Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) Read Online Free PDF Page B

this part of the world, and to take the islands to their destiny as the leader of Islamic revival in the twenty-first century.
    Imaduddin said, “Formerly they used to read the Koran without understanding the meaning. They were interested only in the correct pronunciation and a certain enchanted melody. We are changing this now. Now I’ve been given a chance to give lectures through TV.”
    Later we went out, past the now empty open space with the rumpled rugs. Imaduddin’s wife was there, waiting for him: a gracious and smiling Javanese beauty. It was something in Imaduddin’s favor that he had wonthe love of such a lady. It was she who had packed the jail bag for him seventeen years before, and she reminded me that I had come to their house in Bandung on the last day of 1979.
    I went to the bathroom. Ritual ablutions from a little concrete pool had left the place a mess, except for people who would take off their shoes and roll up their trousers.
    When I came back there was a tall middle-aged man in a gray suit standing with Imaduddin’s wife. As soon as this man saw Imaduddin he went to him and made as if to kiss his right hand. Imaduddin made a deflecting gesture.
    The man in the gray suit was in the Indonesian diplomatic service. He had met Imaduddin when Imaduddin had come to Germany to do his mental training courses for students. He looked at Imaduddin with smiling eyes, and said to me in English, “He is himself. He fears only God.”
    And I knew what he meant. And for a while we stood there, all smiling: Imaduddin, his wife, and the man in the gray suit.
    Imaduddin told me later that it was the custom of traditional Muslims to kiss the hand of a teacher. The diplomat looked upon Imaduddin as his teacher. Whenever he met Imaduddin he tried to kiss his hand. “But I never let him.”

2
 
HISTORY
    T HE MAN whom Imaduddin and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals had in their sights more than anybody else was Mr. Wahid.
    Mr. Wahid didn’t care for Habibie’s ideas about religion and politics, and he was one of the few men in Indonesia who could say so. He was chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the NU. The NU was a body based on the Islamic village boarding schools of Indonesia, and it was said to have thirty million members. Thirty million people resisting mental training and the Association of Muslim Intellectuals: this made Mr. Wahid formidable. And Mr. Wahid was no ordinary man. He had a pedigree. In Indonesia, and especially in Java, this mattered. His family had been connected with the village boarding schools of Java for more than a century, since the dark colonial days, when Java had been reduced by the Dutch to a plantation, and these Islamic boarding schools were one of the few places to offer privacy and self-respect to people. And Mr. Wahid’s father had been important in political and religious matters at the time of independence.
    The
Jakarta Post,
choosing its words with care, said in one report that Mr. Wahid was controversial and enigmatic. There was a story behind the words. Imaduddin believed that it might have been God, no less, who had made President Suharto more of a believing Muslim in these past few years,had sent him on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and had made him a supporter of the technological-political-religious ideas of Habibie. Mr. Wahid had other ideas about that. He believed that politics and religion should be kept separate, and one day he had allowed himself to do the unthinkable: he had criticized President Suharto to a foreign journalist. Only someone as strong and independent as Mr. Wahid could have survived. He had, remarkably, been re-elected chairman of the NU. But in the eight months since then he had not once been received by President Suharto, and it was now known that Mr. Wahid was in the line of fire.
    It was no doubt this scent of blood that made people say I should try to see Mr. Wahid. One note from a foreign journalist described him as “a blind old cleric with a