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INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY M.A ENGLISH LITERATURE & LANGUISTICS 4th SEMESTER-SECTION A COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Subject: Among The Believers: Indonesia; Usurpations (Summary) SUBMITTED TO: MADAM RUBIA AKRAM SUBMITTED BY: HUMA ASLAM HUMA HAFEEZ SUMAIRA BIBI KINZA GHAFOOR Dated: 7 th May, 2013 INDONESIA: USURPATIONS Assaults:
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Among The Believers: Indonesia;

Oct 28, 2014

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Fatima Gul

 
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Page 1: Among The Believers: Indonesia;

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY

M.A ENGLISH LITERATURE & LANGUISTICS

4th SEMESTER-SECTION A

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Subject: Among The Believers: Indonesia; Usurpations (Summary)

SUBMITTED TO: MADAM RUBIA AKRAM

SUBMITTED BY:

HUMA ASLAM

HUMA HAFEEZ

SUMAIRA BIBI

KINZA GHAFOOR

Dated: 7th May, 2013

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INDONESIA: USURPATIONS

Assaults:

The person named Shafi telephoned Naipaul when he was about to leave Kaula Lampur, and gave him the names of people participating in the Muslim Movement in Indonesia. Shafi said that the army in Indonesia was hostile to the movement. He wanted to meet the Narrator to say good bye but when he came, Shafi was not in his office; instead he sent an old man who had just came back from Switzerland. The old man had gone to Switzerland for an Islamic business. The Europe was converting fast into Islam.

The old man told him about the seizing of an American embassy in Iran and that the Americans had hired some Iranians to attack another western embassy in order t damage the reputation of the revolutionaries but when they found out, they led them to the American embassy instead.

The Narrator went to Jakarta; he shows us the situation of Jakarta. There was red mud on the edges of road, iron fences, fruit vendors, buses and crowds, red tile roofs and many trees. The highways were filled with air pollution. Narrator feels the place very much like Asia. There were news-boys and beggar-boys and men carrying heavy loads.

Jakarta was also a city of statues and monuments which seemed unrelated to the life of city but still they showed a respectable celebration of pride and freedom.

Being in Jakarta enables one to think of its past colonial times and freedom struggle when Dutch had ruled there for more than hundred years and Jakarta was known as the city of Batavia. Instead of the use of Dutch language, Indonesia language did not lose its grip even in Roman letters. Some of Indonesian words had roots from Sanskrit name, meaning “the city of victory”.

Narrator stayed in a hotel named Borobudur Intercontinental. The ground design of the ninth-century Buddhist temple in central Java was the basis of the hotel logo. It was stamped on ash trays, woven into carpet, in the elevators, on the tiles of the floor of the pool.

The pre-Islamic past in Malaysia seemed to be only a matter of village customs, while in Indonesia and Java it reflected a great civilization. Islam is their formal faith which came in the fifteenth-century but Hindu-Buddhist past which lasted for fourteen hundred years before that, survived in many ways, this gives them a feeling of uniqueness.

Japanese occupied Indonesia in 1942 and abolished Dutch language and their rule. Dutch disappeared after three hundred years. The Japanese made the nationalist leaders their positions which were imprisoned and exiled by the Dutch and established Sukarno. They organized the Indonesian army. The army fought the Dutch for four years when they tried to reissue their rule and it also held the islands of archipelago and suppressed the Muslims and Christians movements in various places.

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It was not easy for Indonesia to get independence. The army power grew and it over threw the Sukarno in 1965 because it claimed that the communist were planning, with the help of Sukarno, to take over the country.

The archipelago felt a great terror due to the chaos and the frustration of independence. Thousands of people were arrested and Chinese were put to death. In the popular rebellions in archipelago millions of people which were suspected to be communists were killed. Indonesia are stilled shocked by these events.

The army of Indonesia has made itself into a political organization. During army rule Indonesia practiced fifteen years rest and it gained great progress. But the restless progressed in Indonesia, which is progressed by the new Islam that speaks of the injustices done to Allah’s creatures and satanic ways of worldly government.

A man named, Suryadi described himself as one of the ‘Statistical Muslims’ OF Indonesia. He had received no religious training. He was not sure about his belief hereafter; neither had he known that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.

Suryadi belonged to the nobility which means that he was not from peasantry. His grandfather was a bookkeeper in a bank during Dutch time which was a noble and modest job. Being noble it was easy for him to go to Dutch school where he had not to pay. The Excellency in English speaking was considered to be the quality of education.

Siryadi got certificate in exanimate marked with the help of Dutch taught in German.

In 1942 the Japanese occupied Java and news was that they would liberate Indonesia so Indonesians welcomed them as liberators. Suryadi was in university then. Teacher, professors and supervisors were replaced by the Indonesians. The Indonesians used to preach nationalism in classes. Suryadi was sure that the whole economy was subverted to assist the Japanese war effort.

The university authorities ordered to shave the heads; a Zen monastery which Suryadi felt like an assault on his personality. Another incident occurred which humiliated the Indonesians, was that a student was slapped by a Japanese officer. The protest demonstration made the Japanese secret police thirty teachers and students.

In jail they were treated as political prisoners and they continued to be disciplined in the way of Zen monastery. Suryadi and his friends were released but they were expelled from university. They were punished lightly in the jail because Indonesians nationalist leaders were still cooperating with Japanese. Sukarno never believed that Japanese were going to lose the war.

Suryadi had no ill feelings for either Dutch or Japanese. He did business with both; and respected both as people who honored a bargain.

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Army rule had appeared to revive the country but it seemed as if Japanese culture was being asserted but at the same time Suryadi felt that the Japanese culture was misused. It was not what Suryadi had wanted for his country.

Suryadi’s daughter had become a convert to the new Muslim course. She met a born-again Muslim and begins to change. She went out with her hair covered and wearing long gown and her mind begun correspondingly dull. Suryadi and his wife came to know that their daughter had signed a pledge to be ruled in everything by a particular Muslim teacher who was to be her guide to paradise.

Suryadi asked his daughter one day that what if she goes out camping and there would be no water for her ablutions before prayer. The daughter replied that she had checked in Quran that it is not necessary during travelling. Then Suryadi asked that does she have to consult the book every time before taking any step, doesn’t she have her own mind to think. She replied that “the Quran is the source of all wisdom and virtue in the world”.

The girl married to the born-again Muslim and remained subordinated to him. This was a sad situation for Suryadi. One day Suryadi got a chance to talk to his daughter. He asked her to reside at the house he has bought for her and that’s why her husband did not act on his own and live without his parents. The daughter replied “he’s got inferiority complex, father”. It was a moment o relief for him that her daughter still had a capability of judgment.

Before separating, Suryadi said to Naipaul that people here are turn mystical, logical and rational. They start burning incense or sitting in grave yards if they want to seek something.

Naipaul went to a market area in central Jakarta, the Pasar Baru where he came upon a book shop. There were books in English on technical subjects. There was also a large section in English books on mystical or occult subjects like Taoism/Cbing, Paul Bruton’s searches in secret India and secret Egypt. This was how the new civilization appeared: technical skill and magic, a civilization without its core.

Sitor: Reconstructing the Past

V.S Naipaul met a poet, named Sitor Morang, who had been connected with the later days of Sukarno. He had been imprisoned during the military takeover. He came from the North of the large island of Sumatra which was wilder than Java. Hindu-Buddhist influence was less than Muslims. There were Christian areas and animist tribes as well; Sitor was one of the tribes and that was the trouble with his autobiography which he wished to be overlooked.

Sitor has lost touch with his past and background and he thought that writing without knowing one’s past is just like recording a series of events that’s why sometime he would put aside his writings and concentrated on his tribal background. He went back to his village in Somalia with an anthropologist who helped him reconstruct his tribal past.

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Sitor invited Naipaul to his residence. His house was apparently made up of bamboo. It was a German house with kind of diplomatic status. It was temporarily without an occupant, had little furniture. But there was a piece of contemporary Indonesian sculpture and many Indonesian pictures.

Sitor was expecting a young man Adi at his place. Adi was Muslim, when he was asked ‘why’ he answered “my parents were Muslims’.

Sitor introduced Barbara by saying that “Barbara is Dutch”. She was young, in her late twenties, and good looking; she had certainty and style. When Naipaul asked about the sweets that were served that, “what are those things”. She told him that that they are made of beans and that Sitor liked these.

Barbara was married to Sitor despite of the age differences. He was fifty six and he was twenty four. She worked in a Dutch centre for Indonesian handicrafts.

Sitor and Naipaul had arranged to talk about Sitor’s autobiography that morning but he had a toothache which was not permitting him to talk much so he showed Naipaul some of the recent colored pictures of his tribes when he and Barbara visited the village together. Sitor came of a chieftain’s who showed that for Sitor there was a part of earth, that was absolutely and inalienably his.

Sitor’s ancestor’s had ruled over a small area in North Sumatra for eighteen generations. His father had fought the Dutch but had been defeated. After that he was appointed as an administrator of the area by Dutch. He remained a chief; things went on as much before.

The tribal area, the area ruled by Sitor’s father consisted of three valleys. The photographs showed pale paddy fields with bonds or walls of down in the valley. Sitor had spent his earliest years there. He had no memory of any conversation with his father or mother. He was six when sent to Dutch school.

They had extraordinary building skills. Big stone walls protected the village. The houses were built in a square. They had horn roofs; a design that protects the houses against the strong winds in the area. They had corrugated iron for the roof.

Sitor was in his last year at the secondary school in Jakarta when the Japanese came. One day Sitor came across a Japanese soldier who asked him for his bicycle, as soldier’s bicycle was hard to paddle. That was the limit of Sitor’s direct contact with the Japanese.

Japanese ordered that all non-Japanese students were to return to their own islands. Taking advantage he went back to Sumatra. He stayed in the village for three years. Though Sitor did not finish school, he had read widely by the end of the war.

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The army that had been created by the Japanese emerged as rulers. Sitor was arrested for his Sukarno connections and imprisoned for ten years. In prison, he got to know people he had not known; politically and socially learned a lot. When he came out of jail he had to be reinitiated to the tribe for which a ceremony was organized. Sitor had a black and white photograph of that time.

Sitor had a reputation of a poet. Once he was giving a poetry reading at the house of a Dutchman in Jakarta. There he met a tall and beautiful European girl; Barbara. She was a Dutch. Barbara went back to Holland and Sitor had been invited to Holland by a cultural organization. They met in Holland for several tomes. She made him aware of intellectual movement in the west.

They lived together when they came back to Indonesia. The tribe got to know, and the tribe insisted that they get married according to tribal rites. For this, it was necessary for Barbara to be initiated into a related but separate tribe.

Sitor had made two attempts in the last three years and had discarded hundreds of pages, because the material was too rich and extraordinary. To him the essence of his experience was something he had not been able to express. He had only been able to record events.

During lunch hour, Naipaul asked Barbara that if she wanted to go back to Europe but she replied as negative. Though, Sitor said that he would like to be invited for a long time. He said that there are too many things here that hurt him.

For Barbara the glamour of Indonesia and Sitor meant a lot and for Sitor it was the glamour and security of Barbara and Europe that meant a lot. For Sitor Indonesia was a land of hurt and failure where he could get no job now, and where he could be snuffed out, without anyone or anything to appeal to. Sitor had written his poems and became famous. He had later become a politician and a man of power.

Analysis (Assault & Sitor: Reconstructing the Past)

Naipaul uses descriptive passages as he describes the condition of Jakarta in a detailed paragraph. He mentions “roads were edged with red mud”, “corrugated-iron fences”, buses with smoking exhausts”, “a feeling of great choked city”, the highways marked with rising smog”. “News-boys and beggar-boys with deformities worked the road intersections”. This kind of sarcastic tone and imagery incorporation was the themes of futility and decay.

Throughout the chapters Naipaul has frequently talked about the historicity of Indonesia. He has mentioned the Hindu-Buddhist past of Indonesia which had lasted for fourteen hundred years. Other than that Naipaul presents different historical events such as the abolition of Dutch language by the Japanese when they occupied Indonesia in 1942. In this way he also fulfills the role of journalist reporting.

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There is a detailed characterization presented in his travelogue. A character named Suryadi is introduced. Naipaul describes his age, his physical features, complexion and about his residence as in the book he mentions “Suryadi was in his mid fifties, he was small, dark frown, frail looking. He was born in east Java…….”

There is another important character named Sitor Situmurang: a poet. Naipaul describes him as “a small man of fifty-six, with a small bony face, Chinese-Negvito, with bristling eye-brows, a canvas shoulder bag with books gave him an odd touch of contemporary undergraduate style”.

Naipaul frequently uses ethnographic details in his book as he mentions a ceremony of Sitor’s village, for being reinitiated into the tribe. For this ceremony the skull of his grandfather was taken out of the stone sarcophagus with the lizard of good luck carved on the lid. Sitor held a plate with this skull and a lemon, the lemon an agent of cleansing.

There is a use of dialogues which authenticate his writings. Here is a dialogue between Suryadi and his daughter, when he said, “But don’t you have a mind any longer? Do you have to go to that book every time? Can’t you think yourself now?” she said’ “The Quran is the source of all wisdom and virtue”.

Naipaul seems to be replicating the image of Muslim in Indonesia as being passive which he authenticates through the views of Suryadi being presented as an eye witness to his point of view. Suryadi says, “You know how people are like here, but perhaps you don’t, they turn mystical; logical, rational people. They start burning incense or sitting up at night in graveyards if they want to achieve something. If they feel they are frustrated, not advancing in their work or career.

Naipaul uses vivid and long descriptions as when he describes the basis of the hotel logo of Borobudur Intercontinental. The ground plan of the Buddhist temple in cultural Java was the basis of that logo; three concentric dotted circles within five rectangles, stepped at the corners with the rippling effect. It was stamped on ashtrays; it was woven into carpets; in the elevators; it was rendered in tiles on the floor of large pool where the ripple of blue water added to the ripple of pattern.

To conclude, Naipaul’s travel narratives are replete with these writing strategies, their main function being to enhance and convince the reader of the ‘idea’ or ‘mood’ which needs to be communicated, and at the same time, to be invoking some form of ‘narrative authority’, not to mention his intense exploration of ‘self’.

Deschooling:

the narrator met Adi Sasonoat Sitor's place, who suggest him to visit traditional Islamic village school known as Pesantren ; that will help him to understand Indonesian Muslims. Adi's business

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advised narrator to visit modern pesantren, there was a famous one near Yogyakrta, Borobudu and there was an old one near Surabaya.

the village school were different from the western style schools, set in Asian country side, because they preserved harmony Between community and school, village life and education. Adi's friend told narrator that Ivan Illich, who had given the theory of deschooling, also visited Indonesia to look at pesantrens. the narrator was accompanied by a nineteen year old boy Prasojo; who had been to Arizona, on scholarship by American Field Service. he was fluent in English. he enjoyed in Arizona and was grateful to American Field Service. Prasojo was wearing jeans with the AFS lebel stitched at the hip pocket. he had Chinese appearance, and was of medium height, but his father was a bulky man of Indonesian appearance.

narrator and Parsojo went to Surabaya through Garuda airline. the narrator draws the imagery of land as overpopulated and the rivers were muddy and there were rice fields around Surabaya. The houses were narrow, they were at a little distance from the road and the yards were clean but shady. there were banana trees, coconut, mango and sugar cane cultivated at the land of Surabaya. The rice fields began right at the back of houses. narrator feels it hard to associate Java with old kingdoms and empires and was over crowded by the people. The population was four million at the beginning of the last century and now it has reached to eight millions.

Prasojo told him the word wong cbilik, which was considered as insulting and old fashioned; but was used the word for the people of Java. Some people called themselves noble, raden and used the letter R. They built their houses with a distinct style and these houses had a hat shaped roof. The houses containing red tiles roofs and walls of woven bamboo were of poor and concrete houses were for not so poor. In traditional Javanese house ventilation was permitted by the walls of woven bamboo and the light came through gaps in the roof and those houses didn't require a window but concrete walls require window for ventilation. There were no gates but gateposts of various designs i.e. of pyramids or diamond at the top. These posts at first suggested the single ownership of the land and people were the remnant of the architectural style of the last Hindu Kingdom of Java, the kingdom of Majapahit that disintegrated at the end of 15th century.

Indra's city was painted on the bus which was taken as a figure from the Javanese puppet drama; and was no longer the Aryan god of the Hindu pantheon. Prasojo told the story o the local Muslim legend of the five pandava brothers who represented the five disciplines of Islam and narrator believed that Prasojo didn't have any idea of the legend and the story came from the ancient Hindu epic of the Mahabharta which had taken Javanese roots and had been adapted to Islam.

In the afternoon they reached the town of Jombang; and there was the old pesantren. Jombang was full of schools and the little school girls were chattering, with cover heads, blouses and sarongs. Then they entered the muddy rural streets and the pesantren was so ordinary looking. There was the fence and behind the fence there was double story concrete building with few trees

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and in the centre of the yard there was a mosque. Boys in shirts and sarong were sitting at the floor, reciting an arabic text.

They passed by a newspaper board, to the office at the side of the mosque. The boys were moving along the veranda. They stared at both of them and soon they encircled them. They became a crowd as they move along the dirt lanes and muddy gutters. There was mud and rubbish outside the rough kitchen. Then a man of four feet ten wearing a black cap took them to a building near mosque. Prasojo and narrator sat down and the man told them that they are creating the disturbance, and after sometime it was revealed that the man in the black car had no authority. The narrator hand over a letter and asked him to take it to his leader. But a pesantren being a traditional and unstructured didn't have a principal but a kiyaki or leader.

The narrator asked Prasojo to talk to leader but he didn't want to interrupt the teacher while teaching and both of them decided to wait, meanwhile man with the black cap entered with the letter in his hand. He hadn't found the leader. Prasojo took narrator back to the room and went for finding someone. After sometime Prasojo came back with two men. One was the student and the other was English teacher and after some conversation in Indonesian with the teacher, Prasojo told Naipaul that teacher would take them to another pesantren.

The pesantren they reached now was newer and well-constructed. There they met Mr. Wahid, who knew about pesantren. In Hindu Buddhist days in Java, a pesantren was a monastery which was supported by the community in return for the spiritual guidance and it was easy for Sufi Muslims to take over such places and continue as a counselling centre for people when the old civilization cracked. A man can visit the leader any time for guidance and there was no formal course for the help, in this way pesantren could be said to be unstructured.

In the end of the 19th century, in the Dutch time, villagers began to change the Pesantren into the schools for children. Islam was changing in Java and the Sufiside was becoming less important.

The Jombang pesantren had been established in 1896, but that remained the religious place where pesantren could go for advice. Leaders of pesantren met after every thirty five days to discuss whatever issues had been arisen and narrator had said that it was a relic of the Hindu Buddhist time that the leader of the monasteries met after every seven weeks. The Jombang pesantren looked different and the main gate was closed and the lights were dim, and the boys were pretending to study because light was so dim.

They spent their night in Surabaya. British had fought the Indonesians in Surabaya in 1945 and after that they left for Yogyakrta, through the Jombang road and the stabbed gateposts that spoke of the Hindu Empire of Majapahit. They stopped at Majapahit museum. There was a temple oppositeto the village lane. It was a green lane full of shade. Prasojo didn't know the significance of the temple except that it had been built without machines.

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Prasojo told Naipaul at the Jakarta airport where there were photographs of antiquities of Indonesia, that Japanese with their swords cut off the heads of the buddhas but narrator said that Muslims were the greatest cutters of the noses of the statues; Prasojo didn't accept that at first but after that he remarked that it was done to prevent the people praying to them. They continued their journey again Prasojo fell asleep from time to time and narrator was gazing at the fields.

In the afternoon Prasojo woke up and he was alert again. He spoke about the beauty of the country. He told about the dating habits of the afternoon and the time was between 4 to 6. Prasojo told him that it wasn't easy for them to be abroad because they got homesick for everything they had experienced all the day. An Indonesian is well aware of his country and nothing went unconsidered. Then Prasojo talked about some of the oddities of his time spent in Arizona. Once he met one of his neighbour and as a matter of courtesy asked him where he was going, and the boy said 'that's my business', which was considered rude in Indonesia. Indonesians were more courteous then the people of Arizona.

Prasojo wished to become a writer and wrote a hundred page autobiographical essay, Meder Buhan Casa Grande "Merden is not Casa Grande", Casa Grande was the place where Prasojo stayed in Arizona, and Merden was the name of his village in Java. At sunset they came to the temple of Prambanan and the onle thing that amazed Prasojo was that, temle wasn't made of machines.

A group of local girls went giggling along the balustraded terrace, the balustraded was carved with the scenes of Ramayana, the Hindu epic, that they had made their own. Prasojo knew the epic with the reference of puppet theatre. They moved further to Pabelan, and that was the pesantren showpiece and Prasojo had high hopes of that. It was the traditional Islamic teaching institution and it gave no diploma, "unstructured" a cooperative self-supporting institution. Teacher and student working together, that was a self-help organization, something in harmony with the village life.

There they met Taufiq and he said that there was not permanent office staff, people of pesantren took it in turn to be in the office and that morning Taufiq was in the office because that was his turn. Taufiq introduced another man who spoke English well. They talked about environment. Ecological concern sounded modern and it had also been deemed Koranic and that was the reason it was incorporated in the new Islam. Then narrator and the young boy who was fluent in English started conversation and during that he said to the narrator that he looked like Prophet. Prasojo outraged on that and said ' Nobody knows what the prophet looked like". Taufiq stopped them and asked them to go outside and left the young boy in the office. in the sandy yard they saw an old man with black cap making bed. Narrator asked Taufiq that who taught them and Taufiq said that they taught one another themselve.

Girls were picking the coconut roots and were admired by Prasojo. Taufiq said that they were gathering fuel; on Friday they don't have classes. Prasojo then offered him to have a look at girl's

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dormitory, but narrator refused to do so. they moved to look at a group that was cleaning the pool and a middle aged man was supervising them. Taufiq told them that man founded the pesantren in 1962.

On a board there were photocopies of articles in Indonesians and the English about the pesantren. Three of them were in English and they talked about the interaction between community and school and in one article Ivan Illich was mentioned and that Pabelan was a perfect example of deschooling.

They walked back to the office. Narrator was puzzled by Taufiq's description of the pesantren and he said to Prasojo “I think it's a bad school; and Prasojo replied to him that he couldn't say that, because it is unfair to spend fifteen minutes at a place and made assumptions about that. Then Narrator referred the novel Nicholas Nikel by Charles Dickens in which he described a school like that." Nicholas Nikleby. I would hate to be forced to stay in a place like that" and Prasojo said that it would be criminal if the narrator made the same remarks.

Prasojo was annoyed by that, because he believed in the pesantren system and he hadn't been to Pabelan before but he respected the pesantren system. Prasojo was hurt by narrator's words and when they came back and car stopped he said that he didn't want to be a guide any more. But Narrator apologized him. In the evening they went to a gathering at the house of Umer Kayam anda little of the mystery about pabelan pesantren was resolved there. Umar was a big, attractive of late forties and a teacher at the university in Yogyakrta anda writer as well. They said to the narrator that he misunderstood the Pabelan.

They said to him that he was misled by the language and that he had gone on Sabbath when there were no classes. When Taufiq said that there were no teachers, he meant that there were no proper teachers. Pabelan was mainly religious and Islamic but it taught other subjects as well, and it had a laboratory and a library as well.

Both of them went back to Pabelan to see what had been missed. There was a man sitting at the office as a spokesperson and narrator asked him about Taufiq. He replied that he was washing clothes. They went to see Taufiq washing clothes. Then they went back to the building where young girls with tight headcovers were chanting Arabic. The narrator asked that Taufiq had told him that there were no teachers but the secretary replied that by this he meant that Taufiq himself was a teacher and was learning by different people, so he was a student as well. The narrator had misinterpreted Taufiq.

Analysis (Deschooling)

Naipaul, has always sought to position himself as a lone, stateless observer, devoid of ideology or affiliation, peers or rivals - a truth-teller without illusion. Naipaul’s limitation of vision dominates his writing because he cannot transcend his apparent “nativist” bias and exclusive focus on the local as opposed to the regional or the global. Taking interviews of some persons

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randomly, he makes totalizing assumptions in a very subtle and twisted way about a rich, diversified and complex religion, culture and civilization like Islam. As it can be mentioned through the text that Naipaul said that Muslims were the greatest cutters of the noses throughout history. At another place he made an assumption about the Pabelan Pesantren, "I think it's a bad school" and that "if I was a boy and my parents sent me to a place like that, I would hate it."

Naipaul’s works take the reader on a journey of experiences from the local to the global and from a narrow perspective to a broader and more encompassing vision. Naipaul's works are set in many places and explore many themes of dissatisfaction, decay and he focuses on the ugly and darker aspects of Islamic states.

"we walked about the narrow dirt lanes and muddy gutters between the houses at the back of the compound...there was mud and rubbish outside the rough kitchen shed"

Naipaul has done characterization in a detailed manner. Naipaul has told his age, physical outlook, and dressing,"Prasojo, a nineteen year old college student...Prasojo had been to Arizona for a year on a scholarship given by the American Field Service. He spoke English well, with an American accent...he was just above the medium height and of Chinese appearance."

Naipaul has used dialogues to provide authenticity to his text, and the use of dialogues provides his travel writing gives a glimpse of fictional elements. Here is a dialogue between the narrator and Prasojo: “you can’t say that. You can’t spend fifteen minutes in a place and make up your mind about it.” And narrator replied that “we didn’t spend fifteen minute.”

V.S Naipaul has mentioned the historicity of traditional Islamic village schools known as Pesantrens, he said that in Hindu—Buddhist days in Java, a Pesantren was a monastery which was supported by the community in return for spiritual guidance.

Naipaul has drawn condensed, stinky, ugly and dark images while presenting Indonesia. He was more prone toward highlighting the sinister, gloomy, dark or bleak aspect of nature. As he said that the land was overpopulated and the rivers were muddy and there were rice fields around Surabaya. The houses were narrow, they were at a little distance from the road and the yards were clean but shady. There were banana trees, coconut, mango and sugar cane cultivated at the land of Surabaya. The rice fields began right at the back of houses. Narrator feels it hard to associate Java with old kingdoms and empires and was over crowded by the people. The population was four million at the beginning of the last century and now it has reached to eight millions. Description of the people of Java and the structure of their houses. They built their houses with distinct style and these houses has hat shaped roof. The houses containing red tile roofs and walls of woven were of poor and concrete were for not so poor. In traditional house ventilation was permitted by walls of woven bamboo and light came through gaps is the roof and they didn’t require a window.

The Rice Goddess

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Umar kayam and V.S Naipaul left for one of the villages below the volcano of Mount Merapi . It was one of the most beautiful village that had been evolved over the ages and reached a kind of perfection. Rice fields were on more than half of acre. Many kinds of bamboos were creatively had been used in furniture and household products. Construction of houses were very traditional, in every house there was a small room at the back of the pillared main room. Considered as shrine-room of the Rice Goddess named as ‘Devi Sri’.

Along with Umar we went to Linus’s village. Linus was poet and catholic, his belonging was from farming family. Linus father converted as catholic to marry Linus’s mother. Linus father was headman and he had to see different projects of government that were carried out for farmers.

Umar was well aware of this area. During the revolution the Dutch had invaded Yogyakarta; he was in the students ‘army and shared his experiences. Linus house was of the Javanese pattern and there was a catholic symbol above the inner door. In bookshelf there were books and the collected poems of T.S Eliot that was given by BBC on winning 2nd prize in poetry competition organized by them.

Hospitality at Linus’s home was fabulous. One dish was brought by Linus’s younger sister and then another girl entered the room who was elder sister of him. Once his elder sister was ill and doctor injected a wrong injection that damaged her nervous system. So, poet’s house has a tragedy story too. His mother entered the room; she was beautiful lady, well dressed but small in height. She came to see us and without discomfiture always seemed to be about to turn into laughter. She with Umar had conversation that was in Javanese language that was different from everyday language. Umar told me later that the conversation was about rituals of welcome. She alleged that she had to go for getting one of his child report from school, that is why she couldn’t receive them on time and she apologized for it.

When we left the Linus’s house he shared with us that his mother was worried about his job. According to V.S Naipaul Linus’s mother must be proud that Linus was poet. But Linus clarified this notion and said she had no sense of poetry. In fact, according to her poetry was something that had been written already in old traditions. However, Linus’s was asked to write column in cultural paper for twenty five dollar a month.

Islam in Indonesia didn’t came as civilization rather as a faith. Muslims used places for religious activities were there already but used for some other purpose previously. So, there was nothing special in construction of mosques. Near mosque there was a catholic church as well with similar shed that mosque had, church was as bare as mosque. Christianity was faith of colonizers and like Islam it came in these villages as a complement to old faiths. Islam was religion of the people that had served Indonesian pride during the Dutch line.

We walked through the village to the house of the Muslim Koum . Umar translated ‘Koum’ as ‘elder’ of Muslims, called in by families on important occasions like funeral, birth, and

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anniversary or on religious ceremonies to perform Salamatan ritual. This ritual had to do with the consecration of food and its distribution. His house was next to rice fields and whitewash turning to black. He didn’t invited us inside and came out instead stood with us in shed of tree. He looked more like a farmer than a priest. It was strange to know that duties of ‘koum’ included washing dead bodies of Muslims and shrouded them for burial. He had inherited position of koum from his father. He saw himself as successful man who had lived a good life. He seemed to be satisfied with present condition of his village. The only regret of past he had was when Japanese occupied Java. On asking a question about it, he said that time was awful and filled with chaos. There was shortage of food, cloth and almost of every basic need one has. He had to run away often as that village was searched when Dutch had invaded Yogyakarta.

On question about Sukarno who was leader against Dutch he replied he was a great and handsome man. Beauty has great importance in Indonesia said by kayam. As Umar asked the question from him he replied that he had heard about Sukarno in 1945. Whereas, Umar and Naipaul was expecting to hear about Sukarno in 1930 or at time when Japanese brought Sukarno from exile.

So, the old man had heard of Sukarno only after independence in August 1945. All of a sudden Sukarno appeared as leader with an army and also a man followed because he spoke well and had nice looks. Koum used to live in a hut, Umar put a question to old man and the old man said, ‘it’s the way of Islam’. A way that was not followed anymore, only few Muslims lived like Muslims. But situation got better by steps took by government of making religious subject compulsory that helped young generation to improve their knowledge about religion.

Then, Umar showed traditional Javanese house, we went there on his scooter. It was few minutes away; environment was very traditional, every girl had a doll, but it was living dolls: a little brother or sister held on the hip.

Islam, like Christianity, complemented the older religions. People could not say precisely from which religion they belong. People said ‘I am a Muslim, but’ ‘I am a Christian, but’.

Umar told a story about Prambanam villagers. Prambanam were in conflict about their religion. In one way they appeared to be Muslims and believed on Prophet and Paradise. On other side they liked Hindus epics and puppet shows based on Mahabharata and Ramayana. So, Prambanam people decided to declare themselves Hindus. But now the issue was that they didn’t know what they should do as Hindus. They had no priests and no idea of rituals they should perform.so, finally they decided to returned to being what they had been in past, people of composite religion.

Umar Kayam lived opposite to Chinese burial ground. He told them that people of china were industrious, successful and Chinese graveyard spirits were likely to be good spirits. But some people didn’t want to hear about this. People who lived close to the spirits of the dead also overcome living epics that have become moral stories like Ramayana and Mahabharata.

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These stories were more than just a story. They were of legends and battles they had. Whatsoever Puppet masters interpreted politically, socially or culturally mystically leaves the issue open. Puppet plays bear any number of repetitions, because more the audience knows the more it understands and interpretations constantly changes.

As Islam was part of composite religion and there were many questions raised about Islam so the ideology was studied in more detail to answer those questions. In Indonesia population was too high and Government family planning system, was threatening as it gives less protection then required. Especially in case of food that was more needed.

At Pabelan Naipaul had been given a copy of an article from an unnamed magazine, it was an interview of Christian by Muslims Kiyai In which all the facts about today’s Islam was given.

The Koum of Linus’s village said that young people were learning more about Islam at schools and for this reason they are more interested in faith. But knowledge that Koum had was of old Islam and Islam they understood afterword was not Koum’s Islam. The Islam that was now introduced to people, borrowed new ideas about evilness of machine and misapplication of foreign –aid. Islam had given idea of late twentieth century raised issues of politics. This political Islam was Rage, chaos.

One day in Yogyakarta tourists visited from Japan, Germany and Australia. One of them were preparing a scholarly paper on the charcoal-burners of Java. Naipaul got to know about this sad idiosyncrasy from a sociologist that Australian apparently discovered about people who were selling tomatoes or repairing shoes or pushing food carts are Charcoal-burners. Australian prepared that paper in period of two months that was again disappointing because it might make job easy but would cause severities in future .Naipaul received a call and had to left Yogya but he was sad as he had missed visiting palace of Yogyakarta and many historical places . He went back to Jakarta to Borobudur intercontinental.

The Loss of Personality

The Borobudur Intercontinental situation changed at Christmas. Most of the people from there went back to their homes to hills or to villages. Now Borobudur offered cut-rate holiday for local people and now local people came with their families.it was recognized way to spend holidays.

Children ran up here and there in corridors, nannies holding kids.one, Chinese family doing right things but unfortunately not enjoying. People enjoying in pools and from fifteenth floor I could see them relaxing chilling in pools. The feeling of wrongness was there. All that had been done during the fifteen years of peace could be ignored.th richer the country became, the better it was made to run, the easier it was for its creative side to be taken for granted.in the town, as in the villages, every improvement made matters worse.

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‘The loss of personality’ this was theme of Darma-sastro. He was high civil servant and concerned with department of technology and we met in his office. He wasn’t handsome but had authority and presence. He had good connections with high nobility and that was something that favored him in his life.

Darma-sastro shared that ‘Among us there are now people who have lost their identities and personalities. He said that people who migrated from villages to town had left their associations with villages as they thought that going back to their villages would be degenerations. On the same time they were not considered to be western individuals .Darma-sastro shared that some of them have been abroad but their minds have stayed in the country. They live there but never ate western food. Because these were the people who went abroad for some purpose and would get back to Indonesia. In their own country they were not considered to be from noble class so they went abroad so that they can come back with new dignity and get wealth and respect in society. It’s really saddened that before them duty of noble people were to guide the society about right and wrong. Whereas, now they even didn’t know difference between right and wrong.in society of Indonesia there were number of individuals who were morally good but they don’t have authority to implant that goodness in society.

From top view of Jakarta was beautiful, area was spread by trees, red tiled roofs and only few roads visible that was followed by traffic. Jakarta included urban areas as well as villages.no street maps could record these twist and turns of lanes. Few villages had houses made of concrete but few covered with fruit trees and gardens. these were the villages were leaders are appointed and situation are far better than rest of the areas of Jakarta, but only few right guidelines were required to them for development in their villages.

Rag-pickers in their finely made bamboo stick baskets carried all the garbage and filtered material that could be sold out. At every open space like gardens there were children as numerous as chickens. One morning Naipaul and Prasojo walked through a place where an old man and his son were using bamboo tree to pick the red fruit. They saw us and with great gestures offered us fruit. Fruit to them was like a money they pick it to sold.in this village people still followed old traditions and behavior of old civilizations. Prasojo said there were people that had lost their dignity and became rag-pickers. They were the people who were squeezed out by the fertility of Java from civilization of Java, people at the very bottom who had lost their personalities as much as Darma-sastro’s people at the top.

This country needed wealth and skills but there was rage about the loss of old order and the old knowledge of good and bad .Finally holidays ended all the multinationals and economists returned.There was peace in the corridors everything came back to its order.

Analysis (The Rice Goddess &Loss of Personality)

Dissyanake and Wickramagamage gave three types of travel writing; experiential information-oriented and intellectual- Analytic. Whereas, V.S Naipaul travelogue exists in third category i.e

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intellectual-Analytic.in this voice of author emerges. Further it can be said that its ‘observation and depth of analysis’. During the course of travelogue ‘Among the Believers’ Naipaul’s personal point of views on observations and his analysis about different instances is prevalent. He has given every single detail staring from setting of locations to characterization, dialogues, imagery, and history, social and political aspects of Indonesia in detail depending on his own observations.

Therefore Dissyanake and Wickramagamage has also given three formal aspects of Naipaul’s travel writings .They argued that Naipaul’s assumptions, actual travel and note taking , return to center and re-organization of events could not be said as actual travel writings. Because it is more influenced by author’s personal interpretations and views based on notes that he took during his travel experiences.

Throughout in his travelogue to Indonesia he has described historicity. As in chapter of ‘The rice goddess’ he mentioned about heroic figure Sukarno and asked questions about him to know details of history from other characters.as Umar asked Koum ‘when he first heard of Sukarno…he says in 1945…I was expecting to hear about Sukarno in 1930’s when Sukarno was exiled’.

Naipaul has given the explicit ethnographic details describing welcome rituals of Indonesian’s as ‘It was the Indonesian ritual of welcome,…no one wished to be first to eat or drink; and it often happened that the tea, say was drunk right at the end, when it was cold’. Naipaul’s way of giving description about ethnography is indeed creative. He tries to give every minor detail to give reader a whole picture.

When it comes to characterization Naipaul gave head to toe detail of characters. While descripting about mother of Linus he said ‘she was small and slight Indonesian way, and she might have passed unnoticed in the streets. But now …her beauty shone; and it was possible to see the care with which she had dressed.’

His travel strategies and techniques, along with his fictional elements are fully intertwined at this point. His interviews are transformed into fictional dialogues. As its prevalent throughout this travelogue that Naipaul has asked question from different characters and interweaved his expectation .While questing ‘koum’ about rituals of Indonesians he shared his view as ‘ from my Hindu childhood I recognized the ritual as Hindu survival, and I thought of the Muslim ‘Koum’ as a kind of successor to the Hindu priests .

V.S Naipaul by journalizing justified his travelogue ‘Among the Believers’ through referring to articles, newspapers and documentaries. As at Pabelan he has been given by an article from an unnamed magazine. It was interview by a ‘Christian lay person’ with a Muslim Kiyai or Koum’. By this he described details about Muslims specifically leaders living in Villages.

Similarly, imagery he represented in The Borobudur International seems to be very savage imagery about natives of Indonesians. As he described it as ‘children ran up and down in

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corridors and plays with elevator…one Chinese family, doing the right thing for the holidays but not enjoying’. ‘The head of the family, an old man with a ravaged face, wore a singlet without a shirt.’ So, throughout imagery that Naipaul has presented is not a pleasant imagery of Indonesian rather it seems that he only focused on darker side of Indonesians. Naipaul has drawn condensed, stinky, ugly and dark images while presenting Indonesia. He was more prone toward highlighting the sinister, gloomy, dark or bleak aspect of nature.

As his fictional and non-fictional works reveal, V.S. Naipaul has an expressed loathing for the cultures and political aspirations of many third-world societies. His book, Among the Believers (1981) testify to that. They deal with his visits to four non-Arab, Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Based on brief visits to these four countries, he makes categorical presumptions about a rich, diversified, and complex culture like Islam's. He extrapolates whatever contradictions he gleefully spots in the Muslim individuals he interviews in these countries toward totalizing assumptions about the whole societies to which those individuals belong.

Mental training in Bandung:

It was the rainy season. Even on bright days, southern Jakarta was hidden by cloud, skyscrapers and greenery and red roofs fading away. The land seemed flat, but there were hills to the south, and they showed when the cloud lifted. Up in those hills were the holiday bungalows of people who wanted to get away from the heat and humidity of Jakarta.

A freeway, cutting through agricultural land—the cause of student protest at one time, but now the freeway took much traffic—led part of the way to the hills. When the freeway ended it was crowded Java again, with a narrow road winding up through unending village (occasionally densing up to little towns), past vegetable and fruit stalls, to tea plantations, over which raincloud and mist drifted, mixed with the black exhaust of buses and trucks and scooters. Here and there the sodden earth at one side of the mountain road had slipped, and the roots of a tea bush, surprisingly thick and long, hung loose above the road.

Bandung of the famous postcolonial conference of 1955, with President Sukarno and Mr. Nehru; Bandung of the cool climate, one of the many Parises of Asia that people spoke about in colonial times; Bandung also of the famous Institute of Technology, founded by the Dutch, and inevitably the forcing ground of revolution. Sukarno went to Bandung; his title of “Doctor Engineer” came from this institute.

And Bandung still had a radical reputation. It was one of the centres of the Islamic revival in Indonesia. Many of Prasojo’s Jakarta friends had gone there for the holiday weekend, to attend a three-day Islamic “mental-training” course at the mosque of the Institute of Technology.

The course was being given by a man famous among Indonesian Muslims, Mr. Imaduddin, an electrical engineer and an instructor at the institute. Some people in Jakarta thought Imaduddin

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brave; others thought him dangerous. He had been released from jail five months before, after a year inside. His name, Imaduddin, Arabic rather than Indonesian, hinted at the kind of Muslim he was.

The outskirts of Bandung were more Javanese than Parisian in the dusk, with the dirt sidewalks and the makeshift roadside stalls. The colour of the langsat fruit was considered the perfect colour for an Indonesian woman. The fruit was pale-ochre, a pale adobe colour; and the girl on the scooter had a clear, southern-Chinese complexion.

It was in the older, colonial part of the town: impressions, in the darkness and lamplight, of wide, silent streets, houses set back, and of a big administrative building in whose carved roof Java had become only an architectural motif, a piece of Dutch colonial exoticism.

The cylindrical tower of the mosque was “modern.” It was past seven, and in the open paved spaces between the mosque and its ancillary buildings, groups from the mentaltraining class, boys and girls, was waiting for the evening session to begin. Soft girls’ voices called from the shadows, “Prasojo! Prasojo!

Imaduddin was telephoned, and someone led us to his house. Before we could get out of the car, Imaduddin himself came out of his house to greet us, a man of medium height, broad-shouldered, wide-faced, smiling, and open; and he swept us inside.

Imaduddin read the letter of introduction Prasojo had brought. His face lit up as he read; he said he was honoured. He looked less than his forty-eight years. His skin was smooth, his dark eyes bright, and he had a wide, humorous mouth. He was attractive, full of welcome. But how, he asked, had I got to hear of him? I mentioned the name of a Jakarta journalist, and Imaduddin said, with a laugh, “But tell him I am still fighting for my freedom! After five months. The institute has not given me any duties this year.”

Aurthor asked about his name. He said, “It’s Ima-dud-din. It means the pillar of the faith.” The interrogations had been tough in jail. The first had lasted twenty hours, but Imaduddin had no stories of maltreatment. Among his fellow prisoners there were some famous men. Imaduddin had met and talked with Dr. Subandrio, who had been foreign minister at the time of the army take-over in 1965. Dr. Subandrio had been accused by the army of plotting a communist coup with others, and he had been sentenced to death. Three days before the execution Queen Elizabeth of England had made an appeal for his life and he had been reprieved.

After being setting free from prison, but he had not been given any duties at the Institute of Technology after his release. All he was doing now was his Islamic missionary work among the young. His mental-training courses were well known. He had started them seven years before and had even done a few for Muslim student groups in England. Then Imaduddin went for his mental training.

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The mental training had been going for an hour when I got back. The class was in the shed like clinic building attached to the mosque. The floor was tiled; the green blackboard was written on already; the lights were fluorescent. The trainees sat on folding metal chairs with broad shiny backs. There were more girls than boys, and the girls sat on the right, the boys on the left. The girls wore head scarves or head-covers in pretty colours—yellow and green and lilac and pink and purple and white. Every trainee carried his name on a green card. The instructor was a small, moustached young man in a flowered shirt. Imaduddin was sitting at the back of the room. He told me when I went and sat beside him that we were witnessing an exercise in “communication.”

Four or five trainees were sent outside, and the instructor, a tape recorder in his hand, read out a story—an account of a motor accident—to a young man. One of the students outside, a girl, was then called in. The young man began to tell her the story. She asked questions; he became confused; the class laughed. The trainees were used to the puppet shows; they had the instincts of actors. The mental-training class became more and more like a puppet show; and the hilarity increased as the story was passed on, more and more distorted, from one trainee to the next.

Imaduddin said, “All this is being recorded. At the end it will be played back, so that they can see how much the original story has changed. It is to help them when they go out into the world to start preaching Islam.” Then it was time for the serious part. They had learnt important things: the value of inquiry, rational analysis.

It seemed to me that the deductions might work against them, because the message they were going to take to the world was extraordinary: a divinely inspired Prophet, arbitrary rules, a pilgrimage to a certain stone, a month of fasting. But we were well within Islam now, and its articles were beyond question. Inquiry and analysis were for internal matters: the hadiths, the traditions and reports about the Prophet. Some hadiths were more reliable than others; people who went by unreliable hadiths could easily find themselves committed to un-Islamic ways. And the trainees had gone straight to the point: the game they had played had led their thoughts directly to the hadiths and even to certain passages in the Koran. These passages were read out. And the langsat girl on the back of the scooter seemed far away, part of another, frivolous world.

One boy, I was happy to see, did a swift cheat, taking a piece from a neighbour and adding it to another’s pattern. There was a shout and clapping from a group of girls: they had completed. It was like bingo.

They had learnt five things—five was a sound Islamic number, there being five Islamic principles. “Cooperation is indispensable for the common goal. Those who give up easily cannot achieve. You have to give others without asking. Knowing each other is also indispensable. Perseverance”.

All that had come to them from the game. Even with the little cheating that had taken place they had gone straight to the Islamic idea of unity or union: men abased together before the creator,

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and bound by rigid rules. There was an unspoken corollary: everything outside that community was shut out, everything outside was impious, impure, infidel. They were the righteous and the secure; they were happy in their reinforced faith. And again pertinent verses from the Koran occurred to some trainees. Again there was that display of scholarship and inquiry as the pages of the book were turned, and trainees and instructor read various verses.

Imaduddin said, “The instructor is calling upon me to read a poem. It is by Iqbal. This is the last session of the mental-training course, and I always end it by reading that poem by Iqbal. I choose it because it is very emotional.

He was so varied. He used tape recorders and Western psychological games for his Islamic mental training. He had a mullah’s passion; but he also jogged. He had lived through a tremendous period of Indonesian history; he had been acquainted with great Indonesians. Imaduddin was born a Muslim in Sumatra.

Everything was contained in that beginning: to that beginning there had only been added events, tools, and age. Imaduddin told him about his father; “My father was a religious teacher, attached to a religious school run by the sultanate in the Dutch time. It was a famous school, and my father was the principal. During the revolution, the war against the Dutch, I was involved in the Muslim army, Hizbullah. I was trained for two weeks in 1946 as a guerrilla fighter, and they gave me a star and a stripe as a first sergeant. At the age of fifteen! Hizbullah actually means the soldiers of God.”

Then there was a long conversation between author and Imaduddin about his religion, passion and devotion. At one instance Imaduddin began to cry; “I cried in Mecca. The first time I entered the mosque there, the place with the black stone, I cried. And I also cried when I was about to leave.”

After that time abroad his Muslim interests became more international. At Cornell he had met a man from Malaysia. In 1971, through this man, he went to Malaysia to help with the conversion of a polytechnic into a university. Imaduddin stayed for two years in Malaysia, until 1973; he became involved with the Muslim youth movement there and still looked upon the people of that movement as his “brothers.”

Imaduddin further told that he travelled, to Libya, to England, rising higher in international Muslim students organizations, more and more in demand for his mental-training courses, which gave a now necessary modernity to old-fashioned mullah’s teachings.

His imprisonment had not arrested his rise. His card, white, black, and green (the Islamic colour), said: Muhammad Imaduddin Abdul Rahim—Secretary General—International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations. He had no Indonesian name. Author said, “But all your names are Arab.” “They are not Arab names. They are Muslim names.”

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The midday call to prayer came from the mosque tower—the mosque that had not been there when Imaduddin first came to the Bandung institute to study electrical engineering.

He said he would be back in fifteen minutes, and he left me to the books in the bookcase. Some, in English, were the bread-and-butter books of Islamic missionary work: The Myth of the Cross, Jesus Prophet of Islam. Others were Indonesian translations published by the movement, paperbacks. One book was by Qutub, an Egyptian. I did not know about Qutub; Imaduddin said he had been killed by Nasser. Another book was by Maulana Maudoodi. He was the Indo-Pakistani fundamentalist so extreme that he had opposed the idea of Pakistan, because Indian Muslims were not pure enough for a Muslim state.

For Imaduddin, as a Muslim and a Sumatran, Indonesia was a place to be cleansed. His faith was so great that he could separate his country from its history, traditions, art: its particularity.

According to author’s understanding of Islam, I cannot own a stretch of land if I cannot cultivate it. Only Allah has that right. So if this is run as an Islamic state, the state should arrange the land so that landlordism cannot exist.”

Narrator asked; “Is there an Islamic state where that has happened?” and he replied;“Yes. In the time of Abu-Bakr and Omar and all the first four caliphs. Right at the beginning of Islam, then, in the thirty-year period that ended with the death of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, in 661 A.D. It was the reply from a village mullah in Pakistan. It was not the reply I was expecting from Imaduddin in Bandung. The logic of Imaduddin’s faith, and his own integrity, was simple: injustice was un- Islamic, and Indonesia was full of injustice. And the Imaduddin who grieved about injustice at home could travel without pain to Muslim despotisms abroad.

The interchangeable revolutions:

To replace all this. Islam sanctified rage—rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate great convulsions.

In Iran there had been Behzad, who had shown me Tehran and the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad. He was the communist son of a communist father, and not a Muslim. But his communism was like a version of the Shia faith of Iran, a version of the Shia rage about injustice: a rage rooted in the overthrow by the Arabs of the Old Persian Empire in the seventh century.

Behzad believed that the best time was in Russia between 1917 and 1953. Darkness had been dispelled; an unjust society had been overthrown; and the jails and camps of Russia were full of the wicked.

In Pakistan, in the Kaghan Valley in the far north, I had talked to the gentle Masood. He was only sentimentally a Muslim. But, standing beside me above the gorge of the cold, green Kunhar

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River, he had allowed anxieties about his family and his own future to flow into a wider political despair about his country, and he had said: “Millions will have to die.”

And something like that was said to me in Jakarta by a businessman. We met late one afternoon in the restaurant of the hotel. He had been described to me as an economist, someone in touch with government departments, a man planning for the future. He was all that, but he also had the Indonesian feeling of things going wrong. And he was full of rage: against the Chinese (too gifted for Indonesia, “like Rolls-Royce spare parts in a Japanese car”), the multinationals, the successful, the ignorant men who were now running his country.

He said, “The leaders of the developing countries—most of them—are prosperous outside but very poor inside.” He was not a humorous man, but his anger (and his fondness for scientific metaphor) appeared to give him a kind of wit.

He was a Muslim from Sulawesi, formerly the Celebes, where—as in Sumatra and West Java—in the 1950s there had been a strong Muslim separatist movement. And there was more than a remnant of that rage in him, though he had benefited from the holding together of the Indonesian state.

There was too much injustice. Too many people were unemployed, and their number grew year by year. Not enough jobs were being created by the government, the multinationals, the Chinese entrepreneurs from Singapore and Hong Kong. Rage was the response of this man: rage, seemingly political, that was really Islamic, an end in itself; and racial rage.

One day the students from the pesantren will come to Jakarta and burn down this nice hotel. Islam can become cocaine. It makes you high. You go to that mosque and you get high. And when you get high, everything that happens becomes Allah’s will.” ot half a million, as was now given out. And more should have been killed: there were two and a half million communists at the time. So a million and a half had escaped killing, and many of them were still around.

I talked one day with Gunawan Mohammed, editor of Tempo, the leading weekly magazine of Indonesia, about the 1965 killings. Gunawan was twenty-five at the time. He said, “It was a war.” Gunawan’s explanation of the killings of 1965 was simple. “Fear. I cannot tell you how frightened people were of the communists. They were so strong, and nobody knew what they were going to do.”

An Indonesian book preceding those days of fear came my way. It was Contemporary Progressive Indonesian Poetry, an anthology of Indonesian communist poetry in English translation, and it was published in 1962 by the League of People’s Culture.

Pramaedra was much like Sitor Situmorang, whom I had met only a few days after I had arrived in Indonesia, whose history I had not fully appreciated at the time, and whose intellectual and social graces I had taken too much for granted.

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In 1962 Sitor was a man of power in Indonesia. He had made his name with his early lyrical poems. He had said to me one day, “The people here have lost their religion.” The bread of the commune; social life, solidarity and hope: the theme was not Sitor’s alone.

It was the Indonesian theme, now more than ever. It was the theme of the Muslim pesantren. And that was the surprise of this communist anthology of 1962: many of its themes and moods were Muslim and Indonesian, still.

Imaduddin had said he could not be a socialist because he could find the good ideas of socialism in the Koran. He said more than he knew. The Islam of protest was a religion that had been brushed by the ideas of the late twentieth century. Men no longer simply found union in a common submission to Allah. Men were the creatures of Allah; and the late twentieth century extended the meaning of the words: these creatures of Allah had “their importance as human beings who must be given justice.” The land and its wealth belonged to Allah and not to men: the late twentieth century made that a political rather than a religious idea.

So to conclude, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey he focuses on the role of religion, as he sees it, in affecting the creative and intellectual resources needed by nations to develop on their own.

Roaming far from his native Trinidad and adopted Britain, he uses his novelist skills for reportorial purposes on a recent journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. On the way he repeatedly finds a reason for backwardness in the very devotion to Islam which brings buoyancy or serenity to so many he meets.

"Among the Believers" exemplifies the Naipaul conviction that it is of no favour to a country to withhold negative views of it. Yet the delicate mockery that flavours his writing also reminds a reader that the view is affected by the eye of the beholder.

A more sympathetic, less secular eye might see the same problems with greater appreciation of Muslim ideals in proportion to lapses from them. This is not to say that Naipaul does not warm people, revise this estimate of them, or try enlightening those he feels are wrong. And he keeps noting his personal reactions, in effect warning you that you're in the presence of an individual with an individual's point of view. The result is a vivid sense of travelling through a world in transition, with pungent vicissitudes of daily life artfully played off the deeper perceptions Naipaul conveys.

He weaves references to literature, history, and the press into encounters with a range of official and unofficial voices. For all that Naipaul finds to appreciate, he keeps coming back to variations on the theme that many Muslims would reject – and indeed did reject early in Iran's revolution.

Analysis:

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Naipaul uses descriptive passages as he describes the condition of Jakarta in a detailed paragraph. He mentions “in the darkness and lamplight, of wide”, “silent streets”, “past vegetable and fruit stalls, to tea plantations, over which raincloud and mist drifted, mixed with the black exhaust of buses and trucks”. This kind of sarcastic tone and imagery incorporation was the themes of futility and decay.

There is a detailed characterization presented in his travelogue. A character named Imaduddin is introduced. Naipaul describes his age, his physical features, and complexion and about his residence as in the book he mentions “His skin was smooth, his dark eyes bright, and he had a wide, humorous mouth. He was attractive, full of welcome”.

Naipaul has talked about the historicity of Indonesia. He has mentioned the mass slaughter in Indonesia. In 1965 the communists had been wiped out. A million people had been killed, not half a million, as was now given out. And more should have been killed: there were two and a half million communists at the time. So a million and a half had escaped killing, and many of them were still around.

There is another character named Sitor Situmurang: a poet. Naipaul describes him as “Sitor was a man of power in Indonesia. He had made his name with his early lyrical poems. He was now more political, general secretary of the League for National Culture; and he was represented in the anthology by three poems he wrote after a visit to China.”.

There is a use of dialogues which authenticate his writings. Here is a dialogue between the narrator and Imaduddin, when narrator asked; “Is there an Islamic state where that has happened?” Imaduddin replied; “Yes. In the time of Abu Bakr and Omar and all the first four Caliphs.”

Naipaul seems to be replicating the image of Islam in Indonesia as being passive, sarcastic which he authenticates by saying; “One day the students from the pesantren will come to Jakarta and burn down this nice hotel. Islam can become cocaine. It makes you high. You go to that mosque and you get high. And when you get high, everything that happens becomes Allah’s will.”

Naipaul uses vivid and long descriptions as when he describes the color of langsat fruit was considered the perfect colour for an Indonesian woman. The fruit was pale-ochre, a pale adobe colour; and the girl on the scooter had a clear, southern-Chinese complexion.

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