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

under his father and his brothers-in-law. And my grandmother invited a sheikh from al-Azhar in Cairo to come and educate my father and his younger brothers for seven years. That was unknown in Java. The Kurds provided very traditional education in Islam. The Egyptians through al-Afghani reformed the whole tradition of religious education in al-Azhar. So my father got the benefits of the two types of education. He was educated like a member of a royal family. That was why my father spoke flawless Arabic and knew Arabic literature very much. He subscribed to the famous periodicals of the Middle East.”
    Mr. Wahid’s father also went to Mecca. He went in 1931, when he was fifteen, and he stayed for two years. It was when he came back—his formal education now complete, though Mr. Wahid didn’t make the point—that he began to add to the curriculum of his pesantren, to make it a little more like the mixed curriculum he had himself gone through. He added geography and modern history. He also added, Mr. Wahid said, the idea of the
school:
this meant that students were “drilled” by the teacher.
    “Before, there was nothing like that. It was very polite. No questions. Everybody just listened to the teacher. With the introduction of the school system in the pesantren my father set up a series of incremental changes. There had been changes before of smaller scope but with no less impact. In 1923 my maternal grandfather instituted a new pesantren for girls. Now it’s so common everywhere.”

    The pesantren were essentially religious boardinghouses. By their nature they could not rise much above the level of the people. The improvements Mr. Wahid talked about seemed small: typing, geography, modern history. But perhaps they were not small at the time. Perhaps, as Mr. Wahid said, their effect was incremental.
    I asked him about the traditional side of pesantren teaching. He told me of his experiences of the late 1940s, many years after his father’s reforms.
    “When I was eight years old, after I completed the reading of the Koran, I was told to memorize this grammar book,
Al Ajrumiyah.
It was about fifteen pages. Every morning I was asked by my teacher to memorize a line or two. I was drilled in that. Later in the evening I had to take this book. A very basic text of religious laws: how to have ablution, how to do the right prayers.”
    This was the very thing I had seen in 1979—thirty years later—in the late evening in the pesantren: boys sitting about bamboozling themselves with a simple textbook of religious laws which they would have known by heart, with some boys even sitting in the dark before open books and pretending to read.
    Perhaps religious teaching had to come with this repetitiveness, this isolating and beating down and stunning of the mind, this kind of pain. Perhaps out of this there came self-respect of a sort, and even an idea of learning which—in the general cultural depression—might never have otherwise existed. Because out of this religious education, whatever its sham scholarship and piety, and its real pain, there also came a political awakening.
    This was the other side of Mr. Wahid’s family story. It was interwoven with the other story of pesantren success and reform.

    “In 1908 a local organization was established in Solo called Sarekat Dagung Islam by a trader who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Four years later that organization was transformed into a national organization called Sarekat Islam. It was not confined to trade.
    “My grandfather had a cousin ten years younger, Wahab Hasbullah. Wahab had been sent to my grandfather to be educated. Wahab went to Mecca afterwards and took a friend, Bisri. After four years in Mecca they heard about Sarekat Islam. Wahab asked to open a Mecca branch of Sarekat. This was in 1913, the year after Sarekat Islam was founded. Bisri didn’t go along because he didn’t have the permission of my grandfather, who was also his teacher. Bisri became my