BOOK OF THE DAY: PATRICK SKENE CATLINGreviews A Shadow Falls: In The Heart of Javaby Andrew Beatty Faber 308pp, £12.99
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST, especially a congenial one who takes his time, can learn much more than a hit-and- run travel writer about the manners and moods of an outlandish community. There is more to a culture than its hotels and restaurants.
Andrew Beatty, an English academic of versatile adaptability (jobs in an Italian circus, an Australian trawler, mining town and banana plantation, now a lecturer on anthropology at Brunel University), spent five years in remote areas of Indonesia in the 1990s and has just got around to producing a wonderfully vivid and disturbing book out of his field notes on Bayu, a village in East Java.
When Beatty and his Mexican wife visited Indonesia in 1992 it had the world’s largest Muslim population. Its 200 million Muslims were already 94 per cent of the total population. The Beattys spent 2½ years on Nias, an island in the Indian Ocean, whose tribal members were descended from headhunters.
On two further visits to Indonesia, the Beattys took along their two small children, helping the family to integrate with their 2,000 neighbours in Bayu and enabling Andrew, with tape- recorder and camera, to analyse village society intimately from the inside.
His subject was “religious diversity and tolerance”, which, he first noted, were great. “In Java,” he writes, “as nowhere else in the Islamic world apart from Mughal India, a broader, tolerant, humanist culture gained a legitimacy and intellectual power that made it a match for more dogmatic forms of Islam”.
He found that Muslims, Hindus, mystics and believers in ancient traditions co-existed in remarkable ecumenical harmony, until radical Islam and the Javanese government began campaigning to impose Muslim conformity.
Beatty attributes the widespread establishment of Islamic doctrinaire puritanism to many factors, including “decolonisation, the rejection of despotic Westernised rulers, petro-dollars, Palestine, mass education and literacy, the Iranian revolution”.
In Indonesia, Muslim orthodoxy was fortified in 1965, when a military coup led to Suharto’s massacre of dissidents, especially opponents accused of communism. Until then, there had been about three million communists, the world’s third-largest communist party, after China’s and the Soviet Union’s.
In rural Bayu, however, Beatty observed that a certain degree of liberalism prevailed. The village headman managed to stay on a fence “between conservative humanism and modern Muslim radicalism”, even as the mosque loudspeakers became shriller, night and day, and villagers who were spied eating during the fast of Ramadan were liable to severe punishment.
Beatty and his wife were dismayed by Muslim education. In kindergarten and primary school, children were compelled to memorise passages in the Koran in Arabic without understanding what they meant.
Even so, the Beattys were delighted by ceremonial feasts and traditional shadow plays. Andrew Beatty is an excellent descriptive narrator who uses dialogue illustratively. His accounts of some bizarre local superstitions are sympathetic.
After his family’s initial enjoyment of friendship and hospitality, Beatty was made to feel increasingly uncomfortable.
He had not taken Communion since the age of 17, but the Javanese regarded him in an unfriendly way as a Christian.
He was aware of the Islamic jihad against the infidels of the “fabulously rich, dissolute, bellicose” West and realised it might apply to him.
By the end of their stay, a shadow seemed to have fallen on the heart of Java. That was in 1997. How much more threatening must it be today?
Patrick Skene Catling is an author. His children's book The Chocolate Touchis now available in Korean.