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together and created the kind of mishmash I had seen.
    While we talked there had been some chanting going on outside: an Arabic class. Mr. Wahid and I went out at last to have a look. The chanting was coming from the verandah of a very small house at the bottom of the garden. The light was very dim; I could just make out the teacher and his class. The teacher was one of the most learned men in the neighborhood, Mr. Wahid said. The pesantren had built the little house for him; the villagers fed him; and he had, in addition, a stipend of five hundred rupiah a month, at that time about eighty cents. So, Islamic though he was, chanting without pause through his lesson in Arabic law, he was descended—as wise man and spiritual lightning-conductor, living off the bounty of the people he served—from the monks of the Buddhist monasteries.
    I was immensely excited by his eighty-cents-a-month stipend and, when Mr. Wahid called him and he came and stood humbly before us in the great gloom, very small and pious and hunched, with very thick lenses to his glasses, I couldn’t get rid of the idea of the eighty cents and wondered how it was given and at what intervals.
    Mr. Wahid praised him while he stood before us and said he was thirty and knew a lot of the Koran by heart. I said it was marvelous, knowing the Koran by heart. “Half,” Mr. Wahid said. “Half.” And, considering the hunched man before us who had little else to do, I said with some sternness that it wasn’t good enough. He, the eighty-cents man, rounded his shoulders a little more, piously accepting and converting into religious merit whatever rebuke we might have offered him. And I feel that he was ready to round his shoulders a little more and a little more until he might have looked like a man whose head grew beneath his shoulders.
    It was he rather than Mr. Wahid who survived in my memory of that evening.

    The Jakarta businessman who had sent me to the pesantren in 1979 was Adi Sasono. He had been a supporter of Mr. Wahid then. But now he had moved away from him, and was on the other side, with the Association of Muslim Intellectuals. He had a big job with the association, and had a big office, with every kind of modern corporate trapping, high up in a big block in central Jakarta.
    He wanted me to know, when I went to see him, that in spite of appearances he had remained loyal to his old ideas about village uplift; it was Mr. Wahid who had been left behind. Once the pesantren schools were all right; now they weren’t.
    In the last century, in the Dutch time, the pesantren gave village people a kind of self-respect, and the pesantren heads, who were called
kiyai,
were a kind of informal local leader who could give some protection to village people. Times had changed; in the modern world the old system didn’t answer. The pesantren was owned by its kiyai; headship or ownership rights were passed down from father to son; so that, whatever the virtues of some kiyai, there was always the danger of “elitism” or “religious feudalism.”
    Adi said, “This traditional method of mobilizing people cannot be maintained in the long run. We need a more accountable process and a national collective decision-making.” In 1979 he had joined the pesantren movement to promote modern education—to complement traditional religiousteaching—and to promote rural development. He thought now that that job was being better done by the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, ICMI in its Indonesian acronym (pronounced “itch-me”). “We develop the people to be more independent in making their own decisions, especially concerning the challenge of big capital coming to the rural area. The kiyai—one man, and a man of privilege—cannot be the guarantee of the people’s life. So ICMI is more on the human resource development and the people’s economic development.”
    Adi had been moving towards it, and now at last it had come: Imaduddin’s missionary idea about the