The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (37 page)

“If another religion comes it’s going to be trouble,” Ramlan warned. “If they all cooperate, it will be no problem, but sometimes with religion, people fight.” He laughed again, that same fatalistic guffaw, lined with resignation, and said, “If Christians come, just let them come, as long as they give us money.”

In
June 1930, Nathalie and Paul Means, Methodist missionaries who had met at Oberlin College in Ohio four years earlier, first encountered the Orang Asli. Indisposed to outsiders, the Orang Asli (then called
sakai
by the Malay people, a slur that translates to “slave”) did not venture forth to meet the Meanses. Finally, curious to see what a Western woman looked like, one person emerged from the
forest. “She was small, dark brown, and wore only a sort of grass skirt that did not serve as much of a cover,” Nathalie Means wrote in
And the Seed Grew
, the Meanses’ 1981 account of their evangelizing efforts from 1934 to 1939 among the Orang Asli. The title comes from one of St. Paul’s jailhouse letters to the Corinthians: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians
3:6).

Although Protestant missionaries had come to the Malay Peninsula with the British during the 1800s, ongoing upheavals made it hard for them to put down any real theological roots in the jungle. The Meanses were among the first Protestant missionaries to actually evangelize the Orang Asli. Paul, a Rhodes Scholar from Nebraska and a member of the YMCA’s international committee, had traveled
to Calcutta and Iraq to study Sanskrit and serve as a language expert during World War I. He arrived in neighboring Indonesia in 1927, along with his new wife, Nathalie, and their newborn son, to serve as the principal of a Methodist boys’ school in the province of Medan. Three years later, after promising the local Malay king, a Muslim sultan, that they would baptize no one for ten years, the
Meanses began their work among the Orang Asli.

It was not easy. Not only did the Malay government oppose the Meanses’ efforts, but the Orang Asli were intensely shy, since they had maintained their identity and escaped slavery through self-seclusion—a trait they still teach their children through stories of violent outsiders. Their most loathed enemies were slave raiders called the Rawa,
descendants
of immigrants who came from Sumatra. In
Spotted Doves at War
, an epic poem translated by the anthropologist Robert Dentan, the Orang Asli recount the battle against the Rawa slavers: “Oh relatives the Raweys [Rawa] have come up they have given us death remember!”
¹

One evening a few days after the wedding, Edo and I passed through a neighborhood of one-story bungalows around a cul-de-sac in Kampar.
“The people who live here are descendants of the Rawa,” he said. He was dropping me off to spend the night with Bah Rahu, the Methodist pastor I had met at the wedding, who lived in a village outside of town called Ulu Geruntum; in Malay, “Upriver Geruntum.” Most villages are named for rivers, because, until the road was built, the river was the source of everything. Beyond the tract of bungalows,
the road, which was tarred to that point, gave way to a bone-jarring dirt track, and we pitched along next to the clean, racing cataract of a river very different from the one along the logging road. Wherever the current eddied and settled, the milk-white water grew glassy and clear. This clarity was partly the influence of the pastor whom I was going to meet, Edo said. Bah Rahu had successfully
used religious identity—a Methodist one—to bind his village together and to protect it from outside incursions, be they logging companies or government-run Islamic schools.

We pulled into the pastor’s village after true dark—the absolute profundity that occurs only when no city lights bruise the sky plum. He was waiting on the riverbank outside his small house, its windows edged in lace doilies.
Heavy-headed marigolds bobbed in the gelid breeze the river made. The churning water seemed phosphorescent; the pastor’s white eyebrows and hair seemed to glow against the darkness. The roar filled our ears, and we had to yell over it to make ourselves heard. Somehow, over the noise, Bah Rahu had made out the Jeep’s engine coming from miles away. Few vehicles came here, and even fewer strangers.
Thanks to the legacy of slavers such as the Rawa, the Orang Asli preferred their solitude.

“My father called them man-eaters,” Bah Rahu said, recalling the reason for his people’s flight from the coast centuries earlier. “That’s why we moved back into the forest.” He led me inside the house, where he had hung a print of the Last Supper, not Leonardo’s somber depiction but another, more effervescent
one, in which a beatific Jesus seemed joyfully
resolved to die. We passed a small store where his family sold candy and ramen noodles to supplement their income. The floor was covered with contact paper depicting kittens playing with yarn—poor man’s linoleum the world over. In his closet-size study, a prie-dieu burnished with use held two books,
The Greatest Story Ever Told
and
Seeking the Face
of God
.

As the pastor padded barefoot around the house, he told me his version of how Christianity had saved his community. It was extraordinarily different from the Meanses’ version and, I suspect, told from a separate register, in which verifiable fact was a matter of perspective—a modern parable.

“This land used to be a cemetery,” he began. The Orang Asli didn’t want to move here, but during
the Communist rebellion of the 1950s, the government made them relocate to be sure they would not help the rebels by providing them food or guidance through the woods. To live on top of graves was anathema. (The word
anathema
derives from the same root as the Hebrew
herem
and the Arabic
haram
. All three words mean “set apart”—cast out—by God.) Living here, on set-apart land, invites attack by
evil spirits. Every evil spirit kills or curses. But the Orang Asli had no choice; the government said they had to move. He went on: “After three months, everyone was sick. Seventy-two people died,” so the shamans ordered a series of strictures to appease the spirits. “We made no noise. We had no white things. We spilled no blood, because the spirit didn’t like it.” Yet the more the shamans worked,
the sicker people became. “We were all suffering. Some were crazy. My mother was going crazy. The shamans said she was possessed by the spirit of a bird,” the pastor, who did not believe in evil spirits, said in disgust. “The shamans wanted us to move, but my father said we’re going to have to stay, because if we go, it will cause more problems with the government.”

Bah Rahu’s father went to
visit a newly baptized Orang Asli Christian down the river, and invited the convert to visit his cursed village. It was right before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, according to this tale, three members of the community had portentous dreams. In two, a man came to the village dressed in white and told the villagers he would “clean” this land by the river so they would not have to move. In the third,
the spirits came to the village and commanded the Orang Asli to leave. So the village decided to test the man in white to see if he would protect them. According to Bah Rahu, they were dreaming of Jesus. “My father said, ‘I think we
should pray.’ We only knew a few hymns. We had no Bible. There were no sermons. So we prayed.” Afterward, they did what the shamans forbade in order to see how the
spirits would respond. The ground, they decided, had been purified. That marked the end of the curse and the beginning of Christianity in this village. Several years later, in 1960, seven hundred people were baptized in one mass ceremony and the missionaries opened a Methodist school for children, which the present-day pastor attended as a boy. Even so, his parents were afraid of what Christianity
would cost them. It could cost them their son, they feared. “I told them I’d love them much more as a Christian,” Bah Rahu said.

“We are free now from satanic rules,” he said. “We know when we die we’ll go to a place promised by God. Now we know what the future holds.” The solace of the afterlife—of absolute salvation—was powerful to him. Providence mattered more than anything else.

Although
most of the villagers are now Christians, they sometimes ask Bah Rahu to exorcise evil spirits, calling him shaman. “I don’t mind, because I’m teaching them about my spirit, which is Jesus Christ,” he said. Yet some Christian teachings still elude his flock. “The Orang Asli do not believe in sin, so that’s difficult to explain.” Communion, with the understanding that the person taking communion eats
the body of Christ in the unleavened bread, repulses them: they believe only evil spirits consume human flesh. “It’s difficult for my community to understand the meat of Jesus,” Bah Rahu said, “so we explain that communion is consuming the power of God.” Other teachings come more easily. “The fact that God speaks through Jesus, they have no problem with that, because in our belief, the tiger spirit
can speak like a man when he comes into a shaman.”

We had finished off the cast-iron frying pan of river fish and peppers. The pastor leaned his back against the woven wall and grew reflective.

“I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” he quoted the Gospel according to John into the now-dark corners of the hut. As a Christian, he told me, he had to set
an example for others. “They look closely at your life to see what effect being Christian has had on you.” Apparently, the indigenous healers did not like his Christianizing influence. Once, they invited him to dance with them to prove their superior powers could outlast him. “Everyone told me not to go, but I went,” he said. “After eight hours of dancing, all of them fell off except for me. They
said I couldn’t fall because I was a Christian.”

It was late. He rose and said, “That’s enough for tonight.”

His wife led me to a mattress. The river was rushing past about ten feet away, on the other side of the grass wall, and I could feel its chill through the rattan. I crawled under the bug netting, between the Garfield the cat sheets, and opened a book I’d borrowed from the pastor. I skimmed
its worn pages until my eye caught this passage: “The first city was Enoch [named for Cain’s son]. Cities enable people to live and work near each other. Cities hold a special attraction for evil people.” This was a cautionary tale—strangers were dangerous, and so were the places where they congregated. Christians should go forth boldly, but warily. Their faith, it followed, would protect them.

The next morning we drove down the dirt track to the pastor’s coral-colored church. “Twice, state security has come to take pictures of the church to see who paid for it,” he said. (In other communities, the Malay government has bulldozed churches.) The community paid half the construction costs, and South Korean Methodists paid the other half. South Korea, whose churches now send roughly twelve
thousand missionaries abroad a year to evangelize,
²
is second only to the United States, whose churches send an estimated forty-six thousand Protestant missionaries
³
annually on foreign mission.

“In the old days, missionaries handed out things, but that’s not helpful,” Bah Rahu said. I wondered what he would think of the Indonesian pastor Rebekkah and her Happy Sundays, but did not mention them.
“We cherish our land—our language, customs, and rights. People need to help us preserve these things.” Christianity, he believed, would protect his people from assimilation by allowing them to retain a more complex identity, allowing them to be Orang Asli and Christians at once. To become a Muslim, he believed, meant to lose everything, to be subsumed by the dominant culture of the Malays. “When
we became Christians, the government was very angry,” he said. “Their plan was to convert us to Islam, but they found it’s not so easy to convert a person. It’s hard work. It takes a long time.” Bah Rahu knew this from his own efforts. Also, Christianity threatened the government because it was synonymous with the all-powerful and threatening West. And it offered a way to organize around a rival
political voice—not those of the popular Muslim political parties. For instance, when the local Malay government failed to provide the Orang Asli here with health care, the community voted together, as Christians, for the multiethnic opposition party.

“I think the policy of the government is to have us disappear,” Bah
Rahu said. Converting them to Islam, he believed, and making them de facto
Malays, was the easiest way to do that.

Due to centuries of enslavement and marginalization, redemption through suffering was the easiest Christian concept for his people to grasp, he said, returning to our conversation from the night before. “Americans don’t care what’s happening in other places, do they?” he said, and pondered aloud if need kept people closer to God and God closer to them.
“I wonder, is there a place for God’s word in the lives of people who have everything?”

He inspected the doorjamb of his simple church. As he saw it, need had turned the Orang Asli to Christianity, and now need was why they’d kept the faith. “Because we’re so poor and in need, we take our religion very seriously,” he said. The Orang Asli’s religious transformation was also proof that Christianity
no longer belonged to the West, he added; in fact, it never had.