In Memoriam Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, 1943-2021

Thursday last week, 28 July, Sjoerd van Koningsveld passed away. Two years younger than me, I felt impressed, because the end of life can be so close. Sjoerd was born in 1943 as the son of a Protestant minister in Leeuwarden, the Frisian province of the Netherlands. He studied Arabic and Islam at the (Protestant) Free University of Amsterdam. His dissertation was about a Spanish Arab-Latin dictionary of the 15th century. He proved that it was written for Arabs who wanted to study Latin. This was the time of the reconquista, when city after city was conquered by the Christian Spanish army, destroying seven centuries of Muslim domination of this great European country. His whole life he continued the study of this Muslim community and its fate under severe Christian rule. Two of his students, Herman Beck (now in Tilburg) and Gerard Wiegers (now professor in Amsterdam), continued this interest. Also Nico Kaptein (now in Leiden), was among his students, but Kaptein wrote a dissertation about the introduction of the maulid celebration of the Prophet's birthday in Fatimid Egypt.

After finishing his studies in Amsterdam, he became keeper of the Arab manuscripts in Leiden University library, later moved to the theological faculty to teach Islam. Here quite a few Indonesian students met him for their studies in the Netherlands, because he was always willing to help new people coming to Leiden. Later he also had close relation to the Iraqi scholar Qasim al-Samarra'i and the Egyptian Nasr Hamid Aby Zayd. In the early 1980s he published a series of articles on the life and work of Snouck Hurgronje, venerated in Leiden as the greatest professor in Islamic Studies. He found in the archives firm proof that the father of Snouck was a Protestant minister who fled from Holland to England with the pregnant daughter of a colleague, leaving his own wife pregnant of a child as well in his home country. Snouck senior was thereupon dismissed from his function in the church. Nevertheless, Snouck junior studied theology, but also Arabic in Leiden, and became the government's advisor for native affairs in Batavia. Twice he married in the Dutch East Indies the daughter of a Sundanese penghulu, at the advice of the religious leader Hasan Mustafa. In the 1890s Snouck junior became also the advisor in the cruel war in Aceh.Van Koningsveld demythologised the fame of Snouck Hurgronje, stating that it is unethical to abuse academic studies and positions for such colonial oppression. The debate about this 'destruction of the image of Snouck Hurgronje' continues until today. Leiden professor Wim van den Doel in his recent (2021!) biography of Snouck. Het volkomen geleerdenleven van Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje), under the subtitle of Verguizing (=slander), spends five pages (534-540) to the deep emotional ties between Snouck and his Indonesian spouses and offspring.

In 1990 Sjoerd was nominated, still in Leiden, full professor for Islam in Europe. With the Dutch-Palestinian social scientist Wasif Shadid he started research about the recent arrival of Muslims in Western European countries. After several experiments he even started in Leiden a special education programme for future imams in the Netherlands, that proved to be not successfull. The combination of the Dutch model of secularised religious studies with the more practical training of a good functioning (but lowly paid) imam was not attractive for Muslim students.

Sjoerd was married to a Sino-Indonesian wife. They had two son, and two grandchildren. After divorce he remarried in the mid-1990s with Iraqi-born (1953) artist Afifa Aleiby, a well known painter in her own right. One of her paintings is included here to show angels who may welcome Sjoerd van Koningsveld in paradise. Perhaps at his surprise!

MEREBUT TAFSIR, a struggle for understanding

On 17 Februari 2021 Lies Marcoes (b. 1958) celebrated her 63d birthday. Just one year short of the 64 years of the Prophet Muhammad and one year short too of eight times eight year or windu. She received that day a great gift. Mirisa Hasfaria, a colleague and friend in her work for better positions of women, against enforced marriage of young girls, against old fashioned and irrational understanding of shari’a rules and similar issues, had collected 112 short pieces written for facebook (between 1-3 pages), sometimes also published in Kompas, Jakarta Post, Gatra and together with a longer interview with Mirisa herself and an opening letter by Nani Zulminarni, it became a literary corpus of 114, as many as the number of sura for the Qur’an. However, the title Merebut tafsir has no direct relation to interpretation of the Qur’an, it rather means that the book will try understand the problems and enigmas of the modern world of Indonesia, especially of Muslim women. It is not only an effort for understanding, it is also an activist initiative for change. In this way also the organization of a Ceribon Pesantren and Lies since 2010, Rumah KitaB  (=House of the BooK) has no direct relation to the Holy Book (only), but is an acronym for Our Common Home (Rumah Kita Bersama), the world where we live must be understood and odd things must be repaired and improved, because Lies is not only a researcher but also an activist. Moreover, she wants first to concentrate on concrete people, not on old texts. In three time months the first edition was sold out and the second is now in the market. Lies was so kind to send me a copy and below I will give some impressions.

The interview with Mirisa Hasfaria (235-244) tells how Lies, after graduation at IAIN, the State Academy for Islamic Studies in Jakarta in 1982, worked in the last decade of the Soeharto government mostly as a critical promotor of birth control for P3M, until she received from the Ford Foundation a fellowship to study medical anthropology in Amsterdam (2000, Master’s Thesis on Javanese Surinamese in the Netherlands and their views on health care, human reproduction). She saw the programme for birth control by the Soeharto government as just an instrument for  large-scale economic progress, without a good insight in the real need of women. It was often misunderstood. The programme was called Keluarga Berencana, usually KB, but kabeh also stands for ‘many’  (children, p. 53). In general it neglected the problems of teenagers: it was restricted for married people with already one or two children. In 2018 she wrote a column for the newspaper Kompas (here pp. 282-4) where she comes to the problem that has one of her major concerns since 2010: the high number of  marriages under 20 year. Research has proven that 45% of the girls in the age of 15-19 want to use contraceptives, but it is against the law to give it to them. In this field again and again she criticizes the 97% of teenagers who receive dispensation from the Religious Courts to marry under the legal age of marriage (minimal 19 years). Nationally about 20% of the marriages are of this kind. As a qualified scholar in Islamic studies she gives her own style of interpretation to the difficult and ambiguous term wali. In the end of 2016 there was the debate about the interpretation of the word by Jakarta Governor Ahok. In her own way Lies supports him (p.11). She also argues as former leader of the fiqh an-nisā programme at P3M that the term wali as a father (or even uncle, older brother) should not be abused to enforce a young girl, dependent, without a network of her own, often poor, into a marriage that is profitable for her wali or ‘protector’s’ sake (p. 35). She also connects the abuse of  the power of the wali to one of the major causes, the overpopulation in agrarian regions, where most people no longer have (enough) land to live from. In her general disgust of patriarchy or manipulation of women by men, she includes also the headscarf and more radical clothing of women in funny descriptions of jilbabisasi and the ‘policy of kebaya’. Quite interesting is also her view on older people (in Tafsir no 38, 65, 74). She writes lovely about the mudik, visiting the parents at the end of Ramadan. But she is critical about the position of elderly as ‘guests’ in the house of one of their children: it is often not a bless, but the end of independence and authority for the older people. From little children, teenagers, women in general, to older people: she puts the individuals and their development first. In a more general formula she defines the goal of the ‘struggle for understanding’ as below: ‘To bring back tafsir to its role of defending the oppressed, we must confront the text with actual life. In this sense the direction of understanding must be clear. It must give a thirst for liberation to and by those who are harassed by social structures and ‘class’.’ (See the text below, ' p 2 in Tafsir 1,  a commentary on ideas of Ziba Mir-Hosseini)

The major isues of Muslim feminist theology are here exposed mostly in concrete cases. The six are: 1. against poligamy; 2. pro gender equality; 3. ladies can be called alima, or ulama, 4. men have no right to beat their spouses; 5. against marriage of children and teenagers; 6. against jilbab, One very special case here is about poligamy. 'Tafsir 79' about a seminar about poligamy. The entrance fee was 4 millin rupiah or € 400, which tells us about the goal of peple seeking a seond wife. They live in a marriage as in business: to keep one for manager in the household, another one for pleasure. This is the reason that in most cases men take a second wife in secret. The first wife knows nothing, children also are not involved! Quite funny too is her description of some male scholars of Islamic law, especially of  ‘the conversion or metamorphosis of Kiai Husein Muhammad’. This learned man had some strange ideas about the menstruation of women: ‘it feels as if they must piss, and they feel when it stops..’ But later he was corrected by the women themselves and considered as a ‘feminist Muslim scholar’ and he received a doctorate honoris causa from the Islamic University of Semarang in 2019 (57-61). When  read this I felt sorry for Lies that she could never fulfil the invitation to write a doctoral dissertation in Australia, due to medical problems. Perhaps we should consider  this book as her doctoral dissertation, or as a book that may stimulate a doctorate honoris cause for this researcher in the field of Islamic feminism or fiqh an-nisā? Also quite funny is her description of another famous personality in Indonesian Islam, Mama Dedeh (29-32). She followed the formal regular courses like Lies: pesantren, the State University of Islamic Studies, but developed as a specific example of traditional Javanese preaching: serious matters mixed with good humorous jokes.  She mixes her daily very early (five o’clock  in the morning) short speeches in television with Arab phrases, but also many common jokes, representing the Islam Nusantara or local Indonesian Islam, seen as the true answer to Salafi Islam. We must thank Mirisa Hasfaria who composed from the Facebook messages and scattered printed material such a lively and wide-ranging collection. It is complete and reliable as to the valuable contributions of Lies Marcoes. This is truly a very direct and concrete report of the contemporary debate on the issue of women, modern culture and Islamic law and local traditions in Indonesia.

For a review of one of the earlier books by Lies Marcoes see my former blog: http://relindonesia.blogspot.com of 3 January 2015, A journey against defeat. – Karel Steenbrink, Utrecht, 12 July 2021.

Dutch colonialism under fire, again

 During the last 15 years again and again aspects of Dutch colonialism have been put forward, often to criticize this long history. In December 2008 ten widows of men who were shot in the village of Rawagede without any process on 9 December 1947 started a court case against the Dutch State in The Hague. On 9 December 2011 they received € 20.000 each. In 2018 another case was started against the Dutch State in favour of men whose fathers were killed in February 1947 in a very strange way. As part of punishing anti-Dutch villages, besides setting houses in fire and shooting people running away, the Dutch held boxing contests between two men: the one who lost was shot, while the winner was saved. There was no reason for this arbitrary killing, under order of one Captain Rijborz of KNIL, the colonial army. On 7 May 2021 the court decided that two sons of victims of these killings will receive € 5.000: one Santa, son of Jabu from Lisu and Alwi Ros, son of La Miru from Amparita. There is much criticism now in the press about the slow process and the low amount given for a war crime so many years ago. By contrast I include here a picture of a calm group of KNIL soldiers, and the modern Puskesmas of Amparita.

The debate continues: from the genocide in Banda under Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, to many war crimes in the period 1946-1949. Also in the recent biography of Muslim scholar Snouck Hurgronje, much details about his involvement in cruelties in the conquest of Aceh were given. The latest field of interest is slavery. Although most facts are given about the Dutch involvement in the slave trade between West Africa/Ghana and Central America, more and more is written now about the Dutch participation in the slave trade between Asian regions. The city of Amsterdam has ordered research and a book is published on the subject on De slavernij in oost en west where Wim Manuhutu wrote about the slaves introduced by the VOC to replace the Bandanese killed under the command of Coen. He also called for a more systematic research of the history of slavery. Also the American series of demonstrations for Black Lives Matter, has supported this interest in the dark side of Dutch colonial history.

Maaike Derksen on Dutch Colonialism as 'Embodied Encounters'

 Today I attended the live-stream examination of the doctoral dissertation by Maaike Derksen at Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The title if the dissertation is Embodied Encounters. Colonial Governamentality and Missionary Practices in Java and South Dutch New Guinea, 1856-1942. 

The title refers to the book on British colonialism: Missions and Empire, where it is stressed that the missionary enterprise was not just a religious activity, but had connections in the spread of Western cultural practices, education. Two chapters of the book concentrate on the Catholic mission in Java, mostly on the Jesuits and their schools in Muntilan and the Heithuyzen (now Semarang) Sisters and their boarding school in Mendut (see the book by Mangunwijaya Ballada Dara-dara Mendut). Two more chapters concentrate on the difficult start of mission (and colonialism per se) in Merauke, to guarantee the Eastern border of the Dutch colony since 1905 and stop head hunting by the local tribe of the Marind Anim.

The pictures are the reality of zoom presentation. In fact Maaike Derksen is a convincing and very lively speaking person and she showed a deep affection to her subject. Missionary activity was not only an expansion of Catholicism (it was today all very Catholic, with few references to the Protestant missions). Colonialism was here mostly seen as a cultural project (ethical policy!) and mission with its education, hospitals and close encounter with people of Western life style, was part of it. Even the terminology of 'soft colonialism' has been used here for the involvement of religious organizations in the colonial world. 

In the 50 minutes of academic questions and answers not much specific could be questioned: after eleven years of work on the dissertation, this was only the closing ceremony with some 30 people in the huge room and some more (perhaps) watching through the zoom technology. Derksen wants to continue her work  by GEDINMU: Gedeeld Erfgoed Delen: Indonesische/Nederlandse Missiecollecties Uitgewisseld, a programme of exchange of data of Dutch archives with Indonesian researchers.  Yesterday I received an interesting request in this field: the Indonesian PRR Sisters of East Flores (Lebau/Larantuka) hope that their founder, Archbishop Gabriel Manek will be given the honour of being a saint of the Catholic Church. Therefore they look for documents from/about him, as many as possible. I will look for more material, although it will take some time (and money in Rome!) to have a true Saint Gabriel Manek in Larantuka!

Again: the Dutch and their bad feelings about the colonial past

 Recently, I wrote already about the museum in Hoorn, where Jan Pieterszoon Coen was born and their condemnation of the genocide in Banda, May 1621, 400 years ago. This week there were again two initiatives that strengthened bad feelings about the Dutch and their own past.

The first is the first movie from the Dutch side on the cruel war by Captain Westerling in South Sulawesi. The movie De Oost shows the naive young soldiers who were lured to the last colonial war with the idea that 'they should defend the Indonesians against the self-interest of Sukarno, who created a nation full of internal conflicts'. In fact, in the movie a young soldier becomes member of the troops who under command of 'the Turk' (the common name for Raymund Westerling) terrorised the villages of South Sulawesi by setting many of them in fire and brutally killing all adult men. The movie De Oost is not yet shown in cinemas (closed due to the Covid-19 pandemy), but can be seen at Amazon's prime video and has created a renewed debate in the country. The story-line of the movie reminded me of the jihadi warriors who went to Afghanistan, Irak and Syria in order to do good, defend Islam against its enemies, while for many of them it was a deception, as decribed in the book by Beatrice de Graaf, below.

Veterans from the 1945-1949 in Indonesia criticised the movie because it would suggest that all elements of the army had been involved in violent warfare and indiscriminate killing of Indonesians. Two scholars of the KITLV, the Leiden institute for Indonesian studies, criticised the movie, because it gave no attention to the bravery of the Indonesian soldiers and only showed the brutal tactics of the Dutch army.

The other issue in our country these days is the great exhibition in the Rijksmuseum, the great national museum in Amsterdam, which focuses on the history of slavery and the involvement of the Dutch. This is usually only the story of trade of slaves for the Americas. But now also the Dutch involvement in Asian slavery is shown. First of all this was the case in Banda, where the population of about 15.000 mostly was killed, then the rest sold as slaves in Batavia, while other slaves were brought to Banda to work in the nutmeg culture. But in many other ways the Dutch were involved in the slave trade from India up to Indonesia. A special case is the strong personality of Surapati: a boy who was taken as a slave from Bali to Batavia, where he served as a houseboy in the ansion of the rich Dutch trader Pieter Cnoll (who married a lady ofJapanese offspring).Then he created his own army of runaway slaves and founded a realm of his own in Eastern Java.

On the painting above we can see Surapati as a houseboy in the mansion of the Dutch trader Pieter Cnoll. Below he leads his army against the Dutch (notice the Red-White-Blue flag).

Dutch and Indonesian terrorism compared

 Beatrice de Graaf (b. 1976) is a Dutch scholar on the history of terrorism. Recently she published a book with the title: Radicale Verlossing: wat terroristen geloven (2021, Prometheus Amsterdam, 383 pages). The title can be translated as: Radical Redemption. What terrorists believe. On page 14 she identifies what she does not accept as methodological guidelines: 1) "Islam is a peaceful religion. Muslim terrorists therefore cannot be accepted as Muslims." 2) "Religion in general and more specifically Islam invites its believers to be violent." Both position are rejected by De Graaf. Instead she takes as her methodology, that the actual modern terrorists often claim that they have religious motivations and this must be taken serious. Not the basic religious texts, not theology, but the actual motivation of terrorists must be taken as a starting point.

In many life stories, she found that terrorists were seeking some kind of redemption from personal sin, from a lost life, frustrations and negative feelings. Quite many of them were as teenager small criminals, who sought a radical redemption in a turn towards 'Islam', whatever they may have understood about it.

De Graaf was born in de Dutch village of Putten, known for its orthodox Protestant population, went as a child twice to church services on Sundays and still holds a good memory of the pious environment in which she grew up. For her research De Graaf interviewed 18 young men put in jail because of terrorist acts in the Netherlands. One of these was of Dutch offspring and was member of a small group that tried to set a mosque in fire in the town of Enschede. All 17 other young men originated from Muslim families, most of them from Morocco, some from Iran or Turkey. They had been jailed for terrorist actions and De Graaf could interview them in prison. All of them had no thorough knowledge of classical Islam and most of them had a history of contact with the police for drug addicts, thefts. De Graaf's method is called by her as thick description and micro history. Narratives fill about 70% of her book and she moves then to 'grounded theory', or a general theory grounded in facts rather than theoretical models or reasoning from sacred texts.

She also included five Indonesians in her research and took interviews in Jakarta from  24-27 February 2020 (with good help from the side of the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta and BNPT or Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terorisme: the National Counter Insurgency of Indonesia).The five ex-terrorists were Sofyan Tsauri, Kurnia Widodo, 'Ramli' (a self-chosen name of a terrorist), Syarafina Nailah (member of a large family, whose father and uncle are still in prison), Farihin.  She gives a very positive impression of the way BNPT works to de-radicalize terrorists. A difference with Dutch terrorists is also that some of the older terrorists of Indonesia have a history of parents or even a grand-father, going back to the 1950s like Darul Islam in West Java. Also the debate about the Jakarta Charter and the introduction of shari'a is typical Indonesian. Common ground is found in the positive attitude to the war in Afghanistan and the rise of IS in Syria and Iraq. And most of all in the individual quest for Radical Redemption.

Sofyan Tsauri was born in 1976 in Depok. His father was a police officer, the family seldom went to the mosque and prayed at irregular times. At secondary school Sofyan became a petty criminal and was arrested several times. At the age of 18 a friend suggested him to read books by Sayyid Qutb and Shaikh Azzam. He realized 'that I had to change my life. I should cleanse my soul from all evil acts. ... I should not only think about myself, but spend my energy and agression in favour of others.' He started dreaming of the desert of Afghanistan, 'we were hiding in caves and we had grenades and guns who always hit the target. And my ammunition never was finished.'[88] But he would never make it to Afghanistan. After secondary school he went to a pesantren, a religious school, besides studying at the police academy. In the pesantren he met some teachers who had fought in Afghanistan and the book by Shaykh Azzan, Ayaturrahman fi JihadilAfghan became his favourite. He left the circle of Muslim Brothers, because they were only talking, had no actions and became in 2007 member of Jemaah Islamiyah, more or less the Indonesian branch of Al-Qaida, With his friend Dulmatin he went to Aceh to start a training camp. He did not tell to his police department, where he had worked for several years that he left his job. Also to his father he did not say anything. He was active in the camp in Aceh, in processes of securing weapons from corrupt police fellows, until the camp was arrested on 6 March 2010, put in jail for six years (after a first verdict of ten years). Already before his arrest he concluded from readings from Usama bin Laden, that it is not allowed to kill fellow Muslims. De Graaf only gives very short and incomplete life stories: she only uses the cases as illustrations for her major thesis aboutthe Radical Redemption.

The most interesting  story resulted from the interview with Syarafina Nailah, member of a great family. Her father worked in Batam as government official in a quite good position. But she, and even more her younger sister Nur Dhania were not happy in Batam: life without meaning (151-6). Nailah was at university for her study of computer science, Dhania still at high school. The two girls  listened to stories of a brother of her mother, a devout Muslim who had heard stories about life in the Islamic State as a truly Muslim paradise. Thisuncle had problems with his business and so the three dreamt of going to Syria in order to become a citizen of the new caliphate. Moreand moremembers of the family became happy with the idea of a new life: the father sold the family house in Jakarta and in August 2015 the extended family, 18 members left for Turkey (6 more members could in the end not follow themajority). Already in the first weeks they saw that the Caliphate was not a good place: everything dirty, even the hospital, strict separation between men and women and the obligationfor men to join the fighting. The Caliphate was a disastrous utopia. Communication with people of the caliphate was very difficult and it took them two years before they could reach Turkey, where the Indonesian government facilitated the return to Indonesia. (Something the Dutch government is quite reluctant to provide!) The grandmother of the family had died in hospital and put in a anonymous grave before the members could perform the burial rituals. The father and theuncle were sentenced to four years of prison because they had become member of a terrorist organization. The female members of the party had to attend de-radicalization programmes and a re-integration course.

In general this is a quite interesting book, but it remains difficult to formulate general qualifications for the 18 Dutch and 5 Indonesian terrorists from the short andsomewhat defective life stories.

In Memoriam DD, Daniel Dhakidae

Last week, Thursday 22 April, I had the rare experience of a succesful webinar. Elga Sarapung and Dian/Interfidei in Yogyakarta held a memorial for Daniel Dhakidae. DD was born on 22 August 1945, only five days after the declaration of Independence of Indonesia. He passed away on 6th April 2021. After a traditional youth (born in Ngada, Flores) of minor seminary in Mataloko, about 2,5 years of major seminary in Ledalero, he moved to UGM in Yogyakarta, where he obtained his BA in Ilmu Administrasi Negara: insight in the government administration, while he since then would work as support vor non-Governmental 0rganizations, NGO. First (1976-1984) he was with the journal Prisma and LP3ES, founded by Dawam Rahardjo (and also publisher of my doctoral dissertation on Pesantren). In the mid-1980s he moved to Cornell where he wrote a prize winning dissertation The State, the Rise of Capital and the fall of journalism in Indonesia where he argued that the Soeharto government  had killed the free press and it lively debate on the state of Indonesia, by its policy that only the New Order style of 'development' should be presented. After returning to Indonesia he became active in the newspaper Kompas as chief R&D, Litbang from 1995-2005.

The webinar was interreligious as usual with DIAN: opened by Machasin from UIN and Depag, anthropologist  Laksono had a nice story about Flores where the penjajah was absen and therefore people never feeled colonised. Noorhalis Majid from Banjarmasin,  Muhammad Taufik from Padang: the work of DD for Prisma (1975-1984) and Kompas (after his Cornell period).  Zakaria Ngelow from Makassar saw him as a cendekiawan with a social commitment. He was not a man of agama or the  bureaucracy of religion, but rather of personalised iman. All speakers had five minutes. Inevitably, I also had  to add something and I praised Ritapiret and Ledalero for  their cosmopolitan education, especially  the basis for classical and modern (Western!) languages.