<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head><meta name="charset" content="UTF-8"/><title></title><link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css"/> </head> <body><h2>Chapter l6 The Santri Ritual Pattern</h2> <p>Santri ritual life is modulated in time by the five fixed prayers—morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening—repeated day after day in the same simple form. In space it is bounded by the borders of three progressively inclusive social circles defined by the three institutions in which the prayers are typically performed: the home, the neighborhood langgar (prayer house), and the village mosque.</p> <p>The morning, noon, afternoon, and evening prayers are usually performed in the home; the sunset prayer is often carried out (by the men, the women always praying at home) in a nearby langgar with a few friends; the Friday noon prayer is almost invariably performed in the mosque in the company of the whole of the village ummat. It is the intersection of the temporally patterned prayers—for it is fidelity in performing the prayers which, ultimately, defines a santri; prijajis and abangans almost never do them—and the spatially outlined social groups of household, neighborhood, and village which organizes the elemental Islamic congregation, the individual’s most immediate ummat, which in turn has a marked tendency to be incorporated as a unit into one of the two over-arching santri political parties.</p> <p>Thus the religious and the social aspects of Islam lend support to one another.</p> <p>(The informant is an NU shopkeeper.) It is permissible to do the prayers in one’s house, but it is always better to do them in a group in the mosque or in a langgar than to do them alone at home. Each prayer of the five is better performed in the mosque or langgar, although this is compulsory only for the Friday noon prayer. The reason for this is that when the prayers are done in a group the mistakes, the good works, and the blessings are shared among all. Thus, if one is doing the prayers in a mosque or langgar and makes a mistake (in the ritual) or is not concentrating enough (for one never really knows how effective and pure and correct his worship is), then the punishment which comes for this can be spread thin over the whole group, who will carry it on their shoulders, and the burden will be much lighter and in fact hardly felt. But if one performs the prayers in the house by himself and he makes a mistake, he gets all the punishment himself. Contrariwise, when one prays in a mosque or langgar one benefits from the piety of others more deeply versed in religion and better at praying, and thus gets more blessings and builds up more good works. Just going to the mosque is enough to get one something. For instance, if one goes to the mosque intending to pray but instead falls asleep, one still gets some credit in heaven for having come to the mosque with the intention of praying and also as a result of the prayers performed by the more pious present. Thus it is always better to pray with other people than to pray alone.</p><h3>The Prayers</h3> <p>actually, “prayer” is not an altogether accurate translation of solat (also called sembahjang) because, unlike Christian prayers, the solats are fixed not only in time but also in form and content, a sharp distinction being made between these obligatory acts of worship and any voluntary personal prayer (doa) one may wish to direct to God for various special purposes of one’s own, which may be done anytime, with any phrasing, and in Javanese rather than Arabic if one wishes. Thus solat might better be translated “ritual incantation.”</p> <p>In any case, the form of the solat in Indonesia is the same as in any other Islamic country; and, as this has been so often described—the lustrations, the prostrations, and the chanting, I need not review the manner of their performance here except to note that, although all santris do the solat regularly, they differ somewhat in the elaborateness with which they carry out the act.</p> <p>Bisri said in connection with describing the prayer that there are several optional parts. There is a part in the middle where one recites any passage from the Koran. Bisri knows about eight verses, all very short and easy. There is another place where one chooses between two prayers; he doesn’t even know the longer one. After the main prayer is over many people continue to say certain phrases over and over, usually 33 or 66 or 99 times—phrases such as Attaint Akbar (God is most Great)—but he never does. He just gets the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.</p> <p>The prayer pattern fits quite neatly with the daily round of the typical peasant. The 5:00 a.m. prayer gets him out of bed and early to work. By noon or one or two o’clock the work is done and the second prayer can be performed, to be followed by the big meal of the day and a nap in the midday heat. At three or four he is up for the afternoon prayer and then can either return to the fields if work is unusually heavy or, more commonly, visit around in the cool of the afternoon, ending up in the langgar for sunset prayer. Then he goes home to an evening meal, the final prayer, and bed.</p> <p>In the town, the prayer pattern fits less well, although storekeepers can always take five minutes to do the prayers in back of their place of business (which is often their home as well). Other urban occupations raise problems; and I knew one santri who quit driving a taxi and returned to being a farmer because his taxi-driving took him on long trips during which it was impossible to do the solat correctly. (Strictly speaking, one can perform a solat in a field or along a roadway so long as one does the proper lustrations first, which is no problem in well-irrigated Java, but Javanese seem reluctant to do this; and all the time I was in Java I never saw anyone performing his solat in this manner.) Another santri claimed that santris often do not like to enter the army because the military routine often makes it difficult to do one’s solat.</p> <p>I doubt, however, that such considerations are very important for most people; the prayer regime is rather more flexible than it looks. In the first place, one can do the required prayer any time between the correct time for it and the correct time for the next one. Thus the noon prayer can be done from shortly after noon to 3:30, the 3:30 prayer from 3:30 until sunset, and so on. (The sunset prayer must be done while there is still light in the sky, however, and so is an exception.) In addition it is possible, for good reason, to combine certain couples of the prayers into one: e.g., if one misses the noon prayer one can do it at 3:30 along with the prayer for that time; and, conversely, if one knows he will not be able to do the 3:30 prayer, he can do it ahead of time at noon.</p> <p>The brevity and simplicity of the prayers also make it easy to fit them into the daily routine. I have dozens of times interviewed a husband and wife in their home alternately through prayer time, each of them taking turns to go out back for about five minutes to do the prayer. (It is not impolite either for them to do this or for one to sit there; one is not expected to leave while people do their prayers.) Sometimes if one is talking with only one person, he will nevertheless excuse himself for a minute and go off somewhere in the house to perform the solat. (Although Arabs have performed their prayers in their homes in front of me—while I talked merrily on with those of the family who had completed theirs—no Javanese ever did this. They always went into a little room or out to the back of the house where others could not see them.) On long bicycle trips with santri informants we stopped at a wayside mosque or langgar for a few minutes while the informants performed the prayer, and then we went on. Thus the urban pattem of life, in Modjokuto .at any rate, had not yet made the prayer-sequence awkward to fulfill for most people.</p> <p>I have been told that in Surabaja, where some people must work from 8:00 A.M. until 4:00 p.m. in offices, the noon prayer is sometimes regularly skipped, even by good santris, and only four prayers are done a day, although strictly speaking, this is heterodox. In any case, for most santris, doing the solat is not so unrelated to such more mundane considerations as seeking one’s daily bread as it might seem; like the Catholic act of crossing oneself, the daily prayers are a kind of ritual reflex, assuring one of material wellbeing as well as spiritual:</p> <p>(The informant was a common laborer on the roads.) He asked me if I went to church on Sunday and was quite surprised when I said no. I asked him if he went to mosque every Friday and he said yes. Did he know how to pray? “Yes,” he said, “since I was a child. It’s better if you pray, ask for clothes, food, well-being for yourself and your children, a healthy strong body.”</p><h3>The Friday Service</h3> <p>the Friday group-prayer represents a symbolic coming together of the ummat of the entire village; and the sense of having a “mosque of one’s own” is strong enough so that people who move into town from nearby villages often return to the mosque in these villages for Friday prayer. (For those who live immediately around it, the mosque acts as a neighborhood langgar in which the evening prayer may be performed daily.) The control of the village mosques is entirely local, the director and the governing board being chosen by the people whom the mosque serves.</p> <p>(The informant is an official in the Office of Religious Administration.) To set up a mosque, one first builds it either alone or in a group (or, of course, pays to have it built). Then a paper is signed surrendering it to the populace in general and the Office of Religious Administration in particular. The Office gathers together the people the mosque is to serve (i.e., the people who live around it), and they choose the nadjir, the man in charge and his name is entered in a book. (In fact, this is almost inevitably the man who built it himself or someone approved by him.) Here in town the head of the Office of Religious Administration is automatically ?tadjir, so the nadjir changes as the naib changes; but in the villages a man remains nadjir until he dies, when a new one is chosen. In addition to the nadjir, a general governing body for the mosque is chosen from among its ummat, which aids him in keeping it up.</p> <p>To give a feeling for what the Friday prayer is like, I cite the following description from my notes on a mosque service I attended with an urban informant in the nearby village where he had been bom and had grown up. The mosque was an NU-dominated one and thus old-fashioned in manner, as one can see from the fact that the chotbah (sermon) was not translated.</p> <p>I went to mosque for Friday services with Amiri yesterday in the village where Amiri lived until the Japanese time. We just went in and sat down at about 11:30. The mosque, a small, square, white-plaster building with a slightly peaked red-tile roof, was just a big empty room—or rather two since there was a wall, pierced by two glassless windows and two doorless doors at the sides near the outer wall, about three-quarters of the way back, behind which Amiri and I sat. Outside on the porch hung not the usual slit gong (called a bedug) but a huge parade drum, which some people were engaged in beating with a large wooden club, first slowly and then faster and faster, repeating this about a half-dozen times and calling out in Arabic for people to gather for the prayer. As we squatted there on the stone floor, men and boys of all ages (the youngest perhaps six or seven) wandered in (some of them stopping to shake my hand and touch their chest, none of them seemingly surprised to find me there) and then squatted down, either on a woven mat or on their sarong or just on the bare stone floor. (Amiri rode out on the bike in trousers, but changed to a sarong when he got there.) Many of them were carrying Korans, which they left on a table near the mid-room door. Eventually there must have been 150 people there, and it was quite crowded.</p> <p>When we arrived, there were already some people chanting, not in unison but individually, each at his own pace with his own rhythm. The result, some of the voices being deep and old, some high and adolescent, and all chanting at varying speeds, was an oddly beautiful cacophony. As others came in, they started chanting too, but finally at about 12 noon, they all stopped suddenly, perhaps on a signal from the imam (prayer leader), whom I could not see because of the wall, and then began the formal prayers. However, they still were not in rhythm, but each man went at his own speed. When one was bending over, another next to him was still standing up; and when one was bending over the other was touching his forehead to the floor. (They chanted to themselves now, moving only their lips, although the imam at the front was chanting aloud.)</p> <p>In five minutes or so the praying was over, but the man at the front chanted on in Arabic in what I later found out was the chotbah but at the time thought was merely more praying while the ummat sat and waited. After maybe 20 minutes the chotbah was over, and they all prayed again; but this time they were all together in their motions. After this was over, most of the people left, others sitting there a while quietly or resuming the unorganized chanting that had gone on before the service began. Amiri sat there quietly for a while, and then in about ten minutes we went out and went across the street to see a friend of his. . . .</p> <p>The problem of whether or not the chotbah should be translated is still a very live one, and most conservative mosques still refuse to do so, almost always using Arabic chotbahs written years ago by a famous Javanese kijaji from Semarang. (The Modjokuto mosque, now NU-dominated, continues the translated chotbahs introduced by Muhammadijah before the war.) The Javanese-language sermons holographed by the Bureau of Religious Propaganda are distributed to all the mosques whose officials want to use them, but few do. Those willing to give translated sermons want to make up their own more politically pointed ones, because nowadays when translated sermons are given, especially by urban modernists, they tend to be on political and social problems as much as on religious ones. (There was in fact an intense controversy in the parliament while I was in Indonesia concerning the use by Masjumi and NU of the mosques for political purposes.)</p> <p>(The informant is the Modjokuto imam.) Imam, he said means the man who leads the prayers, but in the office of Religious Administration his duties are broader. In the first place he is in charge of the sermons here in the mosque on Friday. There are four sermon-givers (two NU men, one Masjumi man, and an Arab, the latter still giving his in Arabic) who alternate from week to week, and they write their own sermons. He said that the sermons are not only about religion but depend on the situation and are sometimes about politics. The one he gave last week was on Communism, warning the unmat not to believe the Reds when they say they are proreligion; he said he wanted to prevent the more unlearned santris from being taken in by Communist propaganda. ... He said soon there will be a sermon on Acheh (a province in North Sumatra where a Moslem revolt against the government had just broken out).</p> <p>This pattern is, however, largely confined to town. Even in those more modern village mosques which accept translated sermons they are usually still mostly on religious subjects.</p> <p>The village chief was copying a sermon out of an old sermon book written by a man from Surakarta. He said that he had to give one of the four monthly sermons in the Sidomuljo (a village Masjumi stronghold) mosque the next day. He said that he always copied them out of this book; he wasn’t clever enough to make them up himself. He said the sermon was entirely concerned with religious things—urging people to pray, to believe in God: all quite simple. He said that he read it first in Arabic and then in Javanese. Evidently it isn’t very long.</p><h3>The Fast</h3> <p>the droning chant of the interlocked solat-ummat pattern which flows along quite evenly through eleven months of the year, dividing each day into fixed segments, assembling the santri neighborhood each evening and the santri village each Friday noon, reaches a kind of crescendo in the Fast month (Pasa), when strictly religious activity is suddenly intensified and strictly secular sharply curtailed.</p> <p>We talked about the Fast. He (a Masjumi leader) said that political activity for Masjumi and NU slows down very much in the Fast, which is used for religious reflection. He said that the Fast is not just to be viewed as a month of fasting but as a much more religious month than all the rest.</p> <p>In addition to fasting, one is not allowed to say evil things about other people or listen to or see evil things. Religious activity in general is much stepped up; and Pasa is considered the month in which a Moslem is supposed to get his religious house in order. ... A sin in the Fast is much worse than the same sin in another month. And at the end comes the zakat fitrah (religious tax) to help erase the sins committed in the Fast.</p> <p>After sundown each day during the Fast everyone eats a large meal and then gathers at the langgars (or the mosque if they live near it) to perform the evening prayer and, after it, the trawèh and darns. (Just before this begins one hears the children around each langgar gaily shouting TRAWÈH, TRAWÈH, TRAWÈH, in a manner somewhat akin to a football yell.) The trawèh consists of extra prayers (i.e., solats, not free prayers) as special added duties—although, strictly speaking they are voluntary—for the Fast. The davits is a reading of the Koran verse by verse; this also is voluntary, and evidently felt to be somewhat less incumbent than the trawèh.</p> <p>In both these rituals there is, once more, a difference between kolot and modéren as to the correct manner of carrying them out. Concerning the trawèh, this difference is over the correct number of solats which should be performed. There are two legitimate hadiths on this matter, the first saying that one should do 23 solats and the other that one should do 11. Until the rise of modernism, 23 was the number accepted in Java as orthodox, and NU people still do 23; but Muhammadijah-Masjumi people mostly do 11. (The Modjokuto mosque, although now NU-dominated, has not shifted back to 23 from the 11-system introduced by the modernists when they were in control.) The NU people say the modernists are lazy and not very much interested in religion anyway. The modernists say that, although they do fewer prayers, they perform them more carefully and with greater understanding of the meaning of what they do, while the conservatives just race through their prayers superficially.</p> <p>(The informant is a modernist.) The 11-system is the newer and was largely spread by the modernist movements here and sharply opposed by the more old-line people when it was originally introduced. It was introduced in the Modjokuto mosque by Kijaji Nazir (the old Sarekat Islam founder) over much opposition—so much, in fact, that most NU people went elsewhere to pray, to their own langgars and the like. The reason that the 11-system is preferred by the modernists, in addition to the fact that it is a direct tradition from the Prophet while the 23-system is from the Companion Umar, is that it is possible to do the prayers slowly and in order, and thus to be more pious, while with the 23 they are always hurried through. The old men, who prefer the 23-system, feel that the greater the number of prayers the greater the good works credited to one’s account; the younger, usually, and more pious people who prefer the 11 feel that if one does not do the prayers deeply and piously one will not get any good works on his account at all.</p> <p>The darns conflict is over whether participants should read the Koran alternately or concurrently. The traditional system, still employed by NU, is for each individual to read one of the 30 Koran sections (not the chapters— swat—which are of uneven length; but the sections—djuz—which are of equal length, each %<sub>0</sub>th of the Koran) alternately and to be corrected by the others if he makes a mistake. There is no attempt to complete the entire Koran in one night; but, since each langgar tries to get through the whole Koran once or twice in the month, the chanting, in this system, often lasts until three or four in the morning. (Santris do a good deal of sleeping during the daytime in the Fast.)</p> <p>The other method is one in which the participants sit along a bench, each being given a section to read and then everyone chanting at once in a grand cacophony of mispronounced Arabic, thus completing the whole Koran in about an hour or so. (If there are less than 30 people, the man who finishes his section first runs down to the other end of the bench and starts in on one of the extra sections.)</p> <p>It is not strictly accurate to describe the differences between these two systems in modèren-kolot terms; it is more a rural-urban difference (except for the trawèh difference). In town, most santris are either traders or small craftsmen, notably tailors. Since the end-of-Fast holiday, Idul Fitri, stimulates a great buying splurge (especially in clothing because, as among us on Easter, everyone gets out and parades around in new clothes if he can) business for most of these people is heavier during the Fast month than at any time during the year. In general Muhammadijah people simply do not do the darus at all, considering it pretty much of a kolot pattern anyway, but the simultaneous system is embraced by NU urbanites and the more moderate modernists who simply cannot afford to sit up all night chanting the Koran but cannot bring themselves to discard the darus altogether.</p> <p>He (a PSH member and urban langgar head) said that he doesn’t like the new system but he is using it anyway in his own langgar. It makes it impossible to correct the reader, which is the whole point of the darus, and is in general more superficial. The main reason for its popularity is that in town people don’t have time to sit and read the Koran and are in a hurry to be off. I asked him why, if he didn’t like it, he used it. At first he said something about still being able to make the corrections even with all reading at once. (He said he lets only those people read together who he knows can do it. The ones who are not yet good readers he makes read a section by themselves.) Finally he admitted that those who frequent his langgar are mostly young men, and, like most young men, they want to get off in time for the second show at the movie.</p> <p>The praying in the Fast reaches its climax with the prayers on the morning of the end-of-Fast holiday, Idul Fitri. (Only santris refer to it by this name. Others call it Rijaja in Javanese and Hari Raja in Indonesian.) Muhammadijah holds its prayers in the public square; NU, orthodox to the end, holds its in the mosque. More people usually turn up at the mosque than at the public square, but the prayers in the public square are usually marked by the presence of a few high prijajis who never go into the mosque but who turn out for the Idul Fitri prayers, much the way some of us turn up at church on Easter and Christmas. (Outdoor prayers are held in the public square by Muhammadijah on Idul Adha, “Sacrifice Day,” as well as on Idul Fitri.) The chairman of Masjumi usually gives the sermon in the public square. (The NU mosque ceremony is about the same as any Friday prayer, only larger.) The times I heard him, he spoke on the equality of women in Islam, the need for Indonesians to study in the sciences, and the fact that all over the world members of the ummat were performing similar prayers.</p> <p>The very fixing of the day ending the Fast (as well as the one beginning it) is a source of conflict between the modem and conservative groups. Weeks before it is to happen, Muhammadijah people receive the word when the Fast is to begin and end from their central headquarters in Djokjakarta, where it is figured out by their leaders according to the system (called falalc) for computing the phases of the moon given in special Islamic treatises. NU, as well as the NU-dominated Ministry of Religion, since they distrust this system, are always forced to wait like so many anxious empiricists for the moon actually to appear. As the moon always appears when Muhammadijah predicts it will, this gives them something of an edge on NU in such things as gathering the zakat fitrah tax.</p> <p>The naib (and chairman of NU) said that the best way is to wait until the night when the Fast is supposed to end and see if there is a moon. He said that for him and NU, both being naturally cautious, it is like when one adds up a long string of figures to see how much money one has. When one finishes adding, one still counts his money itself to see if it checks with the figures; and if it doesn’t, one trusts the money rather than the figures. Muhammadijah, on the other hand, trusts the figures and so knows way ahead of time when the day will fall and doesn’t have to wait to see if there is a moon or not. He thought this rather lacking in caution, but admitted somewhat sadly that they do always seem to be right. In Sumbersari (a nearby village) the head of the Masjumi told me gleefully that Masjumi got a better return on its zakat-fitrafi efforts this year because he and the rest of the party felt assured that the moon would show when Muhammadijah had said it would and so had no problems and just went ahead and collected the zakat; but NU vacillated, not being sure what day it would be, with the result that they got a late start and didn’t do so well.</p> <p>As for the fasting itself, for the most part only santris keep it very well, although a few abangans and a number of prijajis also do because fasting is a Hindu-Buddhist custom as well as an Islamic one and deeply engrained in the culture generally. The great mass of non -santris make no attempt to keep the Fast; nor do they put up any pretense of doing so. They eat in the Fast along the street or in coffee-shops in full view of fasting santris, with little thought on either side that this is either unfeeling or impolite—although the santris naturally regard the non-fasters as rather inadequate Moslems. One pious hadji who fasted but ran a.coffee-shop for a living told me that he tried unsuccessfully to keep his coffee-shop open during the Fast—because, after all, every nickel helps. But, he said sadly, with his reputation as a firm santri, people were a little embarrassed to come into his shop in the Fast because they knew he would think ill of them even if he didn’t say anything and accepted their money with his usual eagerness, and so he was forced to close.</p> <p>Fasting all day every day for a month is for many people quite taxing. One old NU leader of 70 or so told me that he had fasted in each Fast all his life had never gotten used to it and each year seemed more hellish than the last. He said that with some people it was easy but with others, perhaps most, it was just a month of suffering. Each evening one sees fasting santris sitting around nervously waiting for the slit-gong to sound signifying that it is lawful to eat. There are various compromises with their stomachs that people make, such as fasting only on the first and last days of the Fast (which one kijaji at an NU meeting compared rather aptly to wearing a hat and shoes but nothing in between) or fasting only until noon (legitimate for younger children, but most santri children can fast the whole day by the time they are twelve), which are mostly employed by people who say they work too hard to keep the Fast. But most people either fast or do not; and most santris do.</p> <p>When one asks santris why one is supposed to keep the Fast, they almost invariably give three reasons: to show obedience to the commands of God, to experience what it is to go hungry so one can have greater understanding of what it is like to be poor and not have enough to eat, to steel oneself so that one will be able to take whatever suffering comes his way. It is exercising the soul the way sports exercise the body; and one young educated santri compared it to an examination in a school.</p> <p>He said that he always feels before the Fast as he does before an examination in school—anxious. Because it is like an exam, he is afraid he won’t pass. Last year he was ill and couldn’t fast, and he didn’t feel right because aU his friends were fasting. When the end of the Fast came he went along to the prayers as though he had been fasting, but he still didn’t feel right. During the Fast one is not supposed to do any wrong things, not supposed to gossip or swear or deceive people. Every day at the end of the day he takes account of himself.</p> <p>The Fast reverses the hours of eating and shifts the hours of sleeping for those who observe it. The Fast is broken at sunset with only a small bite of food, usually a date or a piece of fruit, this being called the buka or “opening.” After evening prayer a full meal is served, and the darns and trawèh follow this, often lasting until after midnight. At 2:00 a.m. the whole family, wakened by the beating of the mosque slit-gong, rises for saur, the main meal in the Fast, and more pious santris, particularly in the villages, often sit up reading the Koran until morning, sleeping much of the day. With Rijaja, this upside-down month ends in a great holiday somewhat like our Easter, when everyone buys new clothes, visits friends, and prepares feasts:</p> <p>He (a young modernist santri) said people tend to make Rijaja more important than fasting. They talk about it more—about saving money for it, about the things they are going to buy. They discuss it all through the Fast. When I asked if santris do this too, he said yes, except those who “know.”</p> <p>I asked for an example of someone who “knows,” and he mentioned Pak Ali (Chairman of Masjumi, Vice-Chairman of Muhammadijah), who always says one shouldn’t wear new clothes on Rijaja but should dress just in ordinary clothes that one likes to wear on every day, and who has never appeared on Rijaja in new clothes. Women are the worst. They always talk about clothes, money, getting ready all the special foods. ... He said that when he was small he always liked the month of the Fast because it meant the Rijaja was coming.</p> <p>But Rijaja is not merely a santri holiday. It is one in which every Javanese participates, regardless of his religious beliefs. As such, it will with greater appropriateness be treated in the Conclusion.</p> <p>Part Three</p> </body> </html>