Muslims go back to the graveyards

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): At least for a few days each year life returns to the graveyards of the city. During this period makeshift shops crop up before the entrance and line the pathway crisscrossing the length and breadth of the last resting place of countless dead people. Flowers are a much-wanted commodity, while teenage peddlers do brisk business hawking food and drinks.

Youngsters armed with broomsticks and scythes earn money sweeping individual graves and trimming the shrubbery on request. Those with a flair for quoting from the Koran are hired to recite prayers on behalf of a stream of visitors who are all Muslim but reveal little sense of contradiction in also practicing adat (native customs) handed down to them from pre-Islamic times.

It is not obligatory for Muslims to visit graveyards at this time of the year and yet millions do so out of habit and from practicing customary rituals inherited from their elders. Clad in trousers and a colorful blouse, and with her head covered by a lace scarf, pretty Murti Mulyaningsih was visiting the gravesides of her mother and her parents-in-law at the Karet public cemetary in central Jakarta, a day before the start of the holy month of Ramadhan.

At the end of this month of fasting she will return like she has every year to reconnect with the spirit of her dead ancestors. Although all the prayers she recites for her ancestors are special verses from the Koran like surat yasin.

She has made the holy pilgrimage to Mecca and considers herself a good Muslim. Her husband, an official with the local government in Jakarta, remembers being told in childhood to believe in the three rules of ibadat (devotion to God), ilmu (search for knowledge) and doa anak soleh (prayers of pious children).

According to Javanese tradition the dead need the prayers of those they have left behind so that God will have mercy, and forgive them of all wrongdoings, and as a consequence release the soul from bondage forever. Murti Mulyaningsih and her husband came to the graveyard accompanied by their daughter, a sixth grader, perhaps in the hope that she will also remember to pray for them when the time comes.

Andallas Maulana, 35, who has a five-year-old child, says that he prays at his grandfather's grave to appease the spirits that might distract him in his devotion to God during the holy month of Ramadhan. At the end of the month-long fasting period he will offer a prayer of gratitude to the spirit of his ancestor and request blessings from God for tranquility, safety and prosperity.

Pensioner Subardo, 66, comes regularly at this time of the year to visit the grave of his second daughter Sulasmiyati Rahayu, who died in 1958.

"My wife knows what prayers to recite. I just accompany her," said the father of eight, who was seen sprinkling red and white flower petals on the grave of the one child he lost.

Many Javanese Muslims are known to indulge in mystical activities like meditating, burning incense and making offerings to spirits of ancestors, along with performing their prayers five times a day in a mosque with fellow Muslims. In fact mysticism is at the very heart of Javanese culture and whatever religion they might practice; a certain spiritual attitude toward reality seems to come naturally to most Javanese.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz believed that Java is the only place in the world where it is possible to have a peasant give a lengthy discourse on the ultimate nature of reality along with a mystical meaning of God while standing in the fields. The result is a lot of tolerance amongst the majority of people who have blended into their religion a long list of complex beliefs without feeling the need to go to war over one particular ideology.

Eddy, 47, is a driver by profession. Since he was a teenager he has been working at the Karet public cemetery, cleaning graves. Even at this stage in his life he returns to do the same job, earning up to Rp 10,000 a day.

But he swears that it is not the money that keeps bringing him back to the graveyard. It just makes him feel good to be able to take care of the dead. Asked if he was not afraid to be surrounded by so many dead people, Eddy grinned: "I do not fear these poor souls. But when I was younger I was petrified of jin (spirits)."

At that time this graveyard was hidden in between thick rubber plantations that made the place an ideal home for spirits, both good and evil. With so much construction and so many people working here, it is the jin who are probably afraid of us now, joked Eddy, who feels that he is a good Muslim.

Perhaps not, according to Mohammad Irfan, 29, a scholar from the Indonesian Ulemas Council, who says that there is no room for ancestor worship and relationships with spirits of the dead in Islam.

He told The Jakarta Post that he has no idea as to why so many Indonesians visit the graveyard a day before the start of Ramadhan, and that he most certainly does not.