“You can classify us as moderates,” he intoned, “but we believe in fundamentals: that Islam is the solution to everything. We were born before the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, and we can live as brothers.”
Not everyone agreed with him, certainly not his Chinese and Indian countrymen, and with more and more Malays rejecting his theocratic vision even in Kelantan, he might have adopted a different tone. But he remained defiant, blaming PAS’s electoral losses on UNMO’s control of the levers of power, including the judiciary, the security forces, and the media. UNMO had in his mind devised a form of autocratic government as corrupt as any in the Middle East, and Husam seemed to relish the disparity in power between the ruling party and PAS, seeing in it a metaphor for his province.
“Kelantan is so small,” he said, “small enough to free itself. Not Malaysia.”
I took him to mean that a theocratic ideal could serve as a model for the rest of his country, and I agreed with his idea that change comes from the periphery. This was, after all, one lesson of the Christian anchorites who settled in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, fleeing cities to devote their lives to God; what they made in solitude, a monastic system of prayer and fasting and the study of scripture, continues to shape Christian thought, including my own. I keep near my desk the sayings of the Desert Fathers, a compendium of wisdom born of their experience of faith; in their desire to live by the teachings of Jesus I recognized a mechanism of reform that may be universal: the center stagnates, corruption sets in, and from the periphery idealists seek to return to their origins—of a faith, a literary heritage, a political tradition. What the Desert Fathers discovered in their devotions was a corrective to the newly Christianized Roman Empire, in which a heretofore religious minority subjected to draconian forms of discrimination had assumed authority; the marriage of church and state made deviation from the ideals of the early church inevitable, as Christian rulers inevitably compromised on issues temporal and eternal; in the desert the religious sought to return to the purity of faith preached by Jesus, cultivating interiority in much the same manner that a later generation of reformers, Sufis disillusioned by the growing worldliness of Islam, tried to recover Muhammad’s message of liberty and love, the mystical heart of the faith. In both cases, Christian and Islam, reformers created a healing force.
But some reformers resort to violence, the David and Goliath narrative having inspired oppressed believers since—well, the time of David and Goliath, if not before. This was what led Osama bin Laden to send his men on a suicide mission to New York and Washington, hoping to rid Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Mecca and Medina, of the American military bases established there during the Gulf War. (In this he was successful : the Bush administration closed the bases in 2003.) And it was what prompted a band of Serbian terrorists to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, setting off the Great War. I asked Husam if he thought another world war was in the offing, this time between Islam and the West.
“I don’t believe there is a clash of civilizations,” he said. “America doesn’t have to worry about Malaysia. Our role is to bring people to understand Islam. From the beginning PAS distanced itself from terrorism. That’s our contribution to peace.”
And the proscription on main puteri?
Husam made a halfhearted attempt at humor. “We do not ban the traditional dances, we ben them,” he said, lazily pronouncing the word in the Malay style. “We bend them and blend them, because culture is a dynamic thing for us.”
But his idea of bending or blending, Eddin later explained, was to strip from the ceremonies all Hindu, shamanic, and fantastic elements. PAS had even instituted a code of ethics for shadow puppetry, which required the use of lifelike puppets to tell didactic stories. Once onstage, however, the puppet masters would take out their classical puppets and let their angin take over, literally throwing the code to the winds.
The dancer bent his fingers all the way back to his wrists and smiled. Eh Chom Eh Kuan, the legendary performer of the Buddhist dance drama known as manora, possessed the suppleness of a man half his age. And his smile broadened when the younger of his two wives served us tea in the living room of his house near the Thai border.
“Are Buddhists allowed to have two wives?” I whispered to Eddin.
He grinned. “Only if you are the master of manora!”
Eh Chom, who came from a long line of dancers, was Kelantan’s last remaining manora performer trained in the traditional style—which meant that at the age of nine he was sent to live in a Buddhist temple, and after four years of intensive instruction he was raised as a girl so that he could develop the grace required for the role of manora, a bird-woman in the Jataka tradition of tales about the previous births of the Buddha. Professor James Brandon retells her story in Theatre in Southeast Asia: how Manora, the youngest of seven daughters of the king of a mythical race of bird people, is bathing one day with her sisters in a mountain lake when a hunter, entranced by her beauty, steals her wings and tail; her sisters fly away, the hunter takes her to the palace of his own king, and there she falls in love with the crown prince. They marry in due course, and when he is sent off to war she is betrayed by a conniving minister, who convinces the king that she is a threat to him and must be put to death. The order is given to burn her alive, and as the flames rise around her she pleads to have her wings and tail returned. Her request is granted—what harm can there be in that?—and now, miraculously, she rises above the fire and ascends to the heavens. The prince’s triumphant return from war turns to tragedy when he learns that Manora has vanished, and so he sets out to find her, searching for seven years, seven months, and seven days, overcoming many obstacles, until he climbs to the summit of the Himalayas, home of the bird people, where no mortal has ever gone. There he is reunited with Manora, and they live happily ever after. In the last verse of the tale it is revealed that the prince is in fact a previous incarnation of the Buddha.
Manora is the most popular Buddha birth story performed in Southeast Asia, and for centuries all-male troupes played the roles of the bird-woman and the prince. But over time women were trained for the drama, and indeed Eh Chom’s second wife played Manora in his troupe, which for more than twenty years had performed for large crowds until PAS deemed the dance antithetical to orthodox Islamic teachings. Now she was embroidering headgear for the second of her two sons, who in two months’ time would be initiated into the troupe, carrying on his father’s work. Eh Chom’s soul would never rest if he died without passing on the tradition, said Eddin, who was documenting every aspect of manora—transcribing its repertoire, recording its catalogue of songs, plays, and music, detailing its rituals. Manora incorporates elements of Buddhist worship and Malay forms of storytelling and music making—a typical performance features both Thai and Malay dancers; the troupe of young men and women that Eh Chom was training, with Pusaka’s support, came from both sides of the border. The strange thing, Eddin added, is that Thais dominated on this side of the border, Malays on the other.
“Boundaries are ludicrous things,” he said.
Here the lines blurred between Buddhism and Islam, a mingling of discourses that might have intrigued the Trappist monk and contemplative writer Thomas Merton, whose dialogue with other religions was for me a model of spiritual inquiry ; his exploration of the mystical heart of faith fired my own thinking. On the day that I finished reading his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in graduate school, my mind was set aflame with questions of faith. I set out on foot for a nearby canyon in Salt Lake City, where I was living. One of my creative writing professors