Abdal Hakim Murad – Abdurrahman Wahid Paradigms of Leadership
AI: Summary ©
The history and cultural context of the Islamized region of Java in impressions of the rainforest in Southern Guinea is discussed, including political and cultural events such as violent riots leading to deadly terrorist behavior. The President of Indonesia is wary of the media and the presence of the army, while Benjamin Gostor is mentioned as a candidate. The Olamath's hesitation to run a modern state and the importance of understanding the difference between Islam and modernity are also discussed.
AI: Summary ©
So I've lost count of, where we are
in this open ended series of,
inhaling some of the blessings of,
those who have gone by and who continue
to teach, sometimes at a distance of 1000
of years and,
1000 of miles.
My scholars used to say, by remembering them
does the mercy descend.
There's a certain fragrance
that attaches to their life and works
and the recollection
of their,
inward lives that can
be therapeutic to those of us who live
in this time of plenty and of uproar.
So as well as these being little snippets
of biodata, data, these paradigms of leadership lectures,
inshallah, allow us in some mysterious mystical way,
to feel our hearts connecting
to the on going spiritual presence
of those who have,
really shaped the life of the Ummah
by the grace of God.
So, today I want to
move to,
what is increasingly becoming
central
to the Islamic world intellectually even though geographically
we assume that it's on the, the margins,
which is,
the
very complex
country of Indonesia.
Some of you, I suspect, will
have accompanied us on the CMC tour of
Java. There
are some videos entitled The Inward Land, which
are on our
website, which were I think it's not free.
It's behind
humble paywall.
You can get some sense of
what we did when we were there. And
the amazingness,
of the whole experience to those who are
familiar with the view that says Islam is
kind of centered in the Middle East. Of
course, demographically most Muslims in the world live
east of Karachi.
Very often people, including journalists, tend to forget
that the center of gravity for the Ummah
is
further east
Omer is further east even than Pakistan. Indonesia,
the world's most populous Muslim country.
Indonesia, the country that has more Islamic universities
than all the Arab countries put together.
About 23%
of Indonesian students go to Islamic universities, which
is much higher than Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq,
those places.
Significant place,
and a country which
there's arguments
about religious movements there.
But last year there was a survey by
Pew which reckoned that 93%
of the Indonesian population self identifies as Muslim.
Maybe 10,000
inhabited islands.
No country really is like that. Maybe 200
major languages,
different races,
6 official religions. It's in many ways the
most complicated
national space for Islam to operate in and
yet clearly it's thriving. Part of the miraculous
proof of the universality
of Muhammad and Revelation is the fact that
from this very specifically Arabian dusty town in
the 7th century,
it fits
so neatly the spiritual needs of spiritual needs
of people living in the rainforest in Southern
Sumatra. And,
yeah, it turns out to be particular in
its origins,
universal in its appeal.
So
I don't want to do too much of
the history.
And again,
the Inwood Land lectures, I think, give it
in somewhat more detail.
Essentially, Islamized from the 13th century onwards by
Muslims from the Cham Kingdom, which is kind
of
former Muslim areas of Kampuchea,
Laos,
southern coast of Vietnam.
Now there's still Muslims there but really diminished
following various
colonial and communist,
genocides.
Although I remember that the very beloved
imam of the Azhar Students Mosque when I
was living in Cairo is actually a Cham
Muslim Kampuchean
very, very beautiful,
luminous young man. Gujarat is also involved basically
traders because if you want to get from
India to China, Europe less, through the Sunda
Straits.
You would have to go through the Straits
of Malacca. Less through the Sundar Straits, you
would have to go through the Strait of
Malacca,
the difficult tidal waters between Sumatra
and North
Java. It was the
the nautical equivalent of the Silk Route and
therefore,
cosmopolitan
from a fairly
a place like that is
the
a place like that, is the enormous,
almost indefinite diversity
of the cultures
of
this nation,
which in its current borders is more or
less left over from various colonial arrangements between
the British and the Portuguese
and the Dutch,
but which has that I suppose will be
our main theme today. The question of how
Islam can function as a therapeutic
and a unifying force in such a, colossomy
diverse
and un Arabian
cultural space.
So Islamization
begins in the coast and then it pushes
inland.
Java is where the great ancient civilizations are,
the ancient Hindu kingdom of Majapahit.
And famously, it's the Wali Songon. And those
who are with us,
you may recall those
bus rides 4 o'clock in the morning, lurching
down the Javanese roads going from shrine to
shrine. It was quite it was quite a
night.
But those 9 saints are the ones who
are popularly credited with the Islamization
of Java. Basically, it's the the Nakshbandi and
Qadiri Tariqas that did the work so that
Java is today the
world's most populous island and has, like, a
90%
Muslim population. So they did their work well.
Then the Dutch turn up.
Dutch colonialism
is not very
agreeable.
After all, they're the ones who start the
kind of racial hierarchy in South Africa.
The Afrikana mentality comes from a certain type
of Calvinistic
collection of ideas about, about,
biblical assumptions about race and,
so they have a hard time. And in
fact, if you go to,
Cape Town, you'll find that Cape Town is
ringed with what they call the Kramats, which
is
the Indonesian
Malayo word for a saint's tomb,
including some really great ones.
Makassari
is a famous one outside Cape Town. He
was one of the great commentators
on Ibn Arabi,
in Indonesia before the Dutch deported him. And,
of course, they wouldn't allow these enslaved Muslim
scholars from what's now Indonesia
to take books with them,
but they had them up here.
So the Quran made the transition to the
the the slave colony of Cape province and
once they got out of the sight of
the white man, they just wrote it all
out
again. Islam travels quite well under difficult
circumstances.
So, yep, the
the the spiritual
ancestry of the South African Cape province Muslims,
they still called Cape Malays.
Amazing people. So the Dutch,
actually,
paradoxically,
unintentionally helped the spread of Islam by pushing
the olema out of the major cities,
which is where the Dutch want to trade
with cloves and spices and the things that
they're there for, and into more remote areas.
And it's because of that outward push that
Islam starts to succeed in in the hinterlands
and the outlying
islands.
Our story today, which will be about,
one particular,
probably the most distinguished influential
Indonesian
Javanese
Muslim scholar of the 20th century, Abdurrahman Wahid,
known popularly as Gostur,
who died only about 14 years ago, 2009,
I think it was. So kind of very
much part of our history,
is the
impact of colonialism,
the humiliation of the white man with his
fly whisk being carried by the local population
in his sedan chair through the,
former capital cities of of the proud
Muslim land of of Java and how Islam
was going
to relate to this
unexpected defeat by these people who came from
such a remote place.
Holland, they never heard of before and suddenly
they're in charge of this spice rich,
clove rich archipelago,
really begins in the the 19th century and
particularly in the city of Mecca.
During the Ottoman period, Makkah was one of
the great centers for intellectual exchange in the
Islamic world. There were districts of Fulani,
districts of Javanese,
districts of Russians. It was a very cosmopolitan
place and they all had their sheikhs who
would have a particular column in the Haram
mosque and would teach. It was like a
university
and because people would like to get to
Hajj early,
it could take 6 months to walk there
from Nigeria.
You wanted to get there early, and what
you did while you were waiting was you
attended classes.
So the whole Haram in Makkah was like
university in different languages
and buzzing. And the great figure
for our story, somebody called, Ahmed Khatib,
Minangkabawi,
late 19th century,
the great Javanese master
from the Minangkabau
regional ethnic
group.
And he was the one who really, talking
to the the Javanese Hajjis,
raised an awareness of the need to resist
colonialism
using an Islamic discourse.
Because some elements of Javanese society, particularly a
group called the Priyayi, who are the,
the the former kind of courtly classes
in these very complex
the Kraton is a palace complex,
in in traditional Java with thousands of courtiers
and employees. And if you go to the
Kraton today in Yogyakarta,
you can see some of the ceremonial,
little old ladies in their ceremonial outfit in
long procession
carrying the Sultan's tea,
walking in a particular way, it's very Indic
and very beautiful in fact, but that class
tended to be the local class that the
Dutch wanted to use in order to create
sort of bureaucrats and administrators, and,
they didn't seem to be,
the most likely basis for some sort of
anti colonial
resistance.
Now,
Sheikh Ahmed Khatib had 2 great disciples,
Ahmed Dahlan
and Sheikh Hashim Ash Ali.
And these two individuals
go on to found the movements which are
the most active scholarly
activist cultural movements in Indonesia today.
So Sheikh Ahmed Dahlen founded a group called
the Muhammadiyah,
which nowadays might have 25,000,000,
30,000,000 members all over Indonesia,
which has the reputation of being a somewhat
kind of modernist, Ahmed,
Mohammed Abrador,
Ahmed Amin,
rationalizing
contemporary interpretation
of the religion. And then the other movement,
which was founded
by, Sheikh Hashem Ashari,
in the year 1926
is called the Nata del Olama,
which is basically Ghazalian. You could say the
Ikhya Ulamadin is historically its manifesto for how
Islam
ought to be
and very Junadian
in its,
tasawaf.
And today, the Naqat ul ul ulama might
have maybe
50,000,000
followers,
which makes it the largest organization in the
whole Islamic world. It's kind of everywhere with
little schools and dental clinics and orphanages and
in all parts of Indonesia, including Papua and
pretty remote places,
they are
active. And we'll talk about the dynamics of
the relationship between these two sorts of followings
of Sheikh Ahmed Khotayib and his little Meccan
circle as we go through this,
this discussion. And there's lots of other groups,
particularly smaller
outright Salafi groups influenced by the Saudi interpretation
of the the beliefs of Mohammed bin Abdul
Wahab.
It's probably the case that this kind of
tension between these 3 major
tendencies
made a lot of
Indonesians
who were thinking about national resistance
a little bit doubtful about the extent to
which Islam could really unify the Indonesian people
and provide a a doctrinal basis for,
resistance to the occupation.
That's one reason why early Indonesian nationalism tends
to be, well, just nationalistic,
secular, and also one reason why communism
starts to appear, perhaps, unexpectedly in this intensely
Islamic area. Generally, communism doesn't get much traction
in most parts of the Islamic world for
obvious reasons. Indonesia, there's a powerful
Communist Party, the suppression of which becomes one
of the the big traumas,
for the country.
During the the 20th century, you have,
an outpouring of new scholarship.
It's a very scholarly kind of country.
You have the idea of the Pessantren.
Pesantren is this particular
Islamic form of
usually
small town or rural
Islamic college
that isn't for them the same thing as
a madrasa because a pasindren is a kind
of boarding school.
They might have a madrasa inside it, generally
in the Indonesian
sort of usage, madrassa is for dayboys,
whereas the pasuntran is where you actually go
to live.
It's
like a rather warm and uncomfortable
English public school, perhaps,
but very much scholarly oriented.
And
typically,
the peasantry
and boys will be working in the fields
and actually making themselves useful, almost like medieval
monasteries in in the UK. And you can
see that there's maybe a 100,000 of these
peasantrans all over Indonesia. You can still see
that that way of,
creating a self sufficient Islamic academic and spiritual
community. They're very
under the direction of the senior scholar, the
kiai. Kiai is the traditional Indonesian word for
for an alim.
They,
usually attach to to a tariqa, and there's
a lot of wazifas, avkar,
as well as the regular
glasses. So 2 big tafsirs come out, tafsir
al Azhar from Abdul Malik Amroulal, which is
the first
4 Indonesian
tafsir, which is a bit closer to the
Nader al Ulamah
perspective,
interpreting
Islam through Ahmed Khatrib and the Minan Kaba
local,
tradition.
And then Qari Shehab produces the Tafsir al
Mishbaach, which is a bit more intellectual,
relates to more abstract philosophical
concerns.
And you also have freelance individuals,
one of the best known of whom in
the 20th century was somebody called Harun Nasutian,
who, tried to revise
revive the tradition of Moctezilism.
Not a kind of exact Baghdad, Moctezilism, but
his understanding of the backwardness of Islam was
not the Salafi understanding, that it's because we've
got away from the sources, but rather that
we've got away from reason and Europe is
based on reason, and we need to rediscover
the rationality of our religion if we're ever
going to catch up with with the white
man. So Harun Nasution, who becomes head of
one of the major Islamic universities, is also,
a very significant
figure in this this complicated
story.
The backdrop in Java is,
again, radically
disparate levels of religiosity,
which which goes on to shape
scholarly activity,
and also the politics.
Most of the population, especially away from the
major cities, are what used to be called
Abangan,
which is people who are nominally Muslim but
may well form follow a kind of syncretistic,
apparently shamanistic,
hybrid of Islamic terminology with ancient Javanese
mythology.
And very often,
communist groups and secular groups in the 20th
century came out of those Abangan,
nominally Muslim,
communities who were intentioned with the other main
group, which is called santri. I'm giving you
the terminology because we're going to be using
some of the jargon to make sense of
the ghost story today.
Santri are the kind of 5 daily prayers,
normative
Sharia
observant Muslim minority.
Maybe even in the mid 20th century, only
10% of the Javanese population is actually
going to mosques
and, much of the population is still
imperfectly Islamized.
And then as well as this, you have
the priayi class, which we mentioned, which is
the the class associated with the traditional klaton
or court culture, very often bound up with
the, bureaucracy of Dutch colonial administration.
So it's into this complicated world,
a diverse Islam,
influence is coming from the Javanese presence in
the Middle East,
arguments about should we be fundamentalists or rationalists,
the reality of
Dutch occupation,
that today's hero is born in 1940,
in East Java.
East Java is the poorest part of,
the island of Java,
kind of the heartland of the Natatul Olamah,
very traditionalist,
not modernist,
not rationalizing. And he's born in a pasandaran.
That's his world. And this is Abdul Rahman
Wahid, who is actually the grandson
of the sheikh who we met earlier, Hashim
Ashari, who you'll recall in the 1890s is
studying in Mecca with Ahmed Khatri and who
is the founder of the Natatul Ullama. So
he's kind of from this dynasty.
And because
family connections are very important in Indonesian society,
this helps to add to his
sort of possibility and credibility later on. And
that family is said to have been descendants
of of one of the last Hindu kings
of Majapahit,
that they have
a genealogy.
So,
this peasantry was opened by,
Sheikh Ashari
after his 7 years of studying in Makkou,
Sheikh Ahmed Khattari. He opens the pesantrin 18/99.
And characteristically, he chooses for the location
the red light district.
It's a characteristic of the Pesandaran culture.
You put this nexus of Islamic
therapy and rightness
where it's most needed
in order to clean up the neighborhood, in
order to, if you like, shame the ladies
of the night into
mending their ways
and the gentlemen who come to visit them
and the drinkers and the opium dens.
That's where you put
religion. Now
he is unusual in that he
introduces modern languages and some modern subjects into
the Pessantin
curriculum
and is also an outspoken
campaigner against the Dutch occupation.
So by bringing these things together,
concern for the poor and social welfare,
opposition to colonialism,
and openness to learning about the Western world
and learning Dutch, learning English, learning about modern
sciences and so forth.
He becomes
really the key figure of his time, Hadrut
e Sheik. They still call him that in
Indonesia.
So his son is Owahid Heshim, who also
is born, grows up in the peasantra and
marries Gostur's mother, Saleha.
And
Gusteau is born there, and they name their
son.
They've had 4 daughters, and then the son
comes along,
Abdulrahman ad Daghil.
That's actually his name. Abdulrahman Warhid is Abdulrahman
ad Daghil
after, of course, the famous Umayyad prince who
after many adventures
enters Daghil. Al Andalus
founds the great Umayyad caliphid of southern Spain,
inspirational figure
in Muslim history.
And then suddenly, unexpectedly, the Dutch are booted
out by the Japanese.
Everybody has to bow to the symbol of
the rising sun. This is an issue for
the Qalamat. The Japanese create a new organization
to control Islam, Shumomo,
which tries to encourage the Muslims to worship
the emperor.
Doesn't go down too well.
Riots, difficulty,
and they're trying to get
the Muslims
who haven't enjoyed Western colonialism too much to
sign up to the Japanese Greater East Asian
co prosperity sphere. So they stop
knocking them on the head for not bowing
to the flag
and figure out ways of co opting them.
Waheed Hirshim is appointed
to lead it.
Difficult decision for him. The Japanese are not
easy occupiers.
But he he decides that this is an
opportunity
to try and build something new
and to consolidate nationalism, which the Dutch had
suppressed
quite brutally.
August 1945,
2nd World War ends. Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the Japanese are still in Indonesia. It's not
invaded by the Americans or the Australians like
Manila or
New Britain.
The Japanese
hand over their arms to the Indonesian nationalists.
The Dutch pop up again saying, well, we
want our farms and our factories and
our mission stations and our comfortable
colonial
mansions. The Indonesians
say, well,
not so fast.
And there's a kind of chaos
and the British intervene in order to support
the reestablishment of Dutch colonialism.
And there's the famous or notorious Battle of
Surabaya,
where the British bring in the rajah still
going Indian troops.
And the Natadul Ullama and the Muhammadir declared
jihad
against the British and the Dutch
the British basically by flattening the city with
the RAF
drive. The
putative
nationalist army from the city, but it's been
so difficult.
They decide,
well, the nationalists are going to win sooner
or later. The Indonesians
don't like the idea of the Dutchmen coming
back, and it's fairly clear that Dutch rule
is
going to be a thing of the past.
There'll be some kind of transition. The British
were getting ready for that in India already.
So that's there's there's a
a series of kind of national legends in
Indonesia about the role of the olema in
resisting the British and the Dutch. Talked to
somebody from the Disney Corporation.
And they're actually considering a script for a
cartoon feature
about a famous teenage boy called Moussa, who
is a hero of the resistance.
Of course,
how well will that play in a kind
of American multiplex?
The brown Muslim boy in a turban called
Morsart a hero against the white man
and issues that
I don't know if they'll do it, but
it's a big kind of imaginative moment for
the beginning of the independent Indonesian
nation.
So the family
go back to East Java. They're in hiding.
The Dutch might well attack them. The communists,
who are now rampant, might attack them.
Gustol's mother, Saleha, to earn some money as
you're selling
sweets from a trolley by the roadside. They've
got an old gun in the house in
case the Dutch police come.
But then independence arrives, and then everybody has
to join the sudden national conversation about what
kind of ideology will be governing the world's
largest,
newest
Muslim country.
The centuries
think Islam should be the basis of the
constitution.
The minorities
say definitely not. Wahid Hashim and many of
the traditionalists,
Natatul Olama,
Olomah,
don't like the idea of a kind of
Islamic religious state,
and we'll return to this apparent paradox in
due course. The new nationalist government run by
Sokarno,
first president of independent Indonesia,
who is kind of left leaning,
which as we'll see causes issues for the
Americans,
hatches this idea called pancasila, which still the
official ideology of the Indonesian state, which is
the idea that it's not a secular state,
but it's not an Islamic state either.
It's based on,
the idea of the one God
and the values the values of the nation
stemming from the one God, but Islam is
not specifically
mentioned. This becomes for decades a big a
big argument in the country. 90% Muslim, why
can't you
have Islam and the constitution just as Holland
has a Christian constitution, Britain has a Christian
constitution, why can't Muslims have the same? You
can see how that argument would go.
After independence, Wahid Heshim, Gustor's father, becomes the
1st minister of religious
affairs. So he moves to Jakarta
from Jombang, which is their town in East
Java,
where he
moves in a more cosmopolitan
circle. Interestingly, one of his supporters is a
German convert to Islam, certainly Iskander Buller,
who, introduces him to Beethoven.
Throughout Gostura's life, he liked listening to to
Beethoven.
So
Abdurrahman Wahid, our hero, is growing up
known as a naughty boy.
Twice he breaks his arm climbing trees.
Sometimes his family have to tie him to
a post in the garden to stop him
doing
naughty stuff.
He doesn't want to go to an elite
school
or missionary school or religious school, he just
goes to an ordinary school,
partly because his father wanted his children to
grow up in a cosmopolitan
way. He wanted them to understand the modern
world rather than just to be sheltered in
Indonesian equivalent of a darul olong,
and used to take his son to meetings,
political meetings, whatever. He'd go in the car.
When he was 12, the car crashes, his
father dies.
So he's in the house with his
4 older sisters and his mother, who is
pregnant with the 6th child,
and she turns out to be pretty strong
and resilient in this situation. It's a poor
country and,
they no longer have an income,
and so she starts a rice business and
and supports them with that. And these kind
of resilient women
become quite a theme in Abdulrahman Waheed's life.
So he's at school,
if he's not climbing trees or doing sport.
He's not doing very well in school, but
he loves books.
Jakarta full of secondhand bookshops.
He speaks Dutch and English well. He's learning
Arabic.
And then after having not done terribly well
in the state school,
joins a Pessan Turen and moves through the
curriculum and does it really quickly.
It seems that he had a kind of
photographic memory which is ideal for that kind
of education.
But also is clearly a devout teenager.
He wants to memorize quite a long Arabic
matin or text on Nahu grammar.
And to facilitate this, he makes a vow.
He will go on foot to some of
the best known saints' shrines in Central Java,
including some on the remote south coast
at a 100 mile journey,
in order to strengthen himself spiritually,
to accomplish this.
So he does this,
and it was the tradition for Pasantaran students
in the middle of the night usually to
go to a shrine and kind of reflect
on death and and absorbing the spiritual
blessings of the place,
returning to class spiritually refreshed
the next day. But he does this walk
and his health is never very good,
but he does it.
Now he also
during the day,
he had tremendous energy levels, goes to the
cinema
almost every day.
So Madrasa
to saints' tombs
to the cinema.
And he also because he's in Yogyakarta at
this time, which is really the Islamic intellectual
center,
that's where the great University of Solon, Cali
Jaga is is located,
which some will say today is along with
the Sharif Hidayatullah University in Jakarta,
the great place for studying
religion in Indonesia.
So he's going to the cinema, he's studying
Sheria, he's going on his pilgrimages,
but he also loves the shadow puppets, which
is the great kind of indigenous
art form of traditional Java.
Again, on our trip, we saw we saw
this that is hugely impressive.
There's a screen,
the Dalang, who's the puppet master, sits behind
and does these complex
Javanese,
puppet stories involving stories often from the pre
Islamic past, the Ramayana,
a great Hindu epic, furnishing many of the
key stories. And because they're ethical
and ironic and sometimes comical, It doesn't matter
that the stories are not of Islamic
origin.
He also really likes kind of kung fu
novels and pulp fiction. So he's, you know,
a teenager, but getting into
his mind is really hungry and capacious. He
reads a lot of European philosophy.
He's an age in which
Marxism is fashionable, so he reads Marx.
He also reads the Islamist
stuff. He reads Hassan al Banna. He reads,
but he records later that he found these
rather
sort of shouty and childish,
just kind of slogans without there being a
real kind of system behind them.
He then goes off to Egypt, this is
November 1963,
to further his studies.
In Egypt, he finds, first of all, a
kind of confirmation
of the nahdat al olamat style of Islam,
respect for local culture and tradition,
syncretism
is just fine,
ziara
visiting the tombs of the saints, which is
what you do in Cairo.
The Muhammadiyah also like going to Cairo because
Muhammad Abdul's legacy is is there, but that's
a kind of different bandwidth in the city's
religious life. But in the 19 sixties, Cairo
is kind of, you know, in its heyday.
Nasser has not managed to smash all of
the city's intellectual life,
and
everything is going on. The Egyptian cinema, the
Egyptian theater.
There's 3 surrealist magazines in Cairo. It's
a great cultural center. The opera house is
one of
the great centers of the city before it's,
mysteriously burned down because apparently, the the accountant
didn't want his books to be audited, and
so he thought, I'll just burn down the
opera house.
Yeah. But, it it's a it was the
intellectual capital of the Islamic world at the
time.
So he went to Al Azhar and they
said, oh, you haven't got a certificate in
Arabic.
We know you studied Taftazani and these advanced
texts, but you're not Arabic, you can't come
to our university. So he has to do
basic remedial Arabic,
sitting in a class with
the
Ruandans and
other Indonesians
younger than himself.
He doesn't need to do that, so he
skips classes and instead he's watching sort of
French cinema and,
doing these things in Cairo and getting into
the intellectual richness
of the city. Of course, when he takes
the Arabic exam, he's head of the class
and goes straight into the Mahad. And, he
actually goes to, I guess, 20 years earlier,
the same
buildings and the same curriculum that I went
through. They saw this guy from Cambridge, Cambridge
Ida,
I hadn't come from one of the institutions
they knew about. And so they said, okay.
You go to the remedial class.
So I was sitting there with these kind
of 12 year old guys from Burundi and
kind of
who, actually, they they were good students.
They have made a lot of of themselves.
There were Indonesians as well. I remember some
Thais.
Students from Thailand and Malaysia
always had a lot of kind of electronic
stuff with them, sort
of cassette players and radios and things, which
was too much for the Al Zahra student
accommodation,
electric circuits. So very often,
the lights would all go out and there'd
be a fight on who, to fix the
fuse.
And, I can tell you some stories about
it. Kinda he must have been in a
world that was a little bit similar, but
to earn an income, he did some translation
work for the Indonesian embassy.
He's from a good family, so he gets
this and he translates. And that but in
that way, he gets to know what's happening
in Jakarta. Telex is coming in. He translates
them. He can do the Arabic, he can
do the English, as well as the
the the Bahasa Indonesian.
And this is a
tense time in Indonesia.
1965,
Sokalarno
is overthrown in a coup
orchestrated by the CIA,
and Sogharto
is put in.
And that's the end of the experiment with
socialism. Of course, the Americans who are fighting
this war in Vietnam are terrified that the
communist thing will extend the domino theory,
and so they bring in Suharto,
and there's a massive witch hunt against communists
and socialists in Indonesia,
and massacres, maybe 3,000,000
people are massacred.
And reading all of these messages,
from Jakarta
to the embassy,
And Rouhman Wahid is kind of traumatized
because some of the people who are carrying
out these massacres,
were actually Netatul olamat youth
because they didn't like the communists and they
were being mobilized in order to get their
own back,
and it wasn't a very good
look or very good moment for this Indonesia's
largest religious
organization, and for the rest of his lives,
he was quite,
sort of, guilty about that. So the embassy
asked him to compile
secret dossier on every Indonesian student in Cairo
or ideally in the Arab world because they
wanted to see who was reading
Engels.
He could see this was what was going
on, and so he wrote the files
in such a way as to exonerate everybody.
Nobody was reading Marx. Nobody was going to
anything with a red flag. They were all
good. Muslims
didn't worry. And so it seems that, none
of the
students
in Iraq, Syria, or Egypt were arrested and
flown home as a result of their political
persuasion. Of course, because he knows Marxism, he's
read the stuff, he can identify what kind
of tendencies are underway.
Cairo is also unstable.
This is the time of the trial of
Seyd But, who Nasr has executed.
'Abdu'l UHman Wahid with his complex deep
peasantron education
and his awareness of Islam's culture of ambiguity
doesn't like Gott's kind of ideological
totalitarian
vision of Islam,
but he doesn't like this execution either. So
with some other students, he stands outside the
prison in Cairo at the time of the
execution and they just pray.
They don't support they don't support Guts, but
they really don't think that the man should
be hanged.
So it's a time for this young student
of ideological
confusion.
He's had this very settled
embedding in the traditional Javanese
world
of century Islam.
The 19 sixties were a time when you
had riots in Paris and communism is on
a roll. Fidel k Gevara, the world is
in ferment.
Where is the truth?
Everything seems kind of breaking down, decadence at
home and abroad, elites
in the Middle East and back home in
Indonesia
pocketing the country's resources.
It's not inspiring,
but he does have a source of relaxation
and relief.
He's embarked on a correspondence,
Rok Ting, you remember writing a letter,
with a female student, as the Pesan Turen,
in Java called Nuria,
and they exchange messages quite erudite.
And then because he's been
hanging out in too many things in Cairo,
he actually fails his Azhar exams.
And he writes to her saying, this has
been a waste of time.
What am I doing here?
I failed. I thought this was easy because
I know these texts, but I failed.
And she writes back saying,
if you have failed in your exams,
perhaps you have passed the test of love.
So he knows what that means. And they
arrange a traditional marriage with a wakil, so
he doesn't go back to Java yet, but
they are married by by proxy.
So he gets a new scholarship. Al Zahra
is not going to renew his support. He
goes to the University of Baghdad,
which is probably the second most interesting diverse
place
in the Arab world at that time.
It's freer than Cairo. There's a lot of
Egyptian exiled academics there.
It's more Westernizing,
more philosophical,
more analytical.
Al Zahra is still based mainly in on
the regurgitation
of texts. At the University of Baghdad, you
have to write essays
and think.
And he likes this.
And also Baghdad's city of shrines,
and Al Junaid
and Salis Sakatry
and Abu Hanifa, everybody's there.
And he spends time there, but also in
cafes on the river.
He strikes up a friendship with the director
of the French Cultural Center, and they talk
a lot about French literature.
He has an Iraqi Jewish friend called Ramin
who introduces him to the Kabbalah and Jewish
mysticism. Baghdad is really
not what it was in the time of
the great Abbasids, but still a cosmopolitan
city. Then he says, I want to study
in Europe.
He goes there for a year, but nobody
in the universities will recognize his certificates.
Whereas University of Baghdad,
what is a pessentrein?
We don't acknowledge this at all. And so
after a year, he just gets kind of
rebuffed
and goes back feeling rather
disconsolate. This is 1971.
So he's back in Java,
has the the proper marriage ceremony,
and he travels around tours at the Sant'Rennes,
the shrines, works for a sociological institute, and
starts to make a name for himself when
he publishes in the journal, which is called
Prisma, which becomes one of kind of centers
central
platforms for social
come religious,
theorizing in Indonesia
at the time.
Not much income.
You don't earn much publishing in sociology journals.
So his wife, Noria,
is selling peanut snacks to students outside the
university
and at night,
after going to his classes and so forth,
he's helping her put roasting the peanuts, putting
them them to little, plastic sacks, and then
on his Vespa motor scooter, he would take
them off, in the morning to deliver them.
He has,
after 3 years, 2 daughters. He helps with
the housework. It's kind of a 3rd world
situation. It's no air conditioning. It's very, very
basic.
Even though he's already acknowledged as as somebody
who can write seriously
on contemporary topics in a sociology
journal.
A breakthrough starts when he is given an
ijazah
in
qwa'id al fakih,
the basic maxims of Islamic jurisprudence,
and also in the hikim of ibn Atha
al al Eskandari, which is a classic Sufi
text.
And because he has this ijazah, this teaching
certificate, he's able to teach and actually to
earn a little bit.
1977, he has a third daughter,
and suddenly, he is appointed to be the
dean of the Ursula Dean Faculty
in, the Hesham Ashari University, maybe after his
grandfather,
in his town of Jombang, which is a
Western style university in structure, but it's designed
for the Pessantren
graduates.
He's asked to become a popular preacher.
1 Ramadan, he sets out to go through
the 30 juz of the Quran using the
tafsir of Jalalayn,
and it said that one evening, a train
was delayed in the station
as the passengers were still listening to the
to the Bayan. They didn't want to miss
it, and so the train actually waited
for the passengers. He becomes really, really popular.
He's pottering around on his Vespa scooter and
has an accident,
quite a serious one. His
vision from this time
starts to deteriorate,
his retina detaches,
and he doesn't really because he's impatient,
with medical treatment, doesn't really allow it to
recover.
And,
in one eye, he's kind of semi blind,
from then on.
He's obviously a rising staff of the Natatul
Olomap,
and he joins their shura council. This means
he has to go to the capital Jakarta.
So that means a smaller salary. He has
to live in a very remote suburb in
a small house.
4th daughter is born,
and,
Abdulrahman
quite like a son. He remembers that he
has 4 older sisters, so maybe
they'll get lucky. But Noria says,
perhaps not.
But they're in this small house now in
a very moderate salary.
The Naqdul Olama are having increasing difficulties with
the new regime
of Suharto,
even though they've kind of colluded or some
of them have in the extermination
of Javanese
communism
because Suharto is basically a military dictator.
In the early 19 eighties, the regime becomes
increasingly repressive.
Often he's arrested
and detained overnight.
Because he's working in official circles,
through the Natu Gul Alama, he does have
connections.
And if we're thinking about leadership,
we might want to ponder the way in
which he
tries to establish connections
in the the ruling
military establishment
as a means of allowing the nadir ul
ulama to continue their work.
Because there are opportunities in this period.
Suharto,
as part of his
pushback against communism,
has decided that some of these moderate Islamic
groups
should be
encouraged
to try and
sanctify
or Islamize
these
villagers
in many parts of Java who might have
Muslim names, but believe in spirits and have
never been inside a mosque
as a kind of bulwark against communism. So
Naft al Ullama,
not wanting to be tools of the regime,
nonetheless see this as an opportunity. So
they have to strike a very delicate balance.
So one of the things that he does
is to create not really a friendship, but
a kind of relationship with somebody called Benny
Mordani.
This is Jenny general
Benny Mordani, who is a Catholic,
head of military intelligence.
Normally, in the Suharto
regime, these key things like intelligence,
they're drawn from
secular background, often Christian communities. Very unusual for
religious Muslim to be involved in the state
like that.
Benny Mordani is famous for the lee as
the leader of the 1975
Indonesian
army invasion
of East Timor
with a lot of human rights abuses.
Portuguese have pulled out,
and the Indonesians
move in
with support from the Israel from the Australian
government
who don't believe in
an independent East Timor.
So in goes Benny Mordani
with his militias and his death squads, and
it's an uneasy relationship.
But the old Portuguese colonies, because under Salazar
in Portugal, Islam was not a legal religion.
Like in in Spain, you couldn't open a
mosque until Franco died in 1975.
It was national Catholicism.
And even to this day, in former Portuguese
colonies, Muslims have a hard time.
Islam is still not the recognized religion in
Angola, for instance. You still can't legally operate
a mosque in Angola.
And if you're in the mood
to be depressed, you can look even on
YouTube at pictures of illegal mosques being burnt
down in Angola by Christian mobs. It regularly
happens. It's
an ongoing issue there. Even the Muslim community
is small. So East Timor is also this
kind of militant
inquisitionized
Catholic place. Mordani is also Catholic, but he
wants it to be part of the
Indonesian
state.
Sometimes,
Wahid will speak out against corruption in the
Saharitel government
and also against the brutality
of the anti Islamist
crackdowns.
Anything that looks like could be an fundamentalist
fundamentalism,
the women will be raped, the men will
be beaten up. It'll be the usual kind
of,
regime saga.
And Benny Mordani is very much kind of
at the forefront
of those crackdowns,
And it's almost certain that
some of the
the riots and the conflagrations
were provoked by the secret police.
Even sectarian rioting
between Muslims and Christians now believe that usually
it would be incited
by, the security forces as a means of
legitimizing a crackdown on various groups.
Meanwhile, the theoretical discussions are continuing about the
compatibility
of traditional Islam with the state Pancha Sila
ideology.
Can Muslims be happy in a state which
doesn't acknowledge Islam as the state's religion, but
just has this perhaps slightly nebulous belief that
values flow from a belief in 1 God.
Some of the younger olema are moving into
the Naqutul olema's shura
council,
the discussion becomes more
intense. And the way the Natu Gulama decide
to play it
is that they're not going to oppose this
Pancha Sila idea,
but instead try and work inside the structures
to push it in a more kind of
Islam friendly
direction.
And that's really how they save the organization.
They're tolerated.
Ngati rlou olema is never shut down by
Soeharto even though civil society is almost dead,
journalists are paid off. It's a very totalitarian
scenario. But they kind of demonstrate to the
state that they're really too big to fail,
30,000,000
members.
So how do you want to take that
on? And so they managed to survive in
this
in this time.
It's not a party political organization, Nata'olulama.
The original
khitah, as they call it, the kind of
educational,
not to kind of
run for parliament.
In due course, partly because of his clever
way of maintaining some kind of modus vivendi
with the Suharto dictatorship,
Abdurrahman Wahid
elected to be chairman of the Natatul Alamat.
There's no salary attaching to that. In their
tradition, the Alim
in an organization like that
doesn't get paid.
Donations come to him all the time,
but he's still living in a cheap rented
house far from Jakarta.
So his
his priority in this time is the reform
of the Pessantrens
and the upgrade of their educational
standards.
Very often these are amazingly informal places
without really a fixed curriculum. They have this
idea of the Quran and the Hadith and
what they call kitabkuning,
which is the traditional curriculum of texts,
and Sufism.
But,
often there's no formal enrollment. Anybody just sits
in to a class.
There might be informal
assessment procedures,
half the time people don't seem to be
there or they're out growing,
you know, picking fruit or something. It's really
very informal. That's one reason for the survival
of the naturaolamat,
that it's so organic
and unstructured.
But he wants to regularize things a little
bit.
And he tries to establish
a presence in the major Islamic universities.
We mentioned Sonam Kalajagi University in Georgia Carta,
Sherifidayatollah
in Jakarta,
but there's a lot of others.
And he wants to establish a naturol olamat
presence
where often the discourse has been dominated by
a little more philosophical
or modernist
reformist types of Muslims.
And later on, you have the appearance of
the Paramedina
University in Jakarta, which is still very
vibrant,
established by Nur
Nur Hollis Majid, who's also from John Bang,
but adopts a much more kind of
rationalizing
approach to religion, you might say,
still orthodox.
But he did his PhD with Fazlur Rahman
in Chicago.
Wahid never really studied in the West, so
a different kind of orientation. But the idea
of the the Paramedini University is to train
up,
religious
boys and girls of the elite.
Quite a small institution, but well worth visiting.
So he's doing this. He's reforming the the
Pesan trend. There's tens of thousands of these
places. It's a huge task. He never really
does it
adequately, I think.
He's he never becomes a really good administrator,
even though people trust him and appoint him
to high positions. He's kind of
a bit too laid back in a sense,
humorous guy,
not always wholly reliable,
enormously energetic.
He can go to several meetings on different
islands in a day and in the evening,
10 o'clock, he's meeting journalists.
Indefatigable,
but a little bit chaotic.
But he's still
risking things by being critical of the regime.
And in particular,
the World Bank
agreed to Suharto's idea to create an enormous,
very environmentally
destructive
dam
and reservoir right in the middle of Java.
It's the Kidung Omo dam, one of the
core celebrities at the time in the 19
seventies.
And he writes to the World Bank saying
this is going to destroy,
this region.
But,
Suharto gets angry with him.
The World Bank don't realize where a lot
of the money is going to end up,
but that's a kind of,
very precarious moment for him. But it shows
that he's still
gauging the situation, knowing how far he can
go before everything will be shut down.
1989,
he comes up for reelection
as head of the Natatul Olomat.
And at this time, he
goes to Mecca. He hasn't done his Hajj
yet.
He goes to Mecca for Umrah and he
goes to visit somebody
for his advice on how to deal with
this really very complicated,
sensitive
situation. He's head of the world's largest Islamic
organization in the world's most complicated Islamic country,
the the biggest Islamic country with this pro
Western dic military dictatorship,
which is fighting all kinds of nasty wars,
Aceh conflict is going on, the Ambon conflict,
the Moluccas are on fire.
You have complex situation in Elianjaya,
West Papua. It's
very
difficult, unstable situation.
So he goes to advice
for to, sheikh Mohammed Yassine Faiderni in Mecca.
Yeah. Who I actually, had the privilege of
of visiting once. Must have been a couple
of years before Gostol was there.
He was already about 90. I remember it
quite clearly.
And because by that time, this is long
after the Ottomans have gone,
you couldn't just teach in the Haram.
If you were allowed
to say anything at all it would be
in your house. We have this flat
in Hayil Andalus
and there would be mostly Syrian students sitting
around. We were doing Sahih Muslim at the
time.
Fadani,
would be,
a kind of really, really thin
thin
oriental dye,
a turban, and a sarong.
And during classes, he would smoke
shisha,
which had various herbs and things. It wasn't
wasn't nicotine.
And the students would read the text
and this really ancient Javanese
guy
would just be there, and
the only way you could tell that the
sheikh was still alive was that sometimes the
thing would bubble. And he said, oh, great.
Otherwise, he's kind of like that. And then
sometimes and, you know, it's like the middle
ages. I was
amazed to see this.
He would kind of come to life and
say, let that's wrong
because there was a misprint in the book.
So we'll have to take our printed copies
and correct it because the sheikh had the
real one up there. And he gave me
5 volumes,
which were just the names of the books
which he was authorized to teach.
He was something from the old times, very
impressive to see
that. It was basically sheikh al Hadith in
in Mecca at the time. So
and is acknowledged as the senior scholar from
the Nusantara from the Malay Indonesian world.
Really a
gentle, humorous guy.
You know, they brought in this
strange sunburnt pink Englishman one day who sat
down and listened to Sahih Muslim. He thought,
fine.
He wasn't fazed by that at all.
So Gostor
goes to see him and ask for his
advice. How does he negotiate this very complicated
situation as a leader
in, in Jakarta
and he advises him. And that partnership seems
to have been quite critical in his success
that he's got a spiritual adviser
who asked him to look at intention
and to read people to gauge the political
equation of of the day.
So he's reelected,
the Naftedol Olomar Convention is a big thing
in Indonesia. Suharto
attends because, remember, he's trying to position himself
somebody who's sympathetic to religion because of the
ball against
communism.
Gusteau gives a speech.
Some of the younger olema are not very
happy with him,
partly because
he has his own mosque in his Pesantren
and he allows the local rather tiny Shia
community to attend. They don't like that.
They accuse him of some kind of Moitezelite
rationalism, which is really not the case.
He's not very keen on large scale Arab
missionary
operations
in Indonesia.
This is 1989,
he'd spoken out against Khomeini's
fatwa on Rushdie,
not everybody's flavor of the month.
But Abu,
Abdul Rahman Wahid is aware of all of
this and is fresh from his energizing encounter
with the sheikh in Mecca. And he gives
a speech.
President is there, but these angry young men
are there as well, and he's very witty.
He had a great sense of humor,
elegant,
talks about the necessity of reforming the Paysan
Thren,
and is back in.
But
and this tends to dominate his later years.
His health continues to deteriorate. He's diagnosed now
with type 2 diabetes.
He has congestive heart issues. He's significantly
overweight, doesn't take much exercise,
this becomes increasingly an issue.
So this is also the time collapse of
the Iron Curtain and the Americans are less
interested in supporting dictators to keep out the
evils of communism, so that means Suharto is
in a more exposed position.
Suharto decides to respond by flagging up his
supposedly Islamic credentials. He makes the hajj
And on the Hajj,
a lot of rulers who want, you know,
to demonstrate to their people their piety, they
they do the Hajj
specifically and, there's usually cameras around.
I was once in,
doing Umrah in Mecca.
There was some shouting
in the.
So what's going on?
And it was
Adafi.
So instead of saying,
death to America, death to world colonialism.
I better
wait a bit before I join the crowd.
He was he was actually there. I also
saw general Zia there on the Hajj.
You know, the chaos of the Jamar'at where
you're treading on slippers and throwing the stones
and it's like
giama.
Suddenly, this
limousine
cruises up, cuts through the crowd,
police,
the door is opened,
General Zia with his mustache steps out, the
flunky hands him his
7 stones from a bag,
back into the air conditioned limousine and off
he goes. Who's that? So it's a kind
of thing that politicians will do.
Suharto does this,
even though he's made speeches on behalf of
Ataturk
and he is really into the dhorn, which
is the traditional Javanese magic.
He spends time with magicians.
So he has this strange
relationship. On the one hand, he comes from
this Abangan kind of nominal Muslim background, but
on the other hand, he's tried to push
back against them because that was the seed
bed for communism.
So situation is precarious. He starts a mosque
building program.
He creates a new kind of Islamic intellectual
forum, which includes some of the radicals. Abu'lurman
Wahid
refused to join this.
Benny Mordani has already kind of severed whatever
connection he had with Wahid,
so Harto is also starting to undermine him.
Wahid, instead of getting involved in this Islamic
forum,
joins something that actually leads it called the
democracy forum, which includes a lot of Christians
and Buddhists and
other people,
which is not what Suharto expected.
So Suharto tries to get Abdul Rahman Wahid
fired from his post as head of the
Natatul Ullamat,
is not successful.
He falls ill. His situation is obviously precarious.
There's riots everywhere. The secret services are sending
in all this kind of mysterious
outsiders into places like Ambon who don't speak
the local dialect with short hair, who are
sort of throwing petrol bombs at churches and
mosques and making the whole thing,
flare up. The idea being to
rally the people around the military.
Often when these riots take place, it's Abdurrahman
Wahid who goes in to mediate.
And then he gets sicker. He has a
really bad stroke,
very nearly dies,
almost dies at that point. People think, well,
his that's the end of him.
But he does make a partial recovery.
More crises.
1997, the Asian financial crisis.
Catastrophe. A lot of poor people lose their
savings.
It's the usual consequence of casino capitalism. It's
the poor who usually lose their homes or
whatever, as
as with the 2008 financial crisis.
There's a really bad drought.
Something's wrong with the environment.
The IMF
give an emergency
grant to Indonesia,
much of which is obviously being gobbled up
by the Suharto family. It's very conspicuous.
The government is sponsoring attacks on the Chinese
community who are being repressed. Student demonstrations everywhere.
And the military is
not sure what to do, partly because Suharto's
tactic with the army has been to support
rival factions, divide and rule.
And the olema
say it's time for elections.
So, you can go past your sell by
date.
We need the people to choose something better.
It's a very, very precarious time for Indonesia.
Americans are not really backing the military any
longer.
You've got all of these really horrible, brutal
ethnic riots and people going through the streets
with sharpened bamboo poles looking for members of
rival
communities.
It's a complicated country to to govern.
So Suharto invites senior Olamat to his palace
and asks for their support.
Muhammadiyah, Natadu Olamah are both there and say,
first, you have to return
all of the wealth that your family has
expropriated because this is too extreme. All of
that IMF money, give it back.
So Hartal's
response is to resign.
Jakarta is in chaos. Students are occupying parliament.
Abu Rahman Wahid is still really sick,
hardly mobile after the stroke and the diabetes
and can't see properly. But people are coming
to his bedside and to his house.
He's in a wheel wheelchair getting about
asking for his advice. Where do they turn
in this kind of sea of 2 200,000,000
anxious people? There's a new caretaker president,
president Habibi.
Abdulrahman Warhid
advocates a slow progressive approach to him,
talks to him about some of the more
anti Chinese elements of his cabinet who he
thinks are bad news.
Habibi actually turns out
to be better than expected. He does open
up the field,
for
a more thriving democracy. He allows more parties
to be established.
Suddenly, a range of Islamist parties
pop up.
But there's still,
communal violence. Some of the hardcore
supporters of Suhartos called Karabati
are beating up and killing, letters to the
olamah scholars,
perhaps as a provocation.
Wahid urges restraint, don't retaliate.
East Timor is a catastrophe,
but Wahid won't oppose
won't support an independence referee referendum until Jakarta
is under some kind of order because
the central government is in no position to
preside over anything there.
In West Timor anti Muslim riots, dozens of
mosques are destroyed.
Ambon, which is a mixed island, a lot
of violence. Ace,
which has never really
liked being part of Indonesia. It's a different
language, different culture. It didn't Islamized much earlier.
Mordania
sent the army into
Aceh. His eyesight is now more or less
defunct. He travels to various clinics
hoping it can be restored, but he can't
read any longer. He can hardly see.
So 1999 with a country in real crisis,
the possibility of total anarchy and chaos,
He decides to run for president,
because he's a kind of unifying
figure.
He's credible because of his
record of opposition
to Suharto.
Because of his moderate policies, the minorities trust
him.
And,
the Western media, I remember at the time,
flips out and says Muslim cleric elected as
leader of
Islam's most populous country and they think it's
Khomeini
landing in Tehran airport because
they've they've never met a traditional Muslim scholar.
They only know these kind of
anxiety,
ideologues.
But that is the case. He's a traditionally
trained Alem. He's been to Pessentherin. He's not
got a western style degree, but now he's
running. He's in the presidential palace
built for the Dutch governors. He's in that
world of
protocol.
And the swearing in. He can't actually read
the oath because his eyes are so bad,
so an army officer has to read it
and he repeats the words after him. That
doesn't
doesn't look so good.
But he wants to make a clean sweep.
One of the first things he does is
to abolish the Ministry of Information.
Ministry of information, a lot of Muslim countries
like to have those in order to control
the discourse
Orwellian.
He just gets rid of it altogether.
What what's the point? Information is is already
there. You don't need the government to shape
it. That goes completely.
The Ministry of Religion is downsized
because she has a bad experience of state
intervention,
official khutbas
and interfering in mosque imam appointments or in
the churches.
There's still a ministry of religious affairs, but
it's not this kind of huge controlling thing
that it used to be.
Irianjaya,
which is,
if you know the map perhaps, you know
that the eastern part is Papua New Guinea
and the western part,
is part of Indonesia
and ethnically very mixed. There have been Muslim
Sultanates there for 600 years, but the inland
is sort of Austronesian
people.
Difficult.
He is reconciled to the local
separatists by offering various concessions even by changing
the the name
of the province. There's a revolutionary government now
in East Timor. He personally travels to Dili,
the capital of East Timor, in order to
offer apologies to the revolutionary government for the
crimes that were committed under the Indonesian occupation.
He goes to South Africa to meet Nelson
Mandela, who advises him to create a kind
of truth and reconciliation
committee for newly democratic
Indonesia.
It's not very easy. Tries to rein in
the military.
That never goes down well. Like what happened
in Pakistan a few months ago.
And he sacks the the the key general
Viram Thol, and he makes quite a few
enemies in the military.
He tries to be reconciled to the Chinese
community.
Under Sukarno and Suharto, it had been illegal
to display the Chinese alphabet in public.
He lifts that prohibition.
He makes the Chinese New Year an
country.
That's quite a big change. The Chinese, even
though they're a wealthy,
mercantile minority,
had often been at the receiving end of
pogroms riots,
suspicions about their true loyalties for a long
time.
It's still a very precarious and anarchic situation
that students want
big figures in the old Suharto regime
not to be left to a reconciliation committee,
but to be prosecuted.
The Islamists
really don't like him. The legal system is
totally corrupt, really difficult to reform.
Very hard to,
pursue a legal case, a civil case in
the courts there because everything seems to be
for sale.
The military,
which is, you know, a big section of
the economy,
most of the revenue for the military comes
from soldiers doing business, generals with forestry businesses
and so forth. That doesn't look so good.
A lot of corrupt politicians, a lot of
people from the ancient regime
try to force him to resign. He tries
to fire the chief of police,
who was
notoriously accused of corruption for having
defrauded a Canadian company,
sold them shares that had already been sold
to some other apparently mythical
person. Chief of police is somebody you don't
necessarily want to antagonize. Television stations,
in many ways still controlled by the Suharto
family, all thy cronies.
The newspapers are pretty hostile to him.
The crisis gets worse.
Maybe he's trying to do too much too
quickly.
For
50 years, they've had a totalitarian,
statist regime and he wants to open things
up.
So the army appear. They bring 40,000
soldiers into Jakarta,
put tanks all around the presidential palace.
His deputy is
Megawati Sukarno Putri, the daughter of Sukarno.
He doesn't want her to become president because
she's
got hard line military connections,
and he thinks that the minorities are going
to rebel again, and you'll have this kind
of colonial situation in Aceh, Erianjaya,
those other places. He really
doesn't trust her,
to deal with the provinces.
It actually deputed her to deal with the
riots in Ambon and she hadn't she hadn't
achieved anything. And she also was known to
have a kind of cult of personality.
But,
parliament is by now against him. The media
is against him. The military is against him.
And the parliament vote for him to be
impeached.
Natadul Olamat students everywhere rioting. Abdulrahman Wawhid tells
them to calm down.
So he's just got hours left in the
former Dutch palace in this unsettled situation.
It is telling the last hours of his
rule.
Late at night,
some journalists go in to interview him,
And he's really a kind of informal alim.
If you've ever studied with traditional olamak, you'll
know how
relaxed they are.
They kind of lie down on the floor
like this, fiddle with their turbans,
kind of
total relaxation.
Mauritanians, in particular, just kind of lie down
and flip their big blue robes all day
is
they they chill.
So this Alim, the Alim president comes out
at 11 PM or something to see the
journalists, Reuters and so forth. And it is
in his house clothes, which kind of what
Indonesians wear when they're at home, baggy shorts
and a t shirt, flip flops.
They're expecting the president of the republic with
a suit and a ribbon.
He comes out and and, of course, the
headline in the Western press is head of
state
has
gone senile, and he's giving interviews in his
underwear.
They just don't get him. He's really not
an ego. He's just like that. He wants
to talk to a journalist. Fine. Why does
he need to put on a bunch of
medals? And the last day in the presidential
palace, the visitors, not politicians, but the country's
religious leaders.
First up, the the Buddhist leaders with their
saffron robes and,
they come to bless him,
And then
Christian evangelicals come along. 1 of them anoints
him with holy oil and reads the Bible.
And so that's kind of the way in
which he goes out
of power by being blessed by the country's
different religions.
Then he goes off to America for medical
treatment.
Next time he tries to run, I think
it's 2,004,
he's disqualified
on medical grounds. He's just not not fit.
But he continues to talk from the side
sidelines, particularly criticizing the military.
Many of you will remember 20 years ago
the Bali bombings.
2005, he was interviewed by an American TV
station
and said
that whole thing was set up by the
military
to justify
crackdowns that they wanted to do. The whole
thing was a false flag operation.
It didn't make him very popular.
2009,
ailing by now, he travels off to Jom
Bang, his hometown, to visit the grave of
his parents at his Pheasantren.
And there in December, his health really takes
a turn for the worse.
And on the 30th December, he dies
buried next to his parents. A simple open
grave in traditional Javanese style, open to the
to the rain. So
we should wind up.
I think there's already a lot of lessons
here.
Essentially,
what we're looking at is
the extent to which somebody who is traditionally,
classically,
medievally Islamic
in his formation
can run a modern state,
particularly a really
complicated, fractious one like Indonesia?
Is that possible? Do we need somebody from
the secular elite?
Kind of,
Benazir type
Megawati sometimes compared to Benazir.
She really didn't make a great job of
it. She sent the army back into Aceh
and there were rapes and burnings, and it
was quite horrible. This is what Wahid was
afraid of. Do we want somebody like that?
Journalists will go and interview Benazir Bhutto, and
the first 10 minutes would be talking about
Harrods or something.
Are those the appropriate people?
Or that Islamists
with their ideological
view of Islam as a single
set of simple answers
and the determination to use the nation state
as an instrument of of collective coercion,
a totalitarian
model in the kind of
ISIS or Taliban
style?
Or
should we look to see this example of
somebody who is unimpeachably,
classically
conservative in his training,
but who
knows a lot about the contemporary world and
can talk to you about Dostoevsky
and Marx,
understands his people,
who did it rather differently,
really set Indonesia up to be one of
the tiger economies
despite everything. He was the 1st democratically
elected president of a difficult country and,
managed the transition.
Other things that we might want to think
about is the kind of temperament. What what
sort of individual is the traditional island?
Well, if you have studied
with traditional olamat,
you will find
that they are laid back individuals,
that they are interested in just about everybody.
They want to know who you are
and what they can learn about you. It
could be this guy from Cambridge who walks
into Sheikha Vadani's majlis. Who's just interested?
Or it could be
a Buddhist monk
somewhere in Central Java.
Interesting. Find out about that person.
Don't jump into some kind of negative reflex.
Find out.
Another member of Benny Adam.
Humor, another thing.
One of the things that the traditional Olamath
tend to be very good at is jokes.
And one of the ways in which,
Gostor won people over was through his
rambunctious
Javanese humor.
One of his favorite characters from the way
and called it shadow puppies was Semar, who's
a kind of Nasseridin Hodja.
Holy
fool, who instructs through
rather ambiguous, sometimes risque forms of humor.
And again, the traditional olema very often do
crack jokes.
Certainly, I
I I think
that the time when I have laughed most
in my life was in the Maliki fiqh
classes of Sheikh Ismail
in Cairo, who is the imam of the
Azar mosque.
He was he was just such a brilliant
wit. Absolutely perfect. We were kind of
splitting our sides,
even though we were studying something about ablution
and he turned it into this
funny thing,
very brilliant. That's how the traditional olema are,
and it's important to remember that. If you
read books like Mohammed Jamal Zadeh's
book, Isfahan is Half the World, which has
been done into English, Isfahan, Nisfahan,
it was a mid-twentieth century Iranian short story
writer, Pre Khomeini,
who describes how the olamat were in his
childhood
and their their generosity,
their interest in people,
their tolerance,
their wit.
Reading that book quite reminded me of what
I saw in
in Cairo.
So that, I think,
probably helped him in his leadership skills.
The Natat al olamat
never really developed, as far as I know,
I don't read it in Indonesian,
a systematic
philosophical
or soul based
rejection of the idea that you can have
a totalitarian
religious state
using the very western idea of a nation
state in order to
enforce religion
rather than the traditional Muslim
image of a vibrant civil society with alqaf
and tariqas and gills that the state wouldn't
get involved with.
But there was a guy called Ahmed Sadiq
who was a Nader al Umar scholar
in the 1950s
who did write some interesting things about
how Islam is just incompatible
with the idea of
statist religion.
Maybe they're still working on that.
Yeah. In any case,
his legacy continues. Some of you might have
seen the news that on Eid al Fitr,
the Indonesian Air Force was active over Gaza
dropping aid.
They are working out as everybody else's, their
identity as Muslims into
complex uproar of the modern world. But it
seems that they have come up with a
viable, stable solution, unlike so many of the
Arab countries, which have been imploding.
Since Wahid
left the Middle East. Iraq is destroyed. Syria
is destroyed.
Yemen is destroyed. Sudan is destroyed. Libya is
destroyed. One country after another. Part of the
reason for that, only one part, is the
fact that there are intransigent Muslims
anxious about modernity,
insistent on
expressing that anxiety
by creating an ideological form of Islam that
you have to comply with or else.
Gusteau
is coming from a place that is not
a liberal place,
really Western categories such as that didn't quite
apply,
but, a place where there is,
a respect for the Quranic injunction that the
religion of Islam should be Muhammin,
protector of the earlier communities.
This idea that the difference of your tongues
and languages, which means cultures, I guess, is
a sign of god. Indonesia was a kind
of good testing ground for the applicability
of that Qur'anic
pluralistic vision.
So may Allah shower his mercy upon the
one who now rests in in Jombang and
Charlene Sparas all to go to Indonesia
and pray for the Indonesian people as they
continue this difficult journey in which they negotiate,
religion and modernity.