was an ordinary man—the only miracle that he took credit for was serving as the vessel for God’s word—who emptied himself, through prayer, to receive a message preserved on a tablet in heaven, a continual surrender that may bring to mind Saint Paul’s account of Jesus emptying himself into human form to bear God’s word into the world. For mystical experience begins in emptiness, in humility; and if Islam differs from Christianity in its conception of Jesus, viewing him as a prophet, not the Son of Man, it is worth noting their common mystical source—a spring that periodically refreshes the faith and also waters creative work. The poet’s supplication (to the muse, the language, the beloved, God) is a form of prayer, and what Muhammad heard in his night-long vigils brings to mind visions vouchsafed to poets the world over. There is indeed a poetic quality to the Koran, which is not always apparent in translation ; hence Muslims are encouraged to recite it in the original Arabic—the divine version. This did not seem to hinder Islam’s appeal when Sufi traders introduced it to Southeast Asia.
Eddin liked to describe Islam’s penetration of the Malay Peninsula in the fifteenth century as a process of accretion and secretion, the pantheism of Sufi teachings falling in nicely with pre-Islamic beliefs; with the spice trade came an esoteric poetry and music congenial to the Malay sensibility, and Eddin attributed Islam’s spread to the syncretism of the Sufis, who incorporated into their practice elements of Persian, Chinese, and Indian thought; their belief in the possibility of a direct encounter with God was of a piece with the play of spirits central to Malay cosmology; hence its broad appeal.
Not until the turn of the twentieth century, Eddin continued, did some Muslims begin to blame the enervation of Islamic civilization, notably the decline of the Ottoman Empire, on the inwardness, the hedonism, of Sufism. Reformers urged the faithful to use their powers of reason to grapple with the problem of modernity, and Sufis were confined to small communities insulated from the society at large.
There is always tension between the visible forms of faith, its ceremonies and institutions and hierarchies, and the interior journeys undertaken by seekers of the divine. Individuals and societies alike navigate between the demands of the temporal and eternal orders, the things of this world and the next; and while I had touched on the relationship between politics and religion in my last book, an account of my pilgrimages to the center of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, the Holy Mountain of Athos, in northern Greece, I wished now to explore the subject in greater detail, particularly as it related to Islam. The age-old argument among Muslim clerics and intellectuals over the role that religion plays in matters of state had, as far as I could tell, acquired new urgency after 9/11; an infidel could hardly gauge the multifarious ways in which a billion or more Muslims, pious or not, sought to make sense of their time here below, but I hoped to hear echoes of their debates, in mosques and universities and the halls of power, in cafés and kampongs, about their obligations to God and society. Husam’s answer to the changes wrought by modernity, for instance, was a changeless understanding of his faith.
“You can classify us as moderates,” he intoned, “but we believe in fundamentals: that Islam is the solution to everything. We were born before the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, and we can live as brothers.”
Not everyone agreed with him, certainly not his Chinese and Indian countrymen, and with more and more Malays rejecting his theocratic vision even in Kelantan, he might have adopted a different tone. But he remained defiant, blaming PAS’s electoral losses on UNMO’s control of the levers of power, including the judiciary, the security forces, and the media. UNMO had in his mind devised a form of autocratic government as corrupt as any in the Middle East, and Husam seemed to relish the disparity in power between the ruling party and PAS, seeing in it a metaphor for his province.
“Kelantan is so small,” he said, “small enough to free itself. Not Malaysia.”
I took him to mean that a theocratic ideal could serve as a model for the rest of his country, and I agreed with his idea that change comes from the periphery. This was, after all, one lesson of the Christian anchorites who settled in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, fleeing cities to devote their lives to God; what they made in solitude, a monastic system of prayer and fasting and the study of scripture, continues to shape Christian thought, including my own. I keep near my desk the sayings of the Desert Fathers, a compendium of wisdom born of their experience of faith; in their desire to live by the teachings of Jesus I recognized a mechanism of reform that may be universal: the center stagnates, corruption sets in, and from the periphery idealists seek to return to their origins—of a faith, a literary heritage, a political tradition. What the Desert Fathers discovered in their devotions was a corrective to the newly Christianized Roman Empire, in which a heretofore religious minority subjected to draconian forms of discrimination had assumed authority; the marriage of church and state made deviation from the ideals of the early church inevitable, as Christian rulers inevitably compromised on issues temporal and eternal; in the desert the religious sought to return to the purity of faith preached by Jesus, cultivating interiority in much the same manner that a later generation of reformers, Sufis disillusioned by the growing worldliness of Islam, tried to recover Muhammad’s message of liberty and love, the mystical heart of the faith. In both cases, Christian and Islam, reformers created a healing force.
But some reformers resort to violence, the David and Goliath narrative having inspired oppressed believers since—well, the time of David and Goliath, if not before. This was what led Osama bin Laden to send his men on a suicide mission to New York and Washington, hoping to rid Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Mecca and Medina, of the American military bases established there during the Gulf War. (In this he was successful : the Bush administration closed the bases in 2003.) And it was what prompted a band of Serbian terrorists to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, setting off the Great War. I asked Husam if he thought another world war was in the offing, this time between Islam and the West.
“I don’t believe there is a clash of civilizations,” he said. “America doesn’t have to worry about Malaysia. Our role is to bring people to understand Islam. From the beginning PAS distanced itself from terrorism. That’s our contribution to peace.”
And the proscription on main puteri?
Husam made a halfhearted attempt at humor. “We do not ban the traditional dances, we ben them,” he said, lazily pronouncing the word in the Malay style. “We bend them and blend them, because culture is a dynamic thing for us.”
But his idea of bending or blending, Eddin later explained, was to strip from the ceremonies all Hindu, shamanic, and fantastic elements. PAS had even instituted a code of ethics for shadow puppetry, which required the use of lifelike puppets to tell didactic stories. Once onstage, however, the puppet masters would take out their classical puppets and let their angin take over, literally throwing the code to the winds.
The dancer bent his fingers all the way back to his wrists and smiled. Eh Chom Eh Kuan, the legendary performer of the Buddhist dance drama known as manora, possessed the suppleness of a man half his age. And his smile broadened when the younger of his two wives served us tea in the living room of his house near the Thai border.
“Are Buddhists allowed to have two wives?” I whispered to Eddin.
He grinned. “Only if you are the master of manora!”
Eh Chom, who came from a long line of dancers, was Kelantan’s last remaining manora performer trained in the traditional style—which meant that at the age of nine he was sent to live in a Buddhist temple, and after four years of intensive instruction he was raised as a girl so that he could develop the grace required for the role of manora, a bird-woman in the Jataka tradition of tales about the previous births of the Buddha. Professor James Brandon retells her story in Theatre in Southeast Asia: how Manora, the youngest of seven daughters of the king of a mythical race of bird people, is bathing one day with her sisters in a mountain lake when a hunter,
