Surabaya, local areas, and Muslim Self Help

Headed to the Denpassar airport with John Taylor for a flight to Surabaya. Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia and the figure that comes to mind while typing is 4000000 people. It is a business and manufacturing city – what places like Pittsburg and Buffalo and Cleveland must have been like when the plants still operated at full bore. Polluted, energetic, fast moving, crowded, it was a lot like Jakarta but less so. I stayed at another Marriot, very nice place with an incredible staff, but had very little time in the city.

I had gotten sick on Bali. When I get sick, even for a brief period, I completely forget what it is like to be well. I don’t know what that observation means but, at that point, I had forgotten what it was like to be well. But when I walked into the lobby, I felt better because a number of my friends were there. Jalu (who flew there to see me), Silfia, Ria, and Dian greeted me at the hotel. I went up and changed, came down, and they took me on a tour of their city. They had a driver from Ready Mix concrete. Dian had left school and was working with the concrete company teaching their employees English. I guess, but again, this is one of those things I only partly understood, she was able to use the driver at certain times. He (the driver) was a young guy who got completely lost and we found ourselves in the slums of Surabaya, by a large drainage canal.

Indonesian cities have grown so fast that the organizational structure is still based on a kind of village model. Each small area (I’m not an expert on this at all so I have to be vague) has some sort of voluntary government function. There is a watchman (sometimes paid, sometimes not, sometimes non-existent) and a guy who takes the garbage out to a place where, sometimes, the government picks it up – the trucks couldn’t get down the narrow streets and alleys. In a place I went in Jakarta, finding a well was a sort of public, local function also.

Anyway, I’m sure Indonesian experts are shaking their head at my ignorance – writing about things they have known about for years – but I can’t help thinking that some recognition of these local functions, and a not overly regulative form of support (buying new carts for the garbage guy) would be a good step toward developing democracy – but I say this without any knowledge at all – maybe they are doing that – this kind of comment is the danger of the two day observation.

I asked about Mosques and they seem to work more on the Catholic then the Protestant model. People go to their neighborhood Mosque. I was told by a number of people that they don’t “mosque shop” (I bet it happens though) but attend locally. The notion of breaking off from the congregation and forming a competing Mosque across the street from the old one, doesn’t seem common there – unlike in my home town of Springfield – four corners, four churches, Ohio.

Hinduism is very hard to understand from westerners raised in the Christian tradition – because of the multiple gods and the complexity – but Islam in some ways is very familiar. At the level of popular culture you could put a Muslim self help book (and there are a lot of them in the book stores) right next to a Christian self help book (and there are a lot of them in the book stores). “How to have a Muslim Marriage”; “Muslim Beauty”; “How to Be a More Attractive Muslimah” (muslim woman)” – inspirational books by the Muslim equivalent of Billy Graham – etc.

It took me a while but I did notice that the book store was similar to American book stores in that there were just a lot of books about religion in general. Christian, Buddhism -- Islamic biographies of Jesus. Indonesians as a whole are very interested in Religion. The state requires you to pick one of six for your identity card so it is obviously an identity issue of some importance. Jalu, my friend from Jakarta (who met me in Surabaya) bought me a book "Arok and Dedes" about Java in 1215. It was fascinating to read about both a) the importance of religion and b) the variety and permeability of beliefs -- different brands of Hinduism (Shiva vs Vishnu); Buddhism, local gods, and ancestor worship were intermingled and the source of political conflict. I'm sure it is a source of conversations and academic conferences to talk about the diverse religious history of Indonesia and modern forms of Fundamentalism.

One area where the similarities end is the arguments over the role of church and state but I’m not sure of the extent to which this is a religious or a historical development questions. I’ll wrestle with that later but suffice it to say that a lot of people felt the separation would cause the withering away of both and that corruption was due to a loss of religious fervor whereas my view is the complete opposite – that linkage causes a withering of both and that corruption has nothing to do with religion – in fact, if anything, a back of the envelope calculation would suggest that the less religious a country is the less corrupt (but this surely isn’t causal but reflects economic standing). This is the same mistake Romney made when he said freedom and religion depended on each other. Maybe the had a relationship at some point in the past for western nations, and maybe they are linked in some places at some times, but not in most places, right now.

Anyway, that long ramble took me away from the the trip with my friends. They took me out to dinner at a local place and I started to get sick again. I had an Indonesian dish, Nasi Goreng Ayam (Fried rice with Chicken) but I just pushed it around on my plate and then I said – we have to leave now. People came back to the hotel, came up and took a look at the room, and left for the lobby. I came down a little later but I was done. This was one of two low points – the other being mixing up Suharto and Sukarno in a political party meeting – and I feel really bad for my friends who often came, on scooters, a long way to see me – I was a disappointing guest.

The next evening, after my day’s events, I got a call from Ria. She had suggested she might come back but I had forgotten and was still ill. She was in the lobby with a young man who she had introduced me to the night before. I came down and talked for a while. It turned out they are engaged and she wanted me to meet him but, again, I was a disappointment. I was much improved the next day when I flew to Sumatra.