A couple of
Australian publishers are currently being sent a segment of a MS titled
“Islamic Studies - East Asian Hemisphere,” which gathers writings that have
appeared on this blog over 6½ + years in the Tropics.
Here is the Introduction to that text.
The
acquaintance had begun with men from the Horn of Africa initially, Eritreans,
Somali, Sudanese, Ethiopians. A pair of Eritrean brothers, Faisal and Fausi,
ran the cafe that served tea and coffee and little else. Later there was enough
interest in ful to encourage Fausi to
cook up a pot after fajr, the dawn
prayer.
An accidental acquaintance. Cafe d’Afrique had been patronized once
or twice while the founding owner, an Ethiopian woman, was still running it. The
serious attraction began to develop, however, only a couple of years afterward
with Faisal’s manner and welcome behind the coffee machine.
A negative was the absence of women.
Who wanted to patronize a cafe where women were excluded? During the early
phase with the two Fs—an older and young brother were also F-named—a young
Eritrean Christian girl worked behind the counter. Taking an outdoor table and
watching the women of that East African community pass up and down the street, some
part of the absence was overcome.
In their behaviours, their sturdy
manners, poise and containment, these political refugees and survivors of their
various wars and conflicts brought back ghostly images from the past. To begin
with, mostly the parallels were unconscious. Like Montenegro, Eritrea had
endured a period of Italian occupation. Faisal and Fausi’s Grandfather, like
Baba’s father, had been dragooned to fight under the banner of the occupier.
(In Granddad Rade’s case the Austro-Hungarian; though the longer-term Venetian
influence was much stronger.)
There was a measured grace and
delicacy in these d’Afrique men,
across all the different groups and cultures. Indeed there was a kind of
Yugoslavia on display at those tables with Muslims and Christians sitting over
drinks together and quietly talking, sometimes laughing. In the case of the
Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians the Eastern Orthodox Rite was practiced.
Through the period of early discovery surprises followed one after another.
When the acquaintance with the Sudanese animists developed parallels there too
were uncovered. (In our Montenegrin hills the priest only visited on the high
marks of the calendar; for the rest of the time the community was left to its
own devices.)
Post-war in the back blocks of the Western suburbs of Melbourne among
our community there was never a sign of the “Turks;” the Muslims. In the early
years even Bosnian Serbs were rare, and therefore their particular antagonists
remained unheralded. For some reason there were plentiful Herzegovinians, Serbs
and Croats of course and us Montenegrins. As landlords of three and four
properties we were minor notables in the area, all the more so with Uncle
Jovo’s standing as a former gendarme commander.
Many of the men and their wives had come from refugee or Displaced
Persons camps in Italy, Austria, Germany and Poland. A number of German wives
were learning our language and religion, some more successfully than others.
There was a Serbian gypsy a few streets off, Chika Ostoja Cigo, Uncle
Ostoja the Gypsy, visiting on one remarkable occasion when he sat at the kitchen
table like on a rocking-chair, or ship at sea.
Croats might worship slightly
differently to us; that was their prerogative, Bab granted. There was only one
god after all. (If there was one, she would add once or twice in latter years
through the course of some particular matter.) A Turk and his god might have
been a challenge to her cosmology. Certainly there was never one to be seen of
that faith anywhere near our neighbourhood, or word of any in the vicinity. (At
the railway station at Sarajevo on her way out of the country Bab finally laid
eyes on a Turk from the annals, a richly swathed man sitting with his bula beside him in her wraps.)
The Turks were a kind of phantasm. In the talk at the kitchen table
with old Montenegrins they would be raised up and assume some dubious kind of
substance difficult to judge.
Turci.
Turcin.
Ghostly dread and abhorrence evoked
that seemed largely fanciful, mythic, taken from the land of poetry and fable.
Any Montenegrin worth his salt could quote from the famous poet of resistance,
Petar Petrovic Njegos, honoured by Goethe it later emerged.
Bab herself was incapable of hatred.
Anger, storms of indignation, strong-minded feeling; not hatred. When venom and
hatred did flash for the Turk it came
from the other Montenegrins, those from the interior who had inherited their
bitterness in earliest years, and more especially from the earlier generation
of parents and grandparents. Bab well understood the passion and could rise to
meet it.
In the vast majority of cases of
course these so-called Turks in
Yugoslavia were in reality our own who had converted.
Poturice.
It was your own who could become your
worst enemy.
On her return to her homeland after
thirty-six years Bab once entertained the driver and passengers on a local bus
plying the coastal route. There were no buses when she had left the country in
the mid-50s; after the Partizans assumed control post-war military lorries
would stop for footslogging comrades. Aboard the bus some kind of exchange had
started and Bab had been asked where she was from. Ready for most questions, Bab’s
answer came like a shot with the common declaration of an earlier age: “There
where no Turkish foot has ever set.”
An impolitic assertion late-term
Yugoslavia—the Second Yugoslavia, as the Communist period was termed in order
to distinguish it from the Royalist, when Uncle Jovo had done his gendarming;
forgivable however for a returnee in her mid-seventies. (In Italy Uncle had
forsworn a return to the country while the Commies ruled and his younger
brother could not abandon him. With the decision the wives being abandoned, reunions
finally ensuing only twelve and fourteen years later respectively.)
In one of the local history books
there was a suggestion that a “Turkish” warlord of some description had passed
through Village Uble, perhaps even settling for a time. Certainly he left no
impression; there had been nothing to keep him in those wilds of course. In the
mind of the village such an event had never taken place at all. Over at the new
capital Titograd/Podgorica it was a different story; in the other valleys the
same. Above Boka Kotorska rose the great totem Lovcen, behind which sat the old
capital of Cetinje, ruling a territory that had always been independent. In the
old historical cartography the encroachment of the Ottoman Empire in the
Balkans, where they had ruled five and six hundred years, excluded the tiny,
proud state of Crna Gora, Montenegro.
In teen years Bab had accepted a real
Turk, Sami from Anatolian Turkey, as tenant in one of the houses down the
street, where he remained with wife and child a number of years. When a
Montenegrin took up residence after him the man joked he should fumigate the
place first.
Mother had been a beauty in younger
years, one who had drawn a deal of attention. From mid-teens she had needed to
negotiate a tricky path. One unofficial engagement was abruptly broken off; on
another side seemly favour switched suddenly to outright rejection and hurt
pride resulting when better prospects opened. Among the rest of the admirers
there had been one proto-typical Turk,
Hasan the gendarme. Ordinarily a reasonable catch a gendarme: nice suit of
clothes, saved from tilling the fields and shepherding and pension in prospect.
But in the case of a Turk, god forbid. Hasan had no chance.
Maternal Baba Ruza had settled as a
young girl with her family just over the border in Herzegovina. The family of
seven or eight had fled adjoining Bosnia during one of the late 19th century
uprisings. In our village over the other side of the porous hill border lore
had it the people had fled before the Turks proper after the battle of Kosovo,
a couple of generations before the fall of Vizantium.
The project of accommodation between
the groups of the South Slavs, the Yugoslavs, only got properly started with
the founding of the new country in mother’s childhood, a federation she would
outlive by more than a dozen years.
On the South-East Asian equator, in
Singapore initially and then Malaysia (if not Indonesia), there were a good
many Turks to be seen among the
Malays, figures from the sketches in history books that included chapters on
“the Sick Man of Europe.” Animated, living figures there suggested possible
versions of Hasan the gendarme up in the hills of Montenegro in the ‘30s
attempting to make out with a young Montenegrin pretty.
The Malays, dubbed Nature’s gentlemen
by the English adventurer Stamford Raffles, were famously friendly and
welcoming. After the earlier introduction one was partly prepared for the
encounter. Dark, worn, craggy faces of granddads and grandmas at the market,
the eatery tables and the streets quickly brightened with smiles and
acknowledgement. At the outdoor eateries perfect strangers could not sit at
table before a plate without offering a portion.
The scarves and the manner of the girls
and women wearing them spun the brain further still. Through childhood and into
youth Bab, Auntie Anka and the other women of their generation had worn our
Eastern version that covered only the hair. (On one of the early visits to
Montenegro Aunt Andje showed what she rightly ought not—the combing out and
braiding that was wound around the head beneath the scarf.)
As the largest portion of the almost
seven years had been spent in Singapore, where the imposition of the colonial
language had been government policy since independence—add in laziness—only a
smattering of Bahasa was learned.
Among the numerous surprises was some shared vocabulary too—the Ottomans had
carried Arabic and Persian into the Balkans, as well as their own language.
The Muslim world on the S-E Asian
Equator offered much refreshment. (The Hindu and Buddhist likewise, though that
is another story.) The correspondences with the buried past was important, but
equally the resistance with which Islam met the excesses of globalism and
modernity. Living in a community where five times daily the call to prayer
sounded (or was scheduled in the case of Singapore, where amplification was forbidden)
reminded of another order. Perhaps only a minority actually lowered themselves
to the floor and their foreheads to the mats five times daily, but that example
loomed large. The month-long Ramadan fast was another protest against
consumption, indulgence and heedless routine. Television was abandoned in many
households during Ramadan, both during fasting hours and otherwise.
The relaxed compartmentalization of
other faiths could not compare. If there were evils in modernity, consumerism
and blind faith in technological advance that needed to be confronted, only earnest
and serious measures availed.
The original Asian Tiger, the Little
Red Dot hotspot of Singapore offered the most startling contradictions and
exemplifications. Singapore was the earliest social laboratory of its kind. The
history written by its boosters had the city-state putting Deng Zhao Ping to
school and the SEZs of Shenzhen and the rest following thereafter. The sheiks
in Dubai had learned from the model. PM Modi in India was a great enthusiast; a
new regional capital was currently being built from scratch in Andra Pradesh by
Singaporean know-how. The Australian PM had awarded honours to the Republic for
its accomplishments in urban planning.
Even within government ranks there was
some understanding that serious costs were involved. Gotong royong, the old community spirit, had got itself lost.
Community hubs and nodes were being created, more pavement trees planted,
assistance provided for those unable to get a foothold on the meritocratic
ladder. Could the egg be unscrambled?
The corporate capture was so complete
in Singapore, the innocent acceptance of branding all-pervasive; government
sloganeering went hand-and-hand with it.
At the very least Islam acted as a
circuit breaker; in this region taking a moderate form. Radical Islam had not
penetrated the fortress city-state at least; even in Indonesia and Malaysia it
was being contained.
Inevitably there was disappointment
when friends saw that despite the camaraderie and shared perspectives the hoped
for conversion was lagging. A former Chinese Singaporean girlfriend had by some
fluke chosen a hotel in Geylang Serai, the Muslim quarter, for a stop-over
either side of the last Montenegrin trip. Over the almost seven years we sat
for our tehs at Mr. Teh Tarik and its successor Al
Wadi, spitting distance from Darul
Arqam, the Converts’ Association on the other side of Onan Road. Many
Westerners were converting behind those walls, a fair proportion men wanting to
marry local Malay girls.
It was a simple, straightforward
matter, one was told occasionally, the mere acknowledgement of a greater force
or being sufficient. (In Islam proselytizing was proscribed.) Some assumed
conversion was taking place, if not actually accomplished. One of the old
uncles at the Wadi tables had
ventured to suggest a fitting name for a scholar-type: Ramadan.
An older Japanese writer and traveler
met at the National Library of Singapore
had made the observation that he could no longer abide a secular society.
Soviet Afghanistan, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia and latterly Philippines
provided something for the Zen man from Hokkaido that no Western country could
offer. It was a paradox for the non-believer.
NB. During his term as Foreign Minister, it was
Gareth Evans who devised the new geographic entity of the East Asian
Hemisphere.
NB2. Of the almost seven years living in the region
about 12 months was spent in various cities across Peninsular Malaysia (Penang
added), similar term in Java (mainly Central and Jakarta & Bandung) and the
balance Singapore.
