Muslims go back to the graveyards

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.