Among the Believers (53 page)

There was a fence. And behind the fence, rough two-storey concrete buildings were set about a sandy yard, which had a few trees. In the centre of the yard there was an open pillared mosque with a tiled floor just above the ground. Boys in shirts and sarongs were sitting or lounging at the edge of the floor and on the step, following an Arabic text while a sharp-voiced teacher, unseen, steadily recited.

We went past the newspaper board—in the open, with a wooden coping, and with the newspapers behind glass—to the office at the side of the mosque. There was nobody in the office. Variously coloured shirts and sarongs hung on the verandah rails of the two-storey buildings. There were boys everywhere, barebacked, in sarongs, with warm brown skins and the lean, flat, beautiful Indonesian physique, pectoral and abdominal muscles delicately defined.

They stared back. And then, gradually, they began to gather around Prasojo and me. When we walked, they followed. They became a crowd as we walked about the narrow dirt lanes and the muddy gutters between the houses at the back of the compound: hanging clothes or sarong-lengths everywhere, glimpses of choked little rooms (eight boys to a room, somebody told Prasojo). There was mud and rubbish outside the rough kitchen shed and the school shop; and over an open fire in the muddy yard one little saronged boy was scraping at a gluey mess of rice in a burnt saucepan. He looked up in terror, at us, at the crowd with us. Perhaps, I thought, all medieval centres of learning had been like this.

But—was it “Illich” that one boy shouted, and then another boy?

A very small man in a black cap, a man perhaps about four feet ten, came up to us and led us back, with our following, to the front of the compound, to a building near the mosque. He opened a door, let Prasojo
and me into a big room, and shut the door on the crowd. He looked quite stern below his black cap.

Prasojo said, “He says we are creating a disturbance.”

I said, “It isn’t me that’s creating the disturbance.”

Chairs were lined up in two rows on either side of low tables in this big room. We sat down.

And just as in East Africa, at certain seasons, the flying ants pile up in drifts against the windows to which they are attracted by the light, so the students of the famous
pesantren
of Jombang—attracted by what? by the visitor who proved their own fame?—piled up against the windows, Mongoloid face upon Mongoloid face, grin upon grin. They mimicked every word I spoke, even in the shelter of the room. And distinctly now, between the chatter and the mimicking, there were shouts of “Illich! Illich!” Had the visit—or the reported interest—of that famous man made them so vain?

Another man came into the room.

Prasojo said, “They say we must be registered. There is an Arabic class going on in the mosque and we are creating a disturbance. They get lots of visitors here.”

Of course.

“We have to register in the office,” Prasojo said.

“But there is no one in the office. We went there first.”

So we sat for a while. And then it turned out that the man in the black cap had no authority at all, wasn’t even a teacher, was only a student, had been one for nine years. He had brought us to this room only to have us to himself. I thought he should be made to do something useful.

I said to Prasojo, “Give him the letter of introduction. Tell him to take it to his leader.”

A
pesantren
, being traditional and “unstructured,” as I had heard in Jakarta, didn’t have a “principal.” It had a
kiyai
, a “leader.”

Meekly, the man in the black cap took the letter and went away.

I said to Prasojo, “Couldn’t you go and talk to the Arabic teacher?”

That class was continuing. The teacher, hidden somewhere in the shadows of the mosque, was reciting on and on.

Prasojo was horrified. He couldn’t interrupt a teacher.

“What do we do?”

“We wait.”

We waited. When the Arabic class was over we went outside, risking the crowd. Barebacked boys were lounging about the verandahs of the houses; some were smoking Indonesian clove cigarettes, sweetly scented. But the mimicking crowd, pressing all around now, made movement and speech difficult. The little man in the black cap came back, as brisk and neat and equable as ever, with the letter of introduction still in his hand. He hadn’t found his leader.

Prasojo led me back to the room with the chairs. He said, and his unhappiness gave him a strange formality, “May I leave you here for a while? I will go and find someone.”

He went out. I saw that none of the boys followed him. But they continued to gape at me. The evening was coming on, though, prayer time, food time, and interest in me began to abate. Less and less frequently, and sometimes now from far off (an idler moving away, his curiosity sated), came the shout of “Illich!” And Indonesian courtesy wasn’t dead. I was sitting alone, but someone from an inner room brought out many glasses of tea (as though a proper tea party was about to begin), set one glass in front of me without staring, and went away.

Prasojo came back with two men. One was a student, who stared and remained mute. The other was an English teacher, as small as the man in the black cap. He was all smiles, anxious to practise his English. Prasojo damped him down. They talked together in Indonesian and Prasojo said the English teacher would take us to another
pesantren
, half an hour’s drive away, where we might see someone who might tell us something.

There seemed little to lose. So we drove through the dusk, past the eternal Javanese village, and the smiling English teacher, sitting next to the driver, was no trouble at all. Abruptly, after some minutes, he turned around and said, “How many times have you visited this place?” And having framed and asked his English question, and having got a reply, he sat good and quiet for the rest of the drive.

The
pesantren
we came to looked newer and more businesslike: a well-constructed set of buildings of concrete and corrugated iron around a well-kept yard. It was the hour of the evening prayer: someone was chanting the call. The deputy leader was in the unlit office, an old man with thick-lensed glasses and a long blue sarong. He said we were lucky: Mr. Wahid was going the very next day to Jakarta. And he led
us in the dark through some gardens to a private house, to meet Mr. Abdur Rahman Wahid, who knew all about
pesantren
s. And it was only then that I remembered that Mr. Wahid’s name had been given me as a man I should try to see. There had been articles about him in the Jakarta papers. His
pesantren
work had begun to make him a figure.

Accident—Prasojo meeting the English teacher—had brought me to Mr. Wahid. And what Mr. Wahid—a short, chunky, middle-aged man in a sarong—said in his Western-style drawing-room—a dim ceiling light, a television set going in a far corner, women coming and going, family, servants, cups of tea laid out on the low table-what Mr. Wahid said altered the day for me, gave order to the confused experiences of the late afternoon, and opened my mind to a historical wonder.

First, the name. In Indonesian the word for the Chinese quarter of a town was
perchinen: per-china-en
, “where the Chinese were.” So,
pesantren
was
per-santri-en
, “the place where the wise men were,”
santri
being a version of
shastri
, the Sanskrit word for a man learned in the Hindu
shastra
s, the scriptures.

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
pesantren
s 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
pesantren
s 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.

W
E
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.