Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) by V.S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online

to speak, however—and his English was fluent and good and sensitive—his quality was apparent. He was a man to whom confidence and graces had been passed down over a couple of generations.
    Mr. Wahid said: “My grandfather was born in 1869, in East Java, in a sugar plantation area called Jombang. He came of a peasant family who followed a tradition of Sufism. The Sufis in Java had been running pesantren for centuries. My ancestors had their pesantren for two centuries, for six or seven generations before my grandfather.
    “My great-grandfather came from Central Java. He studied at a pesantren in Jombang, and was taken as a son-in-law by his teacher. This would have been in 1830, at the beginning of sugar planting in the area. That period was also the beginning of steamship travel via the Middle East. This was important for the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. It became easier. It also led to the emergence of rich new Muslim families growing cash crops. This new rich class could send their children to study in Mecca by the steamship lines. It was a coincidence, but history is often shaped by unconnected developments.
    “My great-grandfather was able to send my grandfather to Mecca in the last quarter of the last century. My grandfather went to Mecca perhaps in 1890, when he was twenty-one years old. He stayed there maybe five or six years. Because of the steamship lines you could send money to students. He came back and established his own pesantren. This was in 1898.
    “The story is that he established that with ten students only. At that time the establishing of a prayer house was considered as a challenge to prevailing values. In the vicinity of the sugar plantations there was an absence of religious life. The sugar factory made people depend on it by providing easy money to gamble, for drinking, for prostitution, all kinds of things frowned on by Islam. In the night in the first few months these ten students had to sleep in the middle of the prayer house. The walls of the prayer house were made of bamboo mats, and spears and all kinds of sharp weapons were thrust in from outside.
    “Maybe my grandfather was too strong in his criticism of people. He chose the sugarcane area quite deliberately. Maybe he had done this with some spiritual insight into the future. The clear wish was there to transform the whole community there, to make them follow the Islamic way of life. In 1947, at the end of his life, my grandfather had a pesantren of four thousand students and twenty acres of land. In the beginning he only had four acres. The community now is totally transformed. There is still a sugar mill there, but the whole community has left that old way of life and now follows an Islamic way of life.
    “My grandfather had married many times. He married also before he left for Mecca. All his marriages ended in divorce or death of wives. Maybe at the beginning of this century he got this new wife from the nobility. The nobility here means from the line of the kings of Java, ruling in Solo. We share the same family line with the wife of President Suharto. The nobility was already a little bit secularized, Westernized. This new wife of my grandfather’s was so proud of her noble origin she often said, according tomy mother, ‘I want my children to have a different education. I don’t want them to follow the peasant way of life of my husband.’
    “Because of that she oriented my father and his younger brothers—eleven of them. They were given tutors from outside the area who taught things unknown in the pesantren—mathematics and Dutch language, general knowledge. My father even went through a course in typing. People wondered about that, because the Muslim community here still used the Arabic script for the local language. Later, when he went into public life, my father would sit in the backseat of the car and type as he was driven about. At the same time as he did those modern subjects my father had to study in the pesantren