Although the progress of the reform movement has been halted, at least temporarily, the results of the first phase can be plainly seen in Modjokuto. The conservatives have adopted some of the outward trappings of the modernists; the modernists have become less intense about conservative practices they consider unworthy of Islam. But the doctrinal differences between the two groups persist, and a certain degree of antagonism continues to be manifested concerning them. With the re-emergence of the separate parties since the revolution, the ummat has been stabilized, roughly in the form it had reached by the time the Japanese came, embracing a modernism most of the original goals of which have either been accomplished or laid aside as impossible of achievement and a conservatism which is to a great extent old wine in new bottles. Each is somewhat hostile to the other, and they more or less divide up the Islamic community between them. Three transcripts from my notes will convey a sense of the situation in doctrinal terms:
(1) He (the secretary of Muhammadijah) said that Muhammadijah is the organization in Indonesia which has the most buildings, does the most work, and so on. He said they have polyclinics in many big towns and lots of orphanages, schools, and the like as here in Modjokuto. He said there are only forty members in Modjokuto but that they are very close to each other, work well together, and thus have much better results than other groups. He said most people do not want to enter Muhammadijah because they know they would have to contribute time, money, and work. The main difference between NU and Muhammadijah is that the latter is modéren and the former kolot; Muhammadijah wants to unite East and West, NU wants just the East. NU has many, many members, but not much in the way of results. It shows no progress and is poorly organized.
(2) He (prewar head, now vice chairman of Nahdatul Ulama) said NU is a kolot organization; that all the leaders are kolot—lots of kijajis particularly; and that he himself is kolot. Asked whether NU people liked to be called kolot, he said, “Yes, of course they do.” I asked him just what he meant by kolot. He said, “Well, for example, we like slametans, we like the old ways, like wearing wooden sandals and sarongs. We stick to the ways of our parents and grandparents. ...” I asked him if only the old and village people were kolot (because he had mentioned that he was old and that there were lots of old men and village people in NU). How about young townsmen like Rivai (secretary of NU)? Was he kolot too? He said, “Yes, it is the heart that is important. A man like Rivai has an old heart; he is old-fashioned inside. All NU people are that way.” He mentioned the present Minister of Religion, who is an NU man, and said that even though he dresses in a tie, coat, and long pants, his heart is kolot; down deep he is an old-fashioned man.
(3) He (a watchmaker and rank-and-file member of both Masjumi and Muhammadijah) went on to list the various intellectuals with academic titles in Masjumi—Dr. Sukiman, Mr.1 Rum, Mr. Jusuf Wibisono, Dr. A. R. Hani-fah (all leaders of Masjumi at the national level)—and compared this situation favorably with that of NU, which had only kijajis and such, and really no educated men. He said that NU was more interested in religion than Masjumi, and Masjumi more in politics. The NU leaders were undoubtedly deep enough in religion, he said, but they didn’t know anything about leading a country.
The contrast, then, between the modernists and conservatives remains, if muted. People still almost inevitably distinguish between the two approaches, choose one and denigrate the other. What is the content of the doctrines involved? How does the modéren interpretation of Islam differ from the kolot? Five pairs of oppositions fairly well sum up the situation:
(1) The kolot group tends to emphasize a relationship to God in which the reception of blessings as acts of His Grace and in reward for one’s moral uprightness and a sense of the individual career as being entirely fated by His Will are the main features. The modéren group tends to emphasize a relationship to God in which hard work and self-determination are emphasized.
(2) The kolot group tends to hold to a “totalistic” concept of the role of religion in life, in which all aspects of human endeavor tend to take on a religious significance and the boundaries between the religious añd the secular tend to be blurred. The modéren group tends to hold a narrowed notion of religion in which only certain well-defined aspects of life are sacralized and in which the boundary between the sacred and the secular tends to be fairly sharp.
(3) The kolot group tends to be less concerned (but still concerned) with the purity of their Islam and more willing to allow non-Islamic rites at least a minor place within the religious sphere. The modéren group tends to insist upon an Islam purified of any foreign religious matter.
(4) The kolot group tends to emphasize the immediately consummatory aspects of religion, to emphasize religious experience. The modéren group tends to emphasize the instrumental aspects of religion, to be concerned with religious behavior.
(5) The kolot group tends to justify practice by custom and by detailed scholastic learning in traditional religious commentaries. The modéren group tends to justify it upon the basis of its pragmatic value in contemporary life and by general reference to the Koran and the Hadith interpreted loosely.
modernists most often sneer at conservative beliefs as “grave and gift” (kuburan lan gandjaran) religion, by which they mean that it is largely concerned with life after death and the gaining of blessings from God.
Both Dullah from Masjumi and Aziz from PSII complained after the NU public meeting at the mosque ... of NÜ’s exclusive concern with religion and with the afterlife. Dullah said, “This isn’t fitting; you have to deal with the situation now”; and Aziz said* “All they are interested in is kuburan and gandjaran. The village people just love this. They love to hear about how they are going to receive blessings for their goodness and about life beyond the grave. This is the old-time religion, and still very popular.” He too, however, doesn’t like it. He thinks NU is out of touch with reality.
The kolot message is eternally the same: if you will be good, pious, moral people, God will probably reward you with good health, riches, and happiness and, in any case, on Judgment Day He will take you up with Him into heaven. Combined with a belief in the determinätiori of all things by the Will of God, this tends to produce a reliance upon one’s moral superiority as the instrument for gaining one’s goals rather than action, particularly where action is likely to lead to sticky situations. A man who orders bricks from a brickmaker and pays for them but never gets them resigns himself by saying that it is God’s Will and that, anyway, later he, the swindled, will get the gatidjaran that was intended for the brickmaker.
The usual image which is employed (by modernists and conservatives alike) as a symbol of the determination of man’s actions by God’s Will is that of the shadow-play puppeteer with his puppets. As the puppeteer manipulates his puppets, so God manipulates men; and as the puppets go into the box at the close of the performance, so men go into the grave at the close of their performance. But although modernists and conservatives both have a lively sense of divine determinism, the manner in which they interpret this doctrine —takdir—varies in its emphasis.
Then I asked him (a young modernist) about takdir, and he said that he believed everything was takdir and that man’s fate was wholly in God’s hands. “Well,” I said, “why do anything then? Why did the Indonesians bother with the revolution if everything is up to God?” He said, very strenuously, that we are commanded in the Koran to work and strive, to better ourselves. At my objection that this seemed in conflict with takdir he said that he supposed that this wish to work and strive is determined by takdir too. But he was somewhat perplexed and asked me what Western thinkers thought on the subject; and I reassured him they were not much ahead of him on the problem. He said that it is partly a matter of emphasis. Some people, particularly the older, more kolot people, emphasize the takdir part of the thing and ascribe everything to that while others, younger people like himself, while still believing in takdir, also believe that effort makes a difference. For example, he has often argued with his grandmother on just these very lines. His grandmother will say, for instance, of a relative who is very poor, “Oh, it is just takdir, just fate.” He will reply, “No, they are just lazy; they don’t work hard enough.” He said they never agree on this sort of problem.
The difference, then, between the kolot and modéren positions on the problem of free will is, in the first place, one of the extent to which the doctrine of determination is invoked to explain actual behavior and, in the second place, of the amount of stress put on the Koranic command to work as against that put upon the power of God to determine the details of individual behavior. In the kolot view, not oúly is takdir invoked more readily to condone, or at least to explain, moral, biological, or economic failure, but also the balance between the command to work and the sense for takdir seems more nearly even. The result is a view of things in which human effort can as a matter of fact really do little or nothing in altering individual destiny, but in which it is necessary to work ..patiently, whether one gets anywhere that way or not/a patient and peaceful servant of one’s divine Master following out the commands He has issued, neither complaining nor questioning.
He (an NU leader) said, “If you believe there is a God and that all things are ordained by God you will be at peace and you won’t get angry. People who believe this are very difficult to upset because they know everything is the work of God. ...” I asked him if this was takdir, and he said, “Yes. It is the realization of this that makes you peaceful. You don’t worry about being sick or dying because you know all that is in the hands of God.” “Then why work?” I asked. He said that the Koran commands one to work. “Everyone has to work; it is sinful not to. It doesn’t matter whether you are successful or not; you have to keep on hoeing in your fields even if you never get anywhere and just2 stay poor. Whether you succeed or not is in the hands of God; what you. have to do is obey the command to work.”
In the modernist view, however, takdir tends to get narrowed to apply only to those occurrences clearly outside any possibility of human control; and the degree to which one responds to the command to work is held to be the main determinant in one’s fortunes.
to God for one’s good fortune. When I asked him if sickness was tcikdir, he said that there were two kinds: illnesses due to dirt, malaria, for example, and those which are not and are thus not one’s own fault. “The same is true with accidents,” he said, unprompted. “If you leave here and walk out in the middle of the street without looking where you are going and you get hit by a truck, that is not takclir, it is your own fault. But if the accident was completely beyond your own control, that is takdir.”
There are various other compromises and solutions between these two extremes, such as the view that God determines us generally into one of two groups, rich or poor, but that within these effort can make a difference; but in general people tend to lean to one pole or the other: that man should be a pious, patient, steady worker in the service of God and he will receive his blessings, most likely in this life, certainly in the next, or that man should strive for what he wishes, thank God when he gets it, but not employ the doctrine of divine determination as an excuse for his failures.
the varying range over which the doctrine of takdir is applied is in itself an example of the second opposition: the totalistic versus the narrowed view of the scope of religion. The greater percentage of secular studies in modernist schools, the emphasis on non-religious groupings such as peasant associations, labor unions, boy scouts, and sport clubs by the modernists, and the generally much less obviously religious atmosphere in which the modernist groups operate point to the same thing. When a modernist opens a meeting, say the kolot, all he does is shout Bismillah! (“In the name of God!”) and then plunges into a discussion of the budget, returning to Islam only to shout Alhamdulillah! (“Thanks be to God!”) as the meeting ends. This, says the kolot critic wryly, makes the organization Islamic.
The issue here, it need be understood, is not a difference of point of view concerning the importance of religion in relation to the rest of life. For both groups Islamic doctrine is considered to be the fundamental basis for human action in all of its aspects; there is no simple rendering unto Caesar. In that sense, all santris are totalistic—in contrast to abangans and prijajis, for whom religion is only one part of life with its own specific patterns and purposes and more or less equal in prestige with other parts which, in turn, do not need to be justified in any explicitly religious terms. But for the santris this latter is just what is involved: how is the secular life to be justified in terms of the religious? While the conservatives have a tendency to regard Islam as providing adequate and explicit directions in all fields of human endeavor from the domestic to the political, the modernists display a greater willingness to allow secular institutions to operate largely independently of a constant harassment by details of religious doctrine as long as their basic relationship to that doctrine is such that there is no obvious reason to condemn them.
I talked with Radjat (an NU member) a while. He discussed the difference between NU and Masjumi and said that their aims were identical but their methods different. For example, both Masjumi and NU want a state based on Islam; but Masjumi argues that people must make the secular state perfect first, or at least some of its leaders, and that they can declare it Islamic later, while NU says Islam first, and that will make the state perfect.3 Also, the leadership of NU in contrast to Masjumi is made up of kijajis and pondok people, people who have in many cases never been to school at all, while Masjumi leaders are mostly educated people. Also, NU puts more emphasis on religion and less on secular affairs; Masjumi emphasizes the secular more than the religious. They are both Moslem, however; it is just a matter of stress.
The tendency for the religious to widen out to engulf the secular, to regard everything as having religious significance, was even stronger in the years before the war, when wearing Western clothes was considered by some conservative leaders to be an infidel practice, the story being told that at one NU conference before the war a famous Icijaji insisted (unsuccessfully, it must be admitted) that other delegates refrain from wearing neckties. This sort of thing occurs rather seldom now, but it is still not always possible to predict what an old-fashioned santri is going to consider anti-Islamic. Movies, playing cards even without gambling, and gym shorts for girls have raised orthodox hackles during the past few years.
despite their seeming greater religiosity, the conservatives are somewhat more flexible about both abangan rituals on the one hand and prijaji mysticism on the other. Their flexibility does not, paradoxically, indicate a greater tolerance; if anything, the conservatives are more likely directly to attack “infidel” practices by non-santris than are the modernists, who worry more about heterodoxy within the ummat than outside of it. Rather, it is a slightly broader view as to what may be considered Islamic or, if not actually Islamic, at least harmless enough to be legitimately practiced by a “true” Moslem without damaging his religious status. Mysticism can be lent orthodoxy by adopting the rules of one of the Sufi brotherhoods (i.e., “orthodox” Islamic mystic sects); and if the spirits petitioned at a slcimetan are called djins and if the Koran chant be somewhat extended, then these little feasts are at worst pleasant gatherings of neighbors, age-old customs of only minor religious significance which it would be a shame to give up.
So, among the kolot, the traditional round of slametcins goes on only somewhat simplified for economy’s sake and with the Islamic elements accentuated at the expense of the non-Islamic; but among the modéren, slametcins often disappear almost completely. A modernist santri wedding will often consist entirely of the ceremony at the naib's office, the meeting (the bride most often dressed in a white Western gown to accentuate the secularity of this part of the ceremony), an Islamic sermon addressed to the couple by an older male relative, and a reception. At death a good modernist may merely buy a half-dozen new benches for his group’s school and dedicate them to tire memory of the deceased. Pregnancy and birth slametans tend to be either ignored completely—sometimes on the pretext that they are dangerous to the health of the mother—or extremely simplified. A modernist informant of mine simply killed a small goat for a feast about two weeks after his wife gave birth. Calendrical slametans are commonly not given at all because they are considered “Buddhist,” the Islamic holidays being celebrated by prayers in the public square and by gifts to the poor. This passage from a poem composed in the early days of Muhammadijah in Modjokuto gives pretty well the modernist attitude to abangan religion:
Many people are thrown in,
Who die, and then are thrown into the flaming fire.
Such is the fate of careless thinkers,
Who guide their behavior by guess.
The Lord God does not ever forgive The sins of idolators, even after death.
One must pray only to one God!
Those who pray to wood and stone,
Who burn incense to ask forgiveness,
Who place magical bundles here and there to call spirits—
Indeed, they shall live in continuous misery!
As for mysticism, in any form, it is even more of an anathema to the modéren.
Chalifa said that members of the modernist movement, such as himself, thought these people (we were discussing a nearby Moslem mystic brotherhood) were wrong, and that they thought people like him were wrong. He said that they were kolot, knew nothing about the science of Islam, and were not interested in helping others. They would go there (to the brotherhood’s pondok) for a month at a time, leaving their families behind unguarded and uncared for, and were interested only in their own spiritual welfare. He said that he and people like him, whose minds were already opened, who knew the true Islam, should teach it to those who did not. He said also that the kolot mystics don’t really know much about this world. A good Moslem, he said, must know both this world and the religious life, and not just one or the other. He read to me something he had written in Arabic in his composition book which said that those people who stumble around mumbling the Confession of Faith over and over again are like dead men who can move, like ambulant corpses just waiting to finally die and trying to assure themselves of God’s favor but not caring about anyone else.
the kolot side of the fourth opposition, the tendency to emphasize the immediately consummatory aspects of religion, is well enough indicated in the concern with “blessings,” with “inner peace,” and the relative tolerance towards abangan ritual and towards mysticism which have already been discussed. Similarly, the modéren side of the equation appears in the emphasis on hard work and religious purity and the concern for social progress which I have ascribed to them. But perhaps the clearest indication of the two groups’ differing choice of horns in this particular dilemma is to be seen in their contrasting attitudes toward art.
The modéren view is well summed up by this transcript from my notes on a conversation with a twenty-year Muhammadijah veteran:
Among other things we discussed shadow-plays. He said that he thought that every person ought to see a shadow-play at least once but not more than that. He said the reason people ought to see it once is that it pictures how the world is. The puppeteer moves the puppets around, and it is just like God and His people. If it were not for God, people could not walk or talk. God is the puppeteer of the world. But once is enough to comprehend this; it is of no use to see it again. But Zaini (the informant’s wife) said that she had never seen a shadow-play; and when I asked why, she said that good santris don’t like shadow-plays because they are “just pleasure” and of no use. Zaini said Islam teaches that we should not waste our time in frivolous pursuits. Her husband then said that tijd is geld (Dutch for “Time is money”), and that when I came we should always talk about important things, not just engage in small talk.
Just about the only art, aside from chanting, which they do not regard as an art form (and the criticize the extended chants of the kolot as being “of no use” also), of which the modernists approve, is moral stories for children. Such stories, emphasizing the virtues of honesty, thrift, hard work, and cleanliness, are evidently frequently related in santri households and form an important part of the religious education of the child. But other forms of art appear conspicuously lacking among the modernists. Rather, there seems to be something of an emphasis on sports, most particularly soccer and badminton, which are justified, not in terms of the enjoyment they bring, but on the basis of their body-building and health-preserving functions.
On the other hand, the conservatives, who also have little interest in shadow-plays and court dancing, have managed to build up, largely around the pondok system, a fairly lively art adapted from the Arabs which contrasts both with the restrained formality of prijaji art and the puritan aesthetics of the modernists. Three art forms are involved: terbangan, a special type of elaborated chanting, originally from Persia, in which small drums are beaten and a history of the Prophet Muhammad is chanted, alternate sections in rhymed prose and in poetry (i.e., with a fixed beat and line length) ; gambusan, a Middle-Eastem-type orchestra, consisting of stringed instruments (the gambus proper; evidently derived from the Hadhramaut) and various-sized drums (also called terbang), to the music of which all-male Arabic dances are danced and secular Arabic songs sung; and, third, a set of strength tests, flesh mortifications, and native “wrestling” exhibitions centering around the famous Indonesian fighting dance, the pentjak.
The terbangan is usually held in the mosque, most commonly on the Prophet’s birthday or other Moslem holidays, and lasts for about two hours. Shorter ones are sometimes held on Friday eves (i.e., Thursday nights) and at santri circumcisions and marriages. Modernists tend not only to look down on these celebrations as old-fashioned but also to regard the performance of them in the mosque as sacrilegious.
I asked Dullah and Hadji Muchtar, the Muhammadijah man who works in the naib’s office, about the terbangan I heard was to be given in the mosque on August 17th (Indonesia’s Independence Day; this was evidently the first time this religious art form had been employed on a secular holiday) ; Muchtar laughed ironically and said, “Oh, we are having a hot time in the mosque from morning to night these days.” Dullah said that it was just a play for ignorant village people and was sponsored by NU. For Muhammadijah this kind of thing was absolutely forbidden. The mosque was for praying only and that was all, but the NU people were very orthodox (!) and didn’t understand. He said Muhammadijah had tried to prevent it, but evidently was unsuccessful.
As for the gambusan, it occurs also at circumcisions and marriages and at “graduation” ceremonies in pondoks. It may in fact be held just for the joy of it, with no special occasion; and there were three or four gambus orchestras in town made up of young santris who used to get together once a week at the home of one of the members to have a kind of jam session. Often, but not always, associated with the music is the singing of catchy Arabic songs (the meanings of which, except in general terms, the singers do not know) and lively Arabic dances, most of them comic, which often include female impersonations. The whole effect, with drum-beating, rhythmic handclapping, shouting, and all the skipping back and forth in helter-skelter fashion, provides such a sharp contrast to the usual Javanese formality that it is considered by most people to be rather animalistic and uncivilized. “It is like Africa in Indonesia,” one young modernist said disapprovingly.
Pentjak, the fighting dance, is not strictly spealcing a wholly santri art or one exclusively practiced by santris; nor did it originally have any connection with Islam. But for various reasons it has come to be mainly associated with pondok culture. Since Sumatra and the other larger “outer islands” of Indonesia have, in general, tended to have a stronger Islamic tradition than
Java and a much weaker Hindu-Buddhist tradition, the pentjak, which was always strong there, tended to get associated with Moslem culture. Also, the generally energetic character of the pentjak fits better with the pseudo-Arabic culture of the pondoks than it does with the more restrained culture of the non-santris; and the kind of encapsulated all male—even somewhat homosexual— hairshirt youth society that pondoks represent is likely to find art forms emphasizing physical strength, agility, and endurance attractive. (One santri who had been at the central NU pondok said that the kijaji there encouraged pentjak so that the students would not wish to play such sports as soccer, which might take them out of the pondok sphere and into contact with secular life). In any case, almost all of the skillful pentjak performers around Modjokuto are kolot santris who have spent long periods in pondoks; and about the only place one still sees pentjak, a dying art (it had a brief renaissance under the Japanese, who stimulated it in line with their pro-Moslem and military preparedness program—and perhaps because it seemed to them much like their judo), is at “graduation” ceremonies at pondoks.
Pentjak is a half-dance, half-fight in which aggressive acts are initiated and developed but not consummated. The two participants strike viciously at one another with their hands and feet, sometimes even wielding knives, but withdraw their blows at what seems like the last possible moment so they do not land. They throw one another to the floor, the victim cooperating in exact rhythm with the attacker; they leap around into formal poses, turning sharply toward and away from one another. All the while the drums beat, the audience shouts. It is a pantomime struggle just on the verge of the actual, and, somewhat as in a bullfight, the beauty and the excitement come from the thinness of the line between art and life. Two fight; one, tired or consistently out-maneuvered, withdraws; and another combatant leaps out from the audience. After five or ten minutes there is another unspoken decision, one of these two retires, and a new challenger faces the victor. This can go on for hours, ten or a dozen young men participating, the mock combat seeming always about to break into actual struggle and open aggression as the antagonists shout and grimace at one another; but it never does.
But pentjak is not just an art form. It is at the same time a practical system of self-defense which can be used without the aesthetic restraint when necessary, and a form of spiritual training. Many stories of actual pentjak feats in battle are told, and a man near me who beat off a huge knife-wielding thief one night was said to have been able to do so because he was a pentjak expert. In the old-time pondoks, it is said, there used to be people whose spiritual discipline through pentjak was so great that they could knock people down without touching them in a pentjak struggle; and a pentjak exhibition is stil' today half viewed as a struggle between two wills, so that a good pentjak man causes others to withdraw through his superior spiritual strength as well as his physical agility—these being, in fact, but reverse aspects of each other.
Associated with pentjak exhibitions is usually a series of strength tests and flesh mortifications. At a pondok “graduation” I attended, young men rolled in thorns, lifted weights, dropped heavy bricks on one another, and climbed slippery poles. It is said that they sometimes lacerate themselves with glass and walle on fire, but I have not seen either. The purpose is again a dual one of physical fitness and spiritual discipline, a kind of mystical sport. In sum: the terbcingan, the gambusan, and the pentjak combine to define a quite variant subcultural art style by means of which the austere simplicities of Islam are modified for those for whom religion needs to be more than faith and works and to whom time is more than money.
finally, there is the opposition between the kolot reliance on custom and detailed scholastic learning and the moderen group’s tendency to take general oughts from the Koran and justify them pragmatically. The strongly kijaji leadership of NU means that the scholastic tradition is extremely entrenched there.
We talked on about NU and Muhammadijah. He (a young modernist) said that NU has all the kijajis; in Modjokuto, Muhammadijah does not have one religious expert, one kijaji. He said that the reason NU is stronger (i.e., has more members) is that it has a fixed religious line. Most NU positions on religious problems are decided by the big kijajis, and the others fall in line. Muhammadijah has none of this. Each man just about decides for himself on the basis of his own interpretation of the Koran, He said that Dullah (a Muhammadijah leader) holds that if one misses a prayer one does not necessarily have to repeat it later; but Pak Ali (Chairman of Masjumi and Vice Chairman of Muhammadijah) doesn’t agree with this position—an example of the conflict that exists even within the organization.
The greater reliance on scholastic learning and on custom is not self-contradictory as it might seem, for what often happens is that kijajis find for themselves interpretations of the law which will allow them and their followers to practice the customs which they are wont to practice on traditional grounds. The modernists, on the other hand, tend to reject traditional Moslem customs which they feel are not in keeping with the true spirit of Islam—such as the symbolic acts surrounding death, or the short “calming” spell said before a prayer—and to be somewhat unimpressed by what they consider sophistic arguments for such customs by the learned. Thus a modernist scholar pointed out at a Masjumi meeting that peoplè often use hadiths rather unfairly. For example, he said, there are three hadiths concerning women, one of which puts them higher than men, one of which puts them lower, and one which says they are equal, and that by quoting any one of these one could make a case for almost any position. One must get the spirit of the Hadith in general, all the quotations on this point, he said. As for arguments from secondary religious commentaries, modernists tend merely to say that it is best to stick to the Koran and Hadiths and not be oversubtle.
For the customs they do accept as “fitting” with the Koran and the Hadith, modernists tend almost inevitably to add pragmatic rationalizations. Thus the prayers are justified as being good exercise and healthful (The early morning prayer is said to get one out of bed early in the morning so that one can get right to work and not laze around in bed), circumcision as preventing genital infections, the Pilgrimage as broadening one as travel always does. Western spiritualist writers are quoted in “scientific” support of the existence of the supernatural, prohibition of pork is justified by references to trichinosis, and Western medicine is said to have established that fasting prevents stomach cancer. But the most insistent theme is that Islamic doctrine presages almost all later thought, social or scientific, and thus is extremely functional in a modem context. The Koran is claimed to contain all the necessary rules for modern hygiene and much of modern medicine; adequate astronomy, chemistry, and physics are also claimed to have been included in the Holy Book. One speaker explained the Prophet’s speedy journey to Palestine at the time of the Mi’radj as being explicable by the fact that he had the secret of atomic power centuries before it was discovered in the West.
It is especially in the realm of social doctrine that the claim for modernity and for the continuing usefulness of Islamic doctrine and law is put most strongly.
His (a modernist speaker at a meeting in the mosque on the Prophet’s birthday) second point was that many times one hears people say that the Islamic law may be all right, but it doesn’t fit with the modern world; it can’t be made operative in the situation today. ... He then gave several examples to show that Islamic law was not only as up to date as Western law (he took French law as the quintessence of Western law and made his comparisons with that) but actually preceded it. Take the matter of the notion that all men are equal. This came to the Western world at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries with the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Before that, society was sharply divided into aristocrats and commoners. But in the Islamic law this principle is stated (he quoted it), in the Hadith it is stated (he quoted it), and in the Koran it is stated (he quoted it). Second example: women’s rights are equal to those of men. This again is in the law, the Hadith, and the Koran; and he quoted them. Thus in both these cases—the equality of men and the equality of men and women—the Islamic law was centuries ahead of the West and fits in with modern ideas. This proves, he said, that the Koran is the Word of God.
these, then, are the dimensions along which doctrinal distinctions within the Modjolcuto ummcit tend to arrange themselves: a “fated” life versus a “self-determined” one; a “totalistic” view of religion versus a “narrowed” one; a more “syncretic” Islam versus a “pure” one; an interest in “religious experience” versus an emphasis on “the instrumental aspects of religion”; the justification of practice by “custom” and “scholastic learning” versus justification by the “spirit of the Koran and the Hadith” in general and “pragmatically.”
It is no accident that the kolot side of these equations appears in each case to place them very near to the kind of world view I have already described as abangan. The extreme kolot santri, despite the fact that he is often called “orthodox,” is not actually the most Islamic of Javanese Moslems but the least. It is he who has made the minimum shift from the traditional religious system in which “animistic,” Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic elements found a stable balance toward the situation where Islam and the world view associated with it have been fully taken up into the self, have been internalized in the individual psyche so that they actually control behavior rather than merely putting a gloss on it to hide the values which are really determining individual action.
It is very hard, given his tradition and his social structure, for a Javanese to be a “real Moslem”—to accept fully at the deepest emotional levels a religion which, in the words of H. A. R. Gibb, “setfs] the terms of a new experiment in human religion, an experiment in pure monotheism, unsupported by any of the symbolism or other forms of appeal to the emotions of the common man, which had remained embedded in the earlier monotheistic religions.”* The otherness, awfulness, and majesty of God, the intense moralism, the rigorous concern with doctrine, and the intolerant exclusivism which are so much a part of Islam are very foreign to the traditional outlook of the Javanese. Even the modernists, supported as they are in their effort by some marked changes in the forms of social organization, succeed only part of the time in actually organizing their behavior in these terms—but then most Christians are pagans much of the time.
It would be a mistake to draw from this the conclusion—and it has often been drawn—that Islam is really of no importance in Javanese life and that the difference between abangan and santri is merely one of terms and protestations. For, even among the most kolot of santris, there has been a crucial shift when a man, propelled by class, occupation, geography, or family history, or, who knows, by an inner psychological need for a different sort of religion from that which his culture offers him, becomes a santri. He starts a process of genuine religious conversion which, if it cannot be completed in him, may well be in his children. Even the minimal santri has adopted, however vague and ill-understood they may be, several principles which, given time and increased social-structural support, may end in a totally different orientation toward the world: the idea of a distant and powerful God who is concerned with the moral worth of the individual believer; the idea that secular behavior must somehow be justified in terms of religious doctrine; and the idea that among the proposed paths to religious understanding, one is correct and all the others are wrong.
Nor can one simply say that the kolot-to-modèren scale measures the degree to which these principles have taken hold in the essentially abangan
* H. A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism (London, 1949), p. 70.
mentality of the Javanese. Rather, they represent two alternate ways in which these principles can in part be realized in a still mainly non-Moslem social context. The modernist emphasizes the way of radical disassociation from that context and the purification of doctrine within a small group of religious leaders; the conservative tries to work out a halfway covenant with the reigning tradition which will both malee his own transition easier and lessen the tension between himself and his neighbors who do not agree with him. It is well to remember, however, that not everyone is so consistent as to choose the same side of each of my oppositions nor is everyone so vigorous as clearly to choose one or the other side in any one of them. There is much indistinctness, ambivalence, and flaccidity of belief; and what one finds is a continuum from the kolot to the modéren along which people fall, many of them at neither extreme but somewhere in between. Tendencies are only tendencies after all, even if, as here, they are quite striking ones; and when one comes to consider the manner in which these variations in Islamic religious doctrine are institutionalized in Modjokuto, the social form they take, and the social context in which they exist, the picture gets not clearer but fuzzier.
Mr. (abbreviation of meester) is a Dutch academic title used by holders of a master’s degree in law.
asked him (a young Masjumi man) about takdir. He said that in his opinion everyone is takdir exactly the same. God does not takdir some people rich and some poor, but everybody is takdir with an even chance. Thus those who are poor are poor mainly because they are lazy or stupid or sinful; for example, they gamble. Those who are rich are rich because they work hard and are clever. He said that if, for example, he was well-off, it was not God’s Will but a result of his own efforts, and anyone could do the same if only he would try hard enough. He said that it is important, however, to give thanks
In other words, Masjumi is willing to work in the present secular republic and feels no necessity for the immediate declaration of an Islamic theocracy, which many Masjumi members privately consider would raise more problems than it would settle. NU, although forced to work under the present secular state, there being no alternative but to rebel (as right-wing Moslems seeking an Islamic state have indeed done in West Java, in South Celebes, and sporadically in North Sumatra), feels that the theocracy should be declared immediately, whereupon reform of the government will follow as a natural consequence of the mere application of the superior political and legal theories of Islam. The Masjumi view just given is not official party doctrine, for neither party would dare come out against an immediate imposition of an Islamic state; it is, however, an accurate summary of the view actually held by the leaders of the party in Modjokuto.