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following of thirty million.” This gave Mr. Wahid a comic-book character and confused him with somebody else in another country. Mr. Wahid’s eyes were not good, but he wasn’t blind; he was only about fifty-two or fifty-three; and he wasn’t a cleric.
    Sixteen years before, people had been just as anxious for me to see Mr. Wahid, but then it was for another reason.
    In 1979 Mr. Wahid and his
pesantren,
the Islamic boarding-school movement, had been thought to be at the forefront of the modern Muslim movement. The pesantren had the additional glory at that time of having been visited by the educationist Ivan Illich and pronounced good examples of the “deschooling” he favored. Deschooling wasn’t perhaps the best idea to offer village people who had been barely schooled. But because of Illich’s admiration the pesantren of Indonesia seemed to be yet another example of Asia providing an unexpected light, after the obfuscations of colonialism. And a young businessman of Jakarta, a supporter of Mr. Wahid’s, arranged for me to visit pesantren near the city of Yogyakarta. One of the pesantren was Mr. Wahid’s own; it had been established by his family.
    There had followed two harrowing days: looking for the correct places first of all, moving along crowded country roads between crowded school compounds: usually quiet and sedate at the entrance, but then all at once—even in the evening—as jumping and thick with competitive life as a packed trout pond at feeding time: mobs of jeering boys and young men, some of them relaxed, in sarongs alone, breaking off from domestic chores to follow me, some of the mob shouting, “Illich! Illich!”
    With that kind of distraction I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, and I am sure I missed a lot. But deschooling didn’t seem an inappropriate word for what I had seen. I didn’t see the value of young villagers assembling in camps to learn village crafts and skills which they were going to pick up anyway. And I was worried by the religious side: the very simple texts, thevery large classes, the learning by heart, and the pretense of private study afterwards. In the crowded yards at night I saw boys sitting in the darkness before open books and pretending to read.
    It wasn’t the kind of place I would have liked to go to myself. I said this to the young Indonesian who had come out with me from Jakarta as my guide and interpreter. He was bright and educated and friendly, always a little bit on my side in all our adventures. Now he dropped all courtesies and became downright irritated. Other people, when they heard what I had said about the pesantren, also became irritated.
    At the end of the two days I met Mr. Wahid in his pesantren house. I wrote about our meeting, but it was strange that, until I re-read what I had written, I had no memory of the man or the occasion. It might have been the fatigue of the two days, or it might have been the shortness of our meeting: Mr. Wahid, busy as ever on pesantren business, was going to Jakarta that evening, and couldn’t give me much time. Or—and this is most likely—it might have been because of the very dim light in Mr. Wahid’s sitting room: it was a great strain to try to see him through the gloom, and I must have given up, been content with his voice, and remained without a picture.
    What he said explained much of what I felt about the pesantren. Before Islam they would have been Buddhist monasteries, supported by the people of the villages and in return reminding them of the eternal verities. In the early days of Islam here they would have remained spiritual places, Sufi centers. In the Dutch time they would have become Islamic schools. Later they would in addition have tried to become a more modern kind of school. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, where Islam was comparatively recent, the various layers of history could still be easily perceived. But—this was my idea, not Mr. Wahid’s—the pesantren ran all the separate ideas