The intricacies of faith

Lead Review

MY FRIEND THE FANATIC
Sadanand Dhume
Tranquebar, 2009,
pp 271, Rs 395

This is a road book on a nation’s religion. Sadanand Dhume, Indian-born, US-educated writer for The Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, gave up his job to focus on his mission — to study the spread of Islam in Indonesia and “understand where things were headed, what Indonesia would look like in ten years or twenty.”

Now this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, but the archipelago is vast and varied, drastically changing colour from one milieu to the other; and faith zigzags between moderate and militant, sometimes even within a school of thought. And then Indonesia has had a long Hindu-Buddhist tradition that prompts Dhume to add this quote from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “In Indonesia, Islam did not construct a civilisation, it appropriated one.” It only makes the job of the raconteur even more unwieldy. 

Beginning the book with the Bali bombings of 2002 which was the most obvious and dramatic trigger that changed the Islamic image of the country from being “overwhelmingly moderate”, Dhume decides to get a local companion to accompany him on his travels, to point out and comment on the landmarks that are transforming the country.
Rather self-conscious about his own privileged position (it “wasn’t the top end of the market.... but it wasn’t quite the bottom either,” he says about his strategically located apartment) and even more so about his western thinking, he feels the need for another voice, more localised and representative of his target group, to show him the way. Until then his evenings are replete with disco nights and melodramatic book launches, dancing divas and cerebral celebrities. There’s a nascent difficulty in this that impinges on his upcoming search, that these denizens of gloomy glitz are also very much a part of the growing tide of rigid Islamisation sweeping the country. The difficulty is that you can’t with any degree of certainty pinpoint their affiliations.

Need for another voice
Dhume twirls his finger and places it on Herry Nurdi, managing editor of the “fundamentalist mouthpiece” Sabili. It is Nurdi who’s the friend in the title, but we find little evidence of the fanatic in him, at least not in the way we’ve come to know the word. Which is what begins to make the impending road show interesting. It shows up the grey of human vulnerability against our conjectured backdrop, the bleak blackness of stringent idealism.

Dhume places himself “in the middle,” between writers on Islam out to prove the religion is basically violent and others who claim it is a religion of peace. Being a “lifelong atheist” helps his thesis to the extent that it provides him emotional distance; but there is often a curled lip, a raised eyebrow, an acerbic comment that comes between him and his reader. This is reportage with panache, new journalism that includes personal thought and whim. “My friend the fanatic” is his guide and sounding board.

Dhume divides his narrative, doling out rich doses of history between journalistic forays. The story of Islam’s rise is shown in “four acts” — with the Old Order (Sukarno), New Order (Suharto), New Order Two (Suharto moving from nationalism to championing Islam) and Reformasi (Islamisation becoming visible and violent, with church-burnings and riots). But even then, there is still the obvious stickiness, the rude remnants of western culture, the baulking at pure conservatism, that bothers so many of the people he meets.
The book moves between personalities, events, chunks of information and personal notes that make it a diary of jottings, a journal of sorts. There are vignettes along the way. Such as the visit to the Gontor school, the elite centre of modernist Islamic education. Realising that Dhume is a non-Muslim, the school’s principal turns to Herry: “He will give this information to the Americans.”

The nocturnal rituals on the Parangtritis beach, a harking back to ancient, pre-Islamic beliefs, comes like an interlude. The thick expectant crowd, the Hindu performances, a young couple he meets, worshippers and the propitious hookers who’ll bring success — Dhume builds up the atmosphere, yet another facet of the country’s bewildering belief system.

He goes into the thick of it, moving among sleek television preachers and rabid intellectuals, hardliners and nervous speakers, so that the road show exposes us to a centre-stage unfolding of idealism and the private quirks of icons. And Dhume is a keen observer who misses little. It is interesting to see the inner world of fundamentalism, its human face, and the processes that make it what it is.

When we see friend Herry again at the end of the book, he is settled and slightly portly, part of the establishment with followers of his own, and probably symbolising what has come to stay in Indonesia.