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Custom Made
A
mysterious traditional belief system survives in a secluded corner of
staunchly Islamic
Lombok.
Tim
Hannigan heads to the hills to find out more.
 The night was wet and
the lamplight cut the shadows on the faces of the elders of Karang
Bajo kampung. The glasses were filled again with brem, the
local rice wine, and I strained to follow the earthy Bahasa Sasak as
the old men talked. Then I heard three familiar words cutting through
the conversation: Islam Wetu Telu.
I
drained my glass of the fiery lemon-flavored alcohol and politely
interrupted. What exactly, I wanted to know, was Islam Wetu Telu.
Silence fell and the men looked at each other. Thunder grumbled in
the distance.
Eventually one old man with betel-stained teeth spoke: “Adat,”
he said.
The
island
of Lombok is a place of sprawling rice fields and slow-paced villages
dominated by Rinjani volcano. The native Sasaks have been Muslims
since the 16th century but the faith that grew around the
slopes of Rinjani took a unique
color.
Mixing the basic tenets of Islam with elements of Hinduism, animism
and ancestor worship, it was called Islam Wetu Telu.
A
century ago most Sasaks were followers of Wetu Telu, but slowly a more
orthodox faith – known as Islam Waktu Lima on Lombok, took hold.
Waktu Lima means “five times”, referring to the number of daily
prayers; Wetu Telu means “three elements”.
In the
1960s the remaining Wetu Telu people came under huge pressure to join
orthodox Islam. Their centuries-old syncretism was not, they were
told, one of the accepted faiths of the Republic of Indonesia.
I had
read that there might still be a few Wetu Telu Muslims, hidden in the
villages on the slopes of Rinjani. But as I travelled north from the
capital, Mataram, on a rented motorbike, I began to have doubts.
There were half-built mosques everywhere and boys in black skullcaps
waved collection boxes at passing vehicles. In every village signs
pointed to pesantren (Islamic schools).
But
people said I might find Wetu Telu Muslims (who they claimed fasted
for only three days during Ramadhan) in the village of Bayan, further
north.
* * * *
 I
arrived in Bayan at dusk, and was soon knocking back my fourth glass
of brem in Karang Bajo hamlet. Whether or not they were Wetu
Telu, it was clear that the people here were not too orthodox.
The old
men described Wetu Telu as adat. Adat is a complex word
encompassing tradition, custom and culture, but they were at pains to
point out that it did not mean religion. Their religion (agama
in Indonesian) was Islam; Wetu Telu was their adat. Outsiders
who claimed that Bayan people did not follow Islam correctly were
mistaken. Tales that Wetu Telu people fasted only three days in
Ramadhan were lies, though they admitted most fasted for only nine
days (a full month was impractical for hardworking farmers).
Once
this was clear they were happy to discuss Wetu Telu. The name did
mean three elements: conception, the egg and its hatching, or perhaps
birth, life and death, or maybe mother, father and god .… It was not
just the brem that was making me dizzy.
Wetu
Telu people believe that ancestor spirits live high on Gunung Rinjani,
a place guarded by jealous ghosts.
There were
ceremonies to give thanks for harvests and rains; certain villagers
held hereditary positions that qualified them to liaise with the
spirits, and hidden in the forest were sacred altars. This all sounded like “religion” to me, but when I pressed
them they insisted: “No, just adat.”
Nursing
a hangover the next morning I visited the ancient Bayan mosque, said
to be the oldest in
Lombok. It was a simple wooden building on a low hilltop.
The doorway was bolted, but peering through the cracks I could see a
dirt floor and effigies of birds and fish hanging from the roof. All
that marked it as a mosque was the mihrab, indicating the
direction of
Mecca,
but even this was obscured by a carving of a Chinese-style dragon.
In a
corner of the mosque compound a group of men was clearing the weeds.
Their leader, Raden Anggirta, a cheerful man with a thin moustache,
said that they were preparing the area for the coming observance of
Maulid, the Prophet’s birthday, one of the few dates when the old
mosque is used.
He
explained that in Bayan people celebrated the key Islamic festivals
twice. First would come the “agama” observance at the modern
mosque, then several days later the old mosque would be unlocked and
villagers would crowd the hilltop to celebrate the “adat”
version. Once again, Raden Anggirta made it clear that the two were
separate things.
All of
the men were wearing sarongs and head-cloths known as sapuk.
Their foreheads were anointed with a dot of chewed betel nut,
reminiscent of Hinduism.
This
was essential when working near the mosque they said, for protection
from the spirits.
 That
afternoon I made a strange discovery. In the hamlet of Otak Lendang,
west of Bayan, stood a new Thai-style Buddhist prayer hall. The local
villagers were Buddhists. They showed me inside the building where a
gold Buddha sat on a pink platform and gave me tea while I sheltered
from another downpour.
They
said that the people of the area had always been Buddhists, and that
Buddhism had once been the main religion of Lombok. I knew that this
was untrue. Lombok had long come under Hindu Balinese rule, but
Buddhism had no history here.
But
there was an explanation. Until the 1960s a few tiny pockets of
completely un-Islamized Sasaks survived, followers of a faith even
older than Wetu Telu.
These
people were known as the Boda, though they had no connection to
Buddhism. At the same time as the Wetu Telu were pressured to become
orthodox Muslims the Boda were presented with their choice of
officially sanctioned religions. Islam and Hinduism were both
familiar to the villagers, and held no appeal; Christianity was
utterly unknown; but the fourth option, “Agama Buddha”, sounded very
much like their own “Agama Boda”.
The new
Buddhists later realized that they had joined something even more
foreign and many drifted into Islam, but I seemed to have stumbled
upon a remnant of the Boda people. What was bizarre was that they
appeared to be in the process of coming to believe that they had
always been Buddhists.
Later
that afternoon I visited one of the orthodox religious schools
scattered through the
Bayan
area. The Pondok Pesantren Nurul Bayan is a spread of pale green
buildings among the trees on the outskirts of Anyar village. Haji
Abdul Karim, a native of Tanjung in
West Lombok,
established the school 15 years ago after completing his studies in
Iraq. The pesantren now has around 150 students.
As we
sat outside Abdul Karim’s bungalow boys in sarongs and girls in white
headscarves practiced their English on me. They spoke Arabic just as
well. Abdul Karim told me he believed it was important for students
not only to recite and interpret the Koran, but also to have a real
grasp of spoken Arabic. He said that in
Lombok, Islam was often “incomplete”; people sometimes had only the
loosest knowledge of their own faith. He regularly visited village
mosques throughout the area teaching people about correct Muslim
practice.
When I
mentioned the double feast days in Bayan, he smiled patiently.
“Is it a
problem, from an orthodox point of view?” I asked.
The same
smile. “Not really. They are Muslims, and religion and adat
are separate things.”
* * * *
 The next
day under a gloomy sky I set out with Pak Jaya, a sprightly
64-year-old from Karang Bajo, and Bakar, a young man with long frizzy
hair. We were going to the Gedeng Daya, one of the holy places of the
Wetu Telu. As we walked along a slippery path through the dense
jungle that cloaks the lower slopes of Gunung Rinjani, I caught
fragments of the conversation in Bahasa Sasak between Pak Jaya and
Bakar. They were talking about ghosts. The forest, they said, was
full of them.
In a
remote clearing, high above Bayan, stood the house of the Perumbaq
Daya, guardian of the Gedeng Daya, the forest shrine. The Perumbaq
was away, but two other men emerged from the trees and pointed out the
Berugak Agung, the spirit house.
It was a
simple wooden building that could only be entered on certain festivals
when the spirits of the ancestors were called down. The similarity to
the old Bayan mosque struck me.
From the
spirit house we made our way along ever slipperier paths, picking over
streams, struggling through sharp undergrowth. The rain started
again, pouring through the dense foliage. In another clearing stood
the Pedangan, a simple platform, and a little further on was the
Gedeng Daya, also a low platform surrounded by a boundary of stones.
Bakar warned me not to step inside the boundary. The place was the
abode of spirits and they must not be disturbed. During the
ceremonies offerings are prepared at the home of the Perumbaq, then
villagers make the journey through the forest, first to the Pedangan,
and finally to the Gedeng Daya. The place seemed to buzz with a
strange energy, and one thing was certain: it had no connection to
Islam.
It
seemed to me that the people of Bayan had made a remarkable
adjustment. By paying lip service to orthodox Islam, reassigning Wetu
Telu as “just adat”, and distinguishing it clearly from
“religion”, their ancient culture had survived modern pressure to
conform.
It
certainly seemed that they had made a more pragmatic choice than the
Buddhists of Otak Lendang who I felt had lost not only their old
religion but even their history.
Pak Jaya
was squatting at the edge of the clearing. This was a very important
place for Wetu Telu, he said.
Here in
the dark forest, far from the mosques and religious boarding schools,
I tentatively asked, “And is Wetu Telu different from normal Islam?”
He
smiled. “A little different.”
I
suspected that things would always be a little different around here.
And I remembered something Pak Jaya’s son, Juliadi, had said the day
before when I was struggling to understand the difference between
agama and adat. They were separate, he had said, but after
all, “What is religion without culture?”
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