Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (50 page)

A PLACE OF PILGRIMAGE AND RECREATION NOT FOR DOING OTHER THINGS
(GAMBLING, BOOZE, AMORALITY)

SOCIAL EVILS TEAM, SRAGEN DISTRICT

The district council that put up that sign also issues licences to the bars that cling to the hill: Hot Lips, the thudding Sexy Karaoke Bar and dozens more besides. The saint has certainly proved a blessing to the owners of knocking-shops, and has fattened the wallets of the thousands of girls that work there on peak nights. The villagers who facilitate meetings and rent out rooms don’t do badly either. One lady sidled up to me as I sat on the steps outside the shrine. ‘You can sleep with the preacher if you want,’ she nodded at the paunchy, grey-haired man in thick glasses, busy waving flowers over the brazier and squirrelling away envelopes. I tweaked my headscarf defensively and deferred as politely as I could.

‘Well, how about his younger brother?’ She shot her lips towards another of the gatekeepers, this one in a shiny batik shirt of gold and white. The man unpeeled his buck teeth and grinned at me. ‘You can do it at my place,’ the lady urged. ‘No need to pay, just a donation for the saint . . .’

The supplicants at the grave were an ill-assorted lot. A college girl was being taken through each step of her first visit by an avuncular minder. An immensely fat woman in a sequinned black top and Lycra leggings pressed herself against a very dark young man with bus-station hair, new Monster Mash hip-hop shorts and incongruous knee-length socks in beige nylon. He shuffled himself uncomfortably away from her all-encompassing bosom and scattered more flowers. She shuffled after him. He shuffled off again. Together, they danced on their knees around the grave; finally, he came full circle to the cream patent-leather shoes that he had left at the door. He grabbed them and fled.

Outside the shrine I chatted with a regular visitor who had the look of a circus strongman and who gave his name as Budi. How did he square all this holy promiscuity with the teachings of Islam? ‘It’s different,’ he said. ‘Islam is something that exists here’ – he put one hand on his forehead. ‘Javanese culture is something that exists here’ – he put the other hand on his heart. Then he patted his heart. ‘This is the thing you can never lose.’

The split between head and heart led to an ugly political rift during Indonesia’s formative years. The modernists set up political parties that aimed to unite Indonesia under sharia law, a worldview based on the life and writings of a man who had lived in a faraway desert thirteen centuries earlier. More rooted Javanese villagers – those who wove incantations to Allah together with their obeisance to local spirits – did not want to be homogenized in this way. They rejected what they saw as Arab-style Islam and its political parties, and sided instead with the nationalists and communists, the groups that supported the staunchly secular (and very Javanese) Sukarno. Religious differences were thus mapped on to political parties. And religion, and especially the particular brand of Islam one subscribed to, became something to fight about. The most spectacular fight came in 1965. The orthodox Muslims considered themselves morally superior to the more old-fashioned villagers. When the army encouraged the anti-communist bloodletting of that year, Muslim leaders in Java were at the forefront of the violence. By equating heterodox religious views with communism, they gave their young followers permission to kill those Java-style Muslims whose beliefs were less pure.

When the dust had settled back over the blood-puddles, Suharto engineered a divorce between religion and politics. His bureaucracy worked to ‘enrich’ the spiritual side of Islam; religious teachers were trained and supported, mosques became more accommodating to all-comers. The effect was to push Islam further into the lives of many millions of Javanese who had previously shown only the most desultory interest in their religion. Though some of the Javanese-flavoured Muslims who survived 1965 converted en masse to Christianity, the majority stamped ‘ISLAM’ on their ID cards and started going to the mosque more regularly. In school their children were newly exposed to more orthodox Islamic beliefs.

As it happened, the shift was well suited to the times; more and more Javanese were leaving their villages and drifting to the disordered world of the cities, places where the webs of exchange that had tied them to their neighbours and that supported their local belief systems did not exist. A homogenized, geographically deracinated, reformist Islam, one that they now shared with other Islamic communities outside of Java – the Acehnese, the Minangkabau, the Bugis – served their needs much better than a religion that depended on worship at the village shrine.

Curiously, Gunung Kemukus was one of the few places in Indonesia where no one asked my religion. Many people, on the other hand, asked me about my business troubles. One of them was the boy in nylon socks. I mumbled something about cash flow. He knew all about that, he said. He had bought into an ice-cream franchise, a sort of pyramid scheme, in Gresik on Java’s north coast. Four of the six sub-agents had grown bored cycling around selling iced lollies and had simply given up, leaving Nylon Socks to pay the collective debt. In a few days’ time he would owe twenty million rupiah, about two thousand dollars.

‘I don’t know what to do, aunty.’ He looked really forlorn. He had read about the Gunung Kemukus miracle on Facebook – he took out his phone and showed me the post. ‘But I can’t find anyone to have sex with me.’ I said that some of the other ladies at the shrine had seemed keen. ‘Ya, they’re all for sale. If it doesn’t come from the heart, it won’t work,’ he said. He turned his dejected eyes on me. ‘Please, aunty . . .’

Though places like Gunung Kemukus still thrive, Islam in Indonesia has homogenized into something more orthodox than it was when Suharto came to power. Saudi Arabia has been underwriting schools and mosques in Indonesia that teach Islam off a Middle Eastern template. The classic mosques of central Sumatra and Java, with their modest, three-tiered roofs in terracotta tiles that echo the shape of Indonesia’s volcanoes and blend into its villages, are increasingly giving way to variations on the Middle Eastern style – domed, minaretted, ostentatious. The simple scarf-over-the-head that used to serve for a jilbab is losing out to elaborate constructions that leave no wisp of hair visible; some girls now wear jilbabs even before they can walk. A small but increasing minority of women are covering themselves completely, and in parts of the country such as Madura and South Sulawesi, it’s now quite common to see men trooping off to the mosque not in traditional sarongs and skullcaps but in full-length robes and turbans.

None of this was deemed worthy of comment by the people I met on boats and verandas, on buses and in coffee stalls. Those people talked endlessly about corruption or the miserable state of the roads, the schools, the health services, but they never worried openly about any rise in religious fundamentalism. Among my middle-class friends in Jakarta, however, the apparent Arabization of Islam in Indonesia was a cause of great angst. They were concerned about two groups in particular. One was the Prosperous Justice Party, the PKS, a parliamentary party modelled on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The other was the Islamic Defenders Front, the FPI, self-appointed guardians of morality who like to descend on red-light districts and smash up licensed bars in the name of Allah.

I ran into a group of concerned friends quite by chance during one of my Jakarta pit-stops, in a cafe popular with the type of activist that can afford to pay a brick-maker’s weekly wage for a cappuccino. One of the group was a photographer; he invited me to see his new show, commissioned by a friend who worked at the Alliance Française. Another, a young lawyer, told me she had just taken a job at the National Women’s Commission. A friend who helps curate Jakarta’s gay film festival was there too. They had gathered to plan a demonstration. It was to be a counterpoint to the Islamic Defenders Front, who were gathering their forces to demonstrate against a concert by Lady Gaga. The pop singer’s mere presence in the country would, according to the FPI, turn young Indonesians homosexual.

The next day, on my way to the dentist, I stupidly chose a route which took me past the Hotel Indonesia roundabout in the centre of Jakarta. This large traffic circle flows around a central fountain from which rises one of Sukarno’s triumphalist sculptures. This one, nicknamed Hansel and Gretel, portrays a young man and woman throwing their hands up in a gesture of welcome to modernity. The cobblestones around the fountain have become the beating heart of the city for political demonstrators; it’s from here they can most successfully draw attention to themselves by clogging the arteries of the already traffic-choked city. I found the circle crowded with bearded men in long white dresses. Some were barking through loudspeakers, others held up banners reading, in English: ‘GO TO HELL LADY GAGA THE MOTHER MONSTER.’ They had also recruited quite a few teenaged girls in jilbabs and provided them with posters that read, in Indonesian: ‘YA ALLAH! PROTECT ME FROM THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE ACCURSED GAGA DEVIL.’ Through a photo of the pop singer was a large cross, emblazoned with the words: ‘Stop Importing Immorality to Indonesia.’

Cops were blocking off the street that led to my dentist’s surgery, so I thought I may as well join the counter-demonstration for a while. I texted a couple of the friends who had been planning it, to ask which side of the circle they were. ‘Didn’t make it,’ one texted back. ‘Busy at work and so much traffic.’ ‘In the end I couldn’t be bothered,’ replied another. Later, I took some of my friends to task about this: if they were genuinely worried about ‘rising religious intolerance’ and the restriction of their freedom to worship and to live as they pleased, shouldn’t they make the effort to battle the traffic and raise their voices against religious zealots like the FPI? ‘It’s not really about religion, though, is it?’ replied my lawyer friend. ‘The FPI are just paid heavies that politicians wheel out when they want to whip up votes or defend their business interests.’

Since Dutch times and possibly earlier, powerful men in Indonesia have made common cause with thugs and gangsters to achieve political ends. Universally known as
preman
, supposedly from the Dutch
vrijman
(or Free Man, in English), the gangsters command fear and a reluctant respect.
*
In exchange for doing dirty work for politicians, preman are allowed a relatively free hand in racketeering; they are up to their biceps in prostitution, gambling, drug-dealing and much else. Indonesia in the 2010s looks a lot like Chicago in the 1920s. Nationalist organizations such as
Pemuda Pancasila
(Pancasila Youth) openly admit to using violence for political ends. In the 2012 film
The Act of Killing
, Indonesia’s former Vice President Jusuf Kalla tells a Pancasila Youth rally that preman are indispensible to do the work bureaucrats can’t do. ‘We need preman to open up the road. Use your muscle!’ he says, on camera. ‘Muscles aren’t
just
for beating people up, though you do sometimes need to beat people up . . .’ Muscles rippled under orange and black military-style fatigues as Kalla’s thuggish audience applauded that line.

Preman come in various flavours. Besides those in orange and black fatigues, you can find them in common-or-garden biker leathers and in the long-haired, tattooed variety. More recently, they have also begun to appear in turbans or knitted skullcaps, long white robes and straggly beards. I first saw one of these holy thugs at around midnight one night in 2002. I had stopped in to say hello to Eris, a friend who managed one of Jakarta’s sleazier gay nightclubs; behind us, a group of transgender dancers were fluttering around in their tummy-control knickers, trying to get their false eyelashes pinned down before their dance show. One of the staff bounded in: ‘They’re here.’

Eris opened a drawer and took out an envelope. Soon, a young man with the trademark beard and long white robes appeared; he seemed completely unfazed by the ribald catcalls he got from the half-naked trannies. There was a quick
salaam alaikum
, Eris handed over the envelope, the holy man nodded, and then he was gone.

‘God, they’re just as bad as those leather preman who used to shake you down,’ I said with a laugh. ‘What do you mean as bad as?!’ she said. ‘They
are
the leather preman. It’s the same guys. That’s their new look.’

The gangsters who were shaking Eris down had joined the Islamic Defenders Front, the FPI. This group appeared in 1998 when the authorities needed a roving squad of civilians it could call on to counter the student protestors. Jakarta’s police commander admitted to giving the FPI money and logistical support. In return, FPI-related groups kept student activists far away from the meeting that laid the ground rules for electing Suharto’s successor. The Islamic warriors also attacked the office of the Human Rights Commission which was investigating military abuses in East Timor. The arrangement made for strange bedfellows, really. The armed forces have a delicate relationship with political Islam. On the one hand the staunchly secular but equally staunchly right-wing army sees Islamic groups as a bulwark against socialism. On the other, it frets that Islamists, if they grow too strong, could threaten national unity. In 1998 the generals were prepared to cut a deal with the FPI simply because they were less threatening than the secular student movement that wanted to put the military’s human rights record under the microscope.