several hours. Then again, at one point in the interview we heard the unmistakable sound of English-language pop music coming from one of the girls’ dormitories. “I want to be with you, you’re so beautiful,” intoned some silver-tongued crooner. Maybe cultural syncretism prevails, even at a pesantren. Teenage girls around the world share some qualities, and Muhamin didn’t seem overly concerned on this point.

On the question of Islam’s relationship with Indonesian culture, Muhamin drew a distinction between the country’s two largest Muslim cultural organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah. Muhamin belongs to NU, which he described as more accepting of indigenous Indonesian influences on Islam. He said Muhammadiyah, by contrast, adheres more strictly to Arabic precedents. Both organizations can claim more than 30 million members, however, revealing meaningful disagreements about the proper role of Islam within Indonesian society.

These disagreements have spilled over into politics in recent years, where parties that refer to Islam as their guiding principle have significant followings. Foreign-based Islamic groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which Muhamin characterized as “anarchist” and “anti-American,” have only a handful of followers. But the Justice and Welfare Party (PKS), an organization that takes its inspiration from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, polled 8 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections that just ended and will likely join the ruling Democratic Party’s congressional coalition. PKS has tried to moderate its image in recent years, but still calls for the establishment of sharia (Islamic law) in Indonesia.

Kyai Muhamin, a firm proponent of respecting Indonesia’s various religious traditions, rejected this idea of bringing Islamic law to Indonesia. His school may teach the subject, but he doesn’t want to see it imposed on others as the law of the land. “I’d rather live in Italy than a country with sharia,” he said.

In his admonitions against mixing of politics and religion, he had harsher words for kyai who in the past cast their lot with Suharto, the dictator who ruled Indonesia for more than three decades. Suharto gave these kyai money to build their pesanstren, which Muhamin saw as corrupting these Islamic teachers and undermining the principle of self-sufficiency. Some of these kyai also endorsed Suharto’s policies, giving this authoritarian ruler a veneer of legitimacy. This close association of important Islamic figures with the ruling regime led to their “degradation,” according to Kyai Muhamin.

Danielle and I had been hoping for a tour of the pesantren and a chance to meet with some of the students, but Kyai Muhamin ended up talking to us for the balance of the two hours we had. We did get a feel for Islamic worship at the pesantren, however, when a muezzin walked into the temple immediately behind Kyai Muhamin and made the afternoon call to prayer at 3 p.m.  

It proved something of a peculiar situation—we hadn’t been invited to watch the prayers, but there they were unfolding a few feet in front of us. We heard the sound of water coming from a tap, as members of the prayer group did their ritual ablutions before entering the temple. Seated directly across from the small temple’s open windows, we could see girls in knee-length white prayer garments and white headscarves file in. We didn’t want to stare—some of the girls seemed to be starting at us—but it was impossible not to notice.

A few of the men and boys working at the pesantren also joined the prayer. It was clear that men and women were to be expected to be in separate places in the temple. A group of seven or eight girls kneeled in a row at the back of the temple, while the four of five men kneeled toward the front.

The muezzin took his place at the front of everyone, kneeling with his back to the rest of the group. With a book in his hands and his eyes closed, he appeared to be whispering a prayer, and no sound was audible. Every minute or so, he would begin to bow his head and touch it to the ground. The rest of the group would follow, repeating this gesture 10 or 12 times over the next several minutes. 

It was fortuitous we ended up in a place where we could witness (even indirectly) a daily prayer, a form of worship that forms a part of so many Indonesians’ lives. While we remain on the periphery on Indonesians’ lives, every once in a while there’s a moment like this one where we catch a glimpse of something that’s inside. 

***

 A few days ago we arrived in the East Javanese city of Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city with 3.5 million people. Danielle will be conducting some of her interviews here over the next six weeks.

Most of our time has been devoted to apartment hunting, which has cut into research and writing time. Still, it has had its share of adventures. When one budget apartment turned us away because they required a minimum six-month commitment, they referred us to Singgasana. When we arrived at Singgasana—a resort with extravagant bungalows, an enormous swimming pool, and a golf course—we quickly realized we were out of our league.

 What had possessed the guy at the budget apartments to recommend a place that cost 10 times as much as the apartments we’d asked him to show us? It had the feeling of a Queens’ landlord telling a budget traveler to New York, “I can’t help you, but you might try this place called ‘The Plaza.’ Here’s the address.”

 Even with Danielle’s expert Indonesian, we’re still muddling through.

 

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