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

maternal grandfather. Wahab was my great maternal uncle. When he returned from Mecca, in 1917, he went to Surabaya. In 1919 Sarekat Islam split. A Dutchman influenced two Sarekat Islam members to form the Red Sarekat Islam. In 1924 there was a Saudi congress for the new caliphate for the Muslims. Wahab joined the Surabaya committee.”
    In 1926 Sukarno appeared, and national politics were transformed. But Mr. Wahid’s father and grandfather remained important in the religious movement.
    “In 1935 the Dutch, worried by the Japanese threat, made a call for a local militia to defend Indonesia or the empire from the impending Japanese threat. And a congress called by my grandfather debated this point: Is it obligatory for true Muslims to defend a country ruled by non-Muslims? The resounding answer was yes, because the Muslims in Indonesia in 1935 under the Dutch had the liberty to implement the teachings of their religion. This means in my thinking that my grandfather saw Islam as a moral force, not as a political force exercised by the state.”
    It was, it might be said, a colonial moral debate, among people who exercised no power, rather like the debate in India when the war came. And, as it happened, the militia in which Mr. Wahid’s father served was the one set up by the Japanese, who overran Indonesia in 1942.
    “The Japanese established two kinds of militias, the Muslim ones and the nationalist ones. My father was the founder of the Hizbullah militia in 1944. The Japanese recruited young people from pesantren and religious schools. My father’s younger brother was trained and then appointed as battalion commander. With his headquarters situated right there in the pesantren, this involved the whole family in national affairs. They discussed the Japanese war, affairs in Germany, the independence movement.
    “In 1944–45 the Japanese established a committee to prepare for Indonesian independence. It was chaired by Sukarno. My father was on this committee. He and eight other members of the committee formed the nucleus of the group to draw up the five principles of the new state, the
panchasila.
In that way he became one of the founding fathers of this state. So when the independence war broke out my father was involved directly. First he became a minister and then later he became political adviser to the commander of the armed forces, General Sudirman.
    “My father went into hiding when the Dutch unleashed their aggression. I was evacuated to my maternal grandfather’s house. And there several times a week my father appeared, hiding in the house, not going out, treating his wounds, which were from diabetes, not from bullets. I had to get frogs to fry, to get oil from, for dressing those wounds. Ten to fifteen frogs a time, two or three times a week. After dressing his wounds he would go back to hiding in the nearby villages.
    “When the Dutch yielded sovereignty to our state my father was appointed minister of religious affairs. He held that position for three years. In the Japanese time there had been an office of religious affairs which hadbeen entrusted to my grandfather, but headed by my father as chief executive director. That office was the embryo of the department of religious affairs.”
    And, as so often in narratives of this time, if the brutalities of their occupation could be set aside, the intelligence and speed—and the lasting effects—of the Japanese reorganization of a vast and varied area had to be acknowledged.
    Mr. Wahid, child though he was, began to live close to national politics.
    “My father took me when I was nine years old to this big rally in the Ikada Stadium. Sukarno was to be there.” This would have been in 1950. “The stadium had been built by the Japanese as a sop to us. It was where they now have this national monument.” And it was the park where, before an audience of a million, the French government were to put on their big firework display for the fiftieth anniversary of