Picturing Islam

Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld

Kenneth M. George

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444359794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld explores issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and globalization through the life and work of the prominent contemporary Indonesian artist Abdul Djalil Pirous.

• Presents a unique addition to the anthropology of art and religion
• Demonstrates the impact of Islam, ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization on the work and life of an internationally recognized postcolonial artist
• Weaves together visual and narrative materials to tell an engrossing story of a cosmopolitan Muslim artist
• Looks at contemporary Islamic art and the way it has been produced in the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia

1

BECOMING A MUSLIM CITIZEN AND ARTIST

“Pirous, I’ve got a question for you.” It was a September morning in 1995, and we were finishing up breakfast in the dining room of one of Jakarta’s boutique hotels before driving over to the Istiqlal Mosque to meet with festival planners. I knew Pirous was going to have a busy day ahead of him. This was not a good time to distract him with an interview. But fleeting moments of conversation often told me much about his work or his ideas. “Tell me. Were you born Muslim or did you become Muslim?”

Pirous put down his cup of tea and gave me an astonished look, the kind someone does when a matter seems so obvious that questions about it come across as mindless. He shook off his perplexed surprise, and said, “Born Muslim.”

People who wish to become Muslim do so by uttering the syahadat (“profession of faith”), saying in Arabic, “asyhadu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa asyhadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah” (“I affirm there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His messenger”). Surrender of oneself to Allah, the very core of what it means to be Muslim, begins with these words, and finds daily expression in them because they are repeated as part of obligatory ritual prayers (salat). On that morning in Jakarta, I was wondering what it means to say one is “born Muslim.” Being Muslim involves – as a matter of obligation – uttering the syahadat, performing salat and reciting the Qur’an in Arabic, fasting (puasa) during the month of Ramadhan, giving alms (zakat), and, if capable, going on the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). No one is born doing (or having done) these things, or any of the things we associate with Islamic faith and culture. So for someone to say that she or he is “born Muslim” seems to me more like a statement about one’s social and religious destiny, a conviction that one was destined to be raised (and thereby become) Muslim. It is a way of saying that fate has thrown one into a Muslim lifeworld.

Figure 1.1 Maps of Aceh and Indonesia. Drawn by Jennifer H. Munger.

Declarations about religion, in many countries, are declarations of ethnicity and ethnic belonging. Pirous was born in Aceh, a region located on the northern tip of Sumatra, and long known as Serambi Mekah, “Mecca’s Veranda” (see the maps in Figure 1.1). It was in and around Aceh that Islam first put down roots in the Indonesian archipelago roughly 900 years ago. Maritime commerce with India, Persia, Arab principalities, and the Ottoman Empire brought Muslim teachers, traders, and migrants to Aceh’s ports. As the Acehnese grew in political stature over the centuries, they developed a fervent attachment to Islam too. Even today, the Acehnese are known throughout Indonesia for their intense religiosity. Like most Indonesian Muslims, they do not speak Arabic as their native language or as a language of everyday communication. But they do devote themselves to mastering the language for Qur’anic recitation, and many Acehnese have become leading scholars of Islamic thought and Arabic-language manuscripts over the centuries.

Telling me that he was “born Muslim” doesn’t have much to do with Pirous’s being a good Muslim or being a good Indonesian. Telling me that he was “born Muslim,” however, is a good Acehnese reply to my question, and perhaps the only reply a good Acehnese properly should give. Members of other ethnic groups in Indonesia might have answered my question in the same way – Bugis and Makassans from Sulawesi, or perhaps the Madurese. Like other Indonesians, then, telling me that he was “born Muslim” is, for Pirous, a declaration about an unquestioned religious destiny and ethnic belonging. It is a declaration of identity.

Although he was destined to become one of Indonesia’s most distinguished painters, my friend was not “born Indonesian.” Rather, he was born in 1932 in the coastal town of Meulaboh, Aceh, as a colonial subject of the Netherlands East Indies. European powers had sailed Aceh’s waters for almost 400 years, and the Dutch East India Company – the world’s first multinational corporation – had held sway throughout the Indies archipelago through treaties, monopolies, colonial settlements, and armed conquest. Aceh managed to stay independent, but once the Netherlands took over administrative and then direct rule of the company’s territories in the nineteenth century, Aceh came under intense pressure from the colonizers. Throughout the nineteenth century, indigenous groups in Sumatra and Java led prolonged revolts against the Dutch under the banner of Islam. Armed Acehnese resistance (1873–1914) was exceptionally fierce and never wholly quelled. The Dutch prevailed, and though they were to begin a more progressive period of so-called “ethical” colonial dominion (1901–41), they kept a watchful eye on Islamic affairs and discouraged the use of Arabic script for writing local languages.

The Japanese occupation of the Indies during World War II (1942–45) dislodged the Dutch from their colony for a few years. With the war’s end, nationalist groups seized the moment and began their struggle for independence. So, it was on August 17, 1945, when Sukarno and Hatta declared the colony as a free and autonomous new nation, that an Indonesian identity was thrust upon Pirous. He embraced it, just as he has embraced the religious and ethnic identities that were his heritage. As we will see, managing and exploring these identities, coming to understand them, and bringing them to bear on his art have been a significant part of his life’s work.

When I arrived in Bandung in late February 1994, I did not know all that much about Pirous’s upbringing. Settling in with Pirous and his family as their house-guest, I hesitated about starting up the life history interviews I had planned. The time did not seem right: the rhythms of the fasting month of Ramadhan were in full sway, and getting Serambi Pirous in shape for its opening preoccupied us much of the time. The holy celebrations of Idul Fitri (also known as Lebaran) came right on the heels of the gallery opening, bringing the fasting month to an end, and ushering in three days of family visitations and endless meals, as relatives and friends ask each other for forgiveness for any conduct – in thought or deed – that might have caused offense.

The household quieted as soon as Idul Fitri came to a close. With the fast and the Lebaran holidays behind us, Pirous and I found that evenings were the best part of the day for our conversations about his life and career. We took our time, lingering over stories and questions. Sometimes Erna, or their daughters or son would listen in, hearing stories from him for the first time. Erna (b. 1941) had been born and raised in a Sundanese family in Kuningan, West Java, and had spent most of her school years around Bandung. Though she had been to the city of Banda Aceh, she had little firsthand knowledge of small-town life in northern Sumatra. Unlike their Acehnese father and Sundanese mother, the Pirous children, Mida, Iwan, and Rihan, grew up quite Indonesian and urbane. All in their early twenties, Aceh was for them a rather distant place which none had visited. Though very aware of their Acehnese roots on their father’s side, they seemed more familiar with the Sundanese ambience of Bandung, and would even switch out of Indonesian from time to time to speak in Sundanese with Erna or her mother, Masjoeti Daeng Soetigna.

Pirous was of course a very practiced interviewee and storyteller from years of meeting with magazine, newspaper, and television reporters. No doubt I worked at a slower pace than reporters, however, and to different ends. As the lifeworld of a young artist came into view for me, Pirous himself was surprised by the depth and span of his reawakened memories. “You know,” he confessed after a few evenings, “I didn’t realize I knew or could remember this much.”

Beginnings

Being born “Acehnese,” one is pushed forward, out of one’s family, thus out of one’s ancestry, to find a place elsewhere. (James T. Siegel, The Rope of God)

People in Aceh would say that Pirous got off to an auspicious start. He was born at noon on Friday, March 11, 1932. The Friday noon hour is of course the time set aside for weekly worship in the ummat, a time when Muslims gather together to make their obligatory midday prayers at the mosque or prayer-room and to listen to sermons. His father, Mouna “Piroes” Noor Muhammad, asked the religious teacher who boarded with the family, Fakih Nurdin, to name his infant son. And so young Pirous came into the world bearing the name Abdul Djalil Syaifuddin.

Figure 1.2 “Boss Piroes.” Mouna Piroes Noor Muhammad (wearing a white jacket and holding a rifle) at his rubber plantation outside of Meulaboh, Aceh, 1921. Photograph courtesy of Yayasan Serambi Pirous.

Mouna Noor Muhammad was the grandson of a Gujarati trader from India, and was given the nickname “Piroes” because of the unusual turquoise (pirus) birthmark on his left arm, a mark many saw as a sign of spiritual significance and potency (pirus also means “triumphant” in Persian and “fearless” in Arabic). Raised elsewhere on the northwest coast of Sumatra, “Piroes” was a newcomer in Aceh, and, indeed, his natal family maintained their ties to their other homeland in India. He ultimately settled in Meulaboh, took a much younger Acehnese woman as his wife, and began work, first as a manager of a German-Dutch provisioning store and then as owner of a thriving rubber estate and rubber export business.

Marrying a young woman from Meulaboh was surely crucial to Mouna Noor Muhammad’s prospects in the town. It was customary in Aceh for a woman’s parent’s to give her a house at marriage – usually near or next door to those belonging to the bride’s parents, her married sisters, and her mother’s sisters – and newlywed husbands were in practice expected to move in with their spouse. Moving in with his wife and near his wife’s kin, Mouna Noor Muhammad gained a home and started a family, and relied on his wife’s broader family to help raise the children. Like all Acehnese, these children would trace their descent through both their mother and father, but would have different expectations in life: Acehnese girls tended to live out their lives in these tightly bound mother-sister-daughter groups, while Acehnese boys at adolescence would begin to gravitate to the meunasah – the local meeting hall and male dormitory – ultimately to marry into and take residence with other families.

By the time Djalil, the fifth of six children, was born, the family was quite comfortable and well-to-do. Mouna Noor Muhammad himself was known locally as Tauke Piroes – “Boss Piroes.” His social origins – in the eyes of Acehnese neighbors and local colonial administrators – marked him as an outsider, a trader from Asia Muka (the “Face of Asia” – today’s India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh). Undaunted, he took advantage of his outsiderhood and served as head of Meulaboh’s Asia Muka community (several of whom were siblings or cousins). The family’s rising commercial and social fortunes placed them among the dominant class elite, and made it possible for Djalil’s father to invest some of his wealth and reputation in religious work. As Pirous recalls it, his father was not drawn to the mystical Islamic tarékat (or “Sufi brotherhoods,” such as Khalwatiyyah or Naksyabandiyyah), nor did he make the pilgrimage. He instead used his wealth and position to promote Muslim institutions in Meulaboh itself: He built a prayer-room (surau) for public worship, funded a madrasah (religious school), and brought several religious teachers, or ulama, to town.

Mouna Noor Muhammad’s ethnic background, prosperity, and civic-religious work distinguish him from those Acehnese who affiliated with the resistance movement that had struggled tenaciously against the Dutch since 1873. Yet, given his familial ties to India and the political-economic atmosphere of the late colonial period in Aceh, Djalil’s father was surely familiar with reformist Islam and the call to religious struggle, or jihad, in resisting colonial domination. Secret recitations of the banned epic poem, Hikayat Prang Sabil (The Chronicle of the Holy War), which celebrated acts of Acehnese martyrdom, would have had special allure to many in and around Meulaboh (Siegel 1979). Although currents of anti-colonial feeling were astir, Pirous himself recalls the hometown of his childhood as “very peaceful, very clean, and very Muslim.” At the same time, young Pirous’s imaginative horizons stretched well beyond Meulaboh and Aceh. His father’s storied ties to India gave Pirous an imagined but unvisited homeland and family abroad. Around 1939, he began to frequent the town’s movie-house, where Gene Autry and Flash Gordon films (subtitled in Dutch) sparked a lifelong interest in foreign cinema. By this time Pirous was already enrolled in Meulaboh’s elite, Dutch-run elementary school and had begun religious instruction in reciting the Qur’an and writing Arabic. He was an avid reader, and, as he approached his teens, he devoured translations of Western books in the school library – among them, The Count of Monte Christo by Alexander Dumas, and Karl Friedrich May’s novels about the American West and his fictional Apache hero, Winnetou.

As Pirous tells it, it was his Acehnese mother, Hamidah, and his older brother, Zainal Arifin, who led him to the arts. Hamidah was from Meulaboh and did not trace her descent beyond her natal town. She was no less religious than her husband, but, unlike him, Hamidah was drawn toward mystical spiritual practices. She pursued dzikir, or mindfulness of God, through special meditation and chants – such as reciting the twenty exalted qualities of God, or the ninety-nine “beautiful names” of God (Asma Ul Husna). Hamidah and her husband also had very different views about art. Mouna Noor Muhammad was the more austere of the two and frowned on art as something that conflicted with Islam. Art was a distraction from more important things. Hamidah saw it as a part of everyday life. As Pirous told me: “My mother was truly an artist. My father didn’t have a drop of artistic blood, but my mother had it strong and my older brother Arifin, too. They were the ones who stirred my ambitions.” Hamidah was adept in several of the Islamic arts. She was especially skilled in Qur’anic recitation and in storytelling, and made a practice of writing down Acehnese and Malay-language stories in Arabic script. She also enjoyed a reputation for making sumptuous, gold-embroidered velvets, felts, and silks for ceremonial occasions such as weddings and circumcisions. Among these are the kasab, the geometric patterns which Pirous would later appropriate as icons of his ethnic roots. Making a kasab could take a year or two of labor, sometimes more, and Hamidah was assisted by her children in preparing patterns, stretching fabric, and so on. It often fell to Pirous to mix inks and prepare varnishes, and, to this day, Pirous can detail every step and technique in preparing the kasab.

Figure 1.3 Hamidah, Pirous’s mother, early 1950s. Photograph courtesy of Yayasan Serambi Pirous.

Figure 1.4 “Mopizar.” Mouna Piroes Zainal Arifin, Medan, Sumatra, early 1950s. Photograph courtesy of Yayasan Serambi Pirous.

Pirous’s enchanted reverence for the artistry his mother brought to stories and fabric found its most explicit expression in a 1982 serigraph called Sura Isra II: Homage to Mother (Sura Isra II: Penghormatan buat Ibunda). Look at Plate 4. It features brightly colored vertical borders patterned directly after Acehnese ceremonial curtains called tabir; an image of the winged bouraq, the Prophet Muhammad’s legendary mount; and a two-dimensional reproduction of a red and gold kasab made by Hamidah herself (Plate 5), but inscribed with the Qur’anic verse traditionally associated with the Prophet’s night journey and ascension to Heaven on the bouraq (QS 17 Bani Isra’il: 1) in place of the arabesque embroidered in his mother’s work. Pirous’s eyes gleamed as he talked about making the serigraph:

This is something taken directly from the craft treasures of Aceh. It is from a piece of embroidery that my mother prepared from gold thread and scarlet velvet. This image of the bouraq makes visual the story, the sura, about the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey from this world to heaven, from the Haram Mosque [in Mecca] to the Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem and to the sky above. My mother always told me stories about how fast [that bouraq] could fly. In one jump it could leap as far as you could see. It was like lightning! So all of this is to make a fantastic story very visual and concrete. This was a story from my mother. That’s why I made it. All of this is a homage, a homage to my mother.

When speaking to curators, art journalists, and scholars, Pirous generally points to his mother Hamidah as a driving force and inspiration in his becoming an artist. Yet in our unhurried evening talks, the painter told me many affectionate and admiring stories about his brother, Zainal Arifin. Arifin made use of his drawing and storytelling skills at the local movie-house, where he would sketch cartoon stories on glass plates and use a lantern to project the cartoons onto the screen. The kids in town, including the young Djalil, were delighted. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Qur’anic Verse
• Guide to Indonesian Spelling and Pronunciation
• Introduction: Picturing Islam
• 1: Becoming a Muslim Citizen and Artist
• 2: Revelations and Compulsions
• 3: Diptych - Making Art Islamic and Making Islamic Art Indonesian
• 4: Spiritual Notes in the Social World
• 5: Anguish, Betrayal, Uncertainty, and Faith
• Conclusion: A Retrospective
• Afterword: Choosing a Frame
• Color Plates
• References
• Index