ABANDONING THE ‘GARDEN OF MAGIC’

Abstract

Until the mid 20th century, the religious landscape of the village areas in Bima – the easternmost regency on the island of Sumbawa – was an amalgam of Islamic and pre-Islamic beliefs and ritual practices that anthropologists usually subsume under the notion of syncretism. From the 1960s onwards such ideas including the belief in the existence of spiritual beings to whom humans were tied through ritual exchange, and in the presence of a spiritual essence that was considered to animate various types of ‘living’ entities including people, cultivated plants and several categories of material objects were increasingly antagonised by Islamic reformers who up to the present are trying to eradicate all local beliefs and ritual performances considered inconsistent with the ‘purity’ of scripturalist Islam. This article gives a brief historical outline of the Islamisation of Bima, identifies the factors contributing to the local upsurge of reformist Islam embodied by the local Mecca pilgrims and discusses the fundamental religious changes brought about by Muhammadiyah- sponsored Islamic boarding schools.

Notes

¹Up to the beginning of the 19th century, three other petty kingdoms existed on the northern Tambora peninsula of Sumbawa: Tambora, Pekat (Papekat), and Sanggar. Tambora and Pekat were disappeared from the map after the eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815. Sanggar was also heavily affected, but parts of the population survived.

²In 2003 Sumbawa regency was further divided into Sumbawa and Sumbawa Barat bringing the number of regencies on the island of Sumbawa to four.

³Fieldwork in Bima was undertaken from 2001 to 2003 under the auspices of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia. Additional field research was conducted in 2006. My research focused in particular on the village communities of Renda (kecamatan Belo) and Tente (kecamatan Woha); shorter periods of research were also conducted in the villages of Rite and Ntoke (kecamatan Wera).

⁴During the reign of Abi'l Khair Sirajuddin various Makassar institutions and titles were adopted in Bima and incorporated according to local needs. These included the six officers of the Jeneli (Mak.: Jennang) who acted as the local regents of the various districts in the sultanate, and the gelarang – the principal government officials at village level. Makassar cultural influence increased when thousands of refugees fled Gowa after it was taken by the Dutch in 1669 (Andaya 1981: 208–27). Several hundred of the refugees settled in Bima and married local nobles. For a full account of titles and the socio-political order of the sultanate of Bima, see Prager (forthcoming).

⁵Another version (see Damsté 1941) attributes the contract with the Malays and the foundation of Kampung Melayu to Dato ri Bandang's grandson, Maharajalela; his name was probably modelled on the chief of the Malay community in Makassar whose heroic role in the war between Makassar and the VOC appears in the Sja'ir Perang Mengakasar (see Sutherland 2004).

⁶The ‘Malays’ played a dominant role in the court of Bima as translators and go-betweens in matters of ‘international’ trade. They knew Jawi and worked as court scribes entrusted with keeping records that were noted in the Bo, the Bimanese palace chronicle (see Hitchcock 1994).

⁷The U'a Pua ritual was abandoned in the early 1940s (see Damsté 1941), probably due to the sensitivities of Islamic modernists who were increasingly dissatisfied with royally sponsored ritual practices that to them seemed ‘backward’ and ‘feudal’, or worse, ‘pagan’. Some older Muhammadiyah informants told me that the U'a Pua was discontinued because of its pagan overtone (the Qur'an covered with flowers, etc.), and that dances performed on the wooden platform house by four Bimanese girls and four boys from Kampung Melayu were considered ‘erotic’. However, the U'a-Pua was revived in 2006 following the election of Ferry Zulkarnain, a direct descendant of Bima's last Sultan Muhammad Salahuddin, as Bupati of Bima.

⁸In theory the dari were endogamous and membership was hereditary, though there were special regulations concerning the dari membership of the offspring in case of inter-dari marriage. Chambert-Loir and Salahuddin (1999: 619–23) provide the most detailed and reliable list to date of the various dari, their sub-units, and respective specialisations. For an analysis of the concordances between the Bimanese task groups and the Makassar Tukajannangang from which the dari presumably derived, see Prager (forthcoming).

⁹After the VOC had defeated Makasar in 1669, the Dutch established a resident and a small garrison in Bima town at the end of the 17th century. The VOC enforced unilateral trade conditions but did not encroach upon the local socio-political order. Dutch colonialism in Bima in the proper sense commenced only in 1908 when Bima was subjected to a governmental reform that led to fundamental changes within the local political order, see Couvreur 1917; Prager (forthcoming).

¹⁰See Abdullah (2004: 206, n. 30) for an overview of the various local Islamic schools that were established up to the 1950s.

¹¹Cognates of the Bimanese term mori for ‘being alive’ are found in various Austronesian languages, though individual semantic connotations may differ from the Bimanese case: Wejewa: moripa, Wanukaka: morik; Tetum: moris; Savu: muri; Roti: moli; Old Javanese: hurip; Gayo: murip; Ponapean: mour etc.

¹²The idea of a four (or five) -part whole is widespread in Southeast Asia. The four-coloured rice is reminiscent of the Javanese slamentan offerings and the concept of the four spiritual siblings (Beatty 1999: 40–1); for a similar form of offerings among the Bugis see Pelras (1996: 201); for the Gayo highlands see Bowen (1993: 118–20, 193).

¹³Before entering school whether sekolah dasar, madrasah, or pondok-pesantren, Bimanese village boys and girls receive instruction in the reading of the Qur'an (ngaji karo'a) at the age of about five or six over a period of two to three years, commonly taught by village religious officials, the haji, or other knowledgeable men and women who consider themselves capable of acting as guru ngaji. Evidence that the children have mastered reading the sura of the Qur'an is demonstrated in a formal ceremony (khata karo'a) held at the home of the pupil's parents and usually attended by the teacher, the pupil's relatives and close neighbours. Some of the children who display a talent are taught the art of cantillation, at a later stage – to the pride of the parents – they may possibly go on to participate in one of the local or nationwide contests in Koran recitation.

¹⁴Aside from the ritual treatment of the dead, ancestors do not play a prominent role in Dou Mbojo cosmology. Descent is bilateral with the typical corollary of ‘genealogical amnesia’. However, the Dou Mbojo had terms for nine ascending generations – now only partially remembered – which implies that ancestors were once more salient than today.

¹⁵For similar criticism put forward by Islamic modernists on the practice of ‘feeding the dead’ among the Sasak of Lombok, see Telle (2000) and Cederoth (1996) for a general account on the development of Islamic modernism on Lombok.