IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING

A POPULAR INDONESIAN PREACHER:

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AA GYMNASTIAR

C.W.Watson

*University of Kent*

*A context*

Gym’s rapid rise to fame has not gone unnoticed by Indonesian scholars,5

who have tried to account for it by alluding to what they see as the general

social malaise and moral decline existing in Indonesia today. Some, though,

have gone further and have placed Gym in a tradition of popular national

preachers stretching over the last four decades (Herry 2002: 117-20). What is

significant about this period is that it corresponds to the development of a

communications technology which has allowed local figures to acquire

national reputations in a way not conceived by their immediate predecessors.

It is precisely from the period of the late 1960s onwards that television became

available not only in the big cities of Indonesia but also, thanks to new satellite

facilities, in the villages and outermost islands, which, from the mid-1970s,

became increasingly connected to Jakarta and urban national culture. This not

only led to the dissemination of a popular music culture and the introduction

of canned TV series – I remember a Minangkabau friend of mine long

resident in London shaking his head in amazement telling me that in the mid-

1970s they were now watching *Kojak *in his remote village in west Sumatra

– but also provided the state with its ability to control the media and use it

to broadcast numerous ideological messages to the nation. At the same time,

however, television provided an opportunity for religious broadcasts and

thereby introduced to the national community figures who had previously

had only a local reputation.

TV, however, has not been the only medium for the widespread distribution

of religious homilies. Cassette technology was very quickly put to use

for this purpose and rapidly spread throughout small towns in Indonesia. In

the periodic markets held regularly in villages, cassettes of sermons became

easily available, sold well alongside the traditional religious pamphlets, and

became the subjects of discussion.

The first person to benefit from this new technology was the west

Sumatran, Hamka, who had already acquired a national reputation before the

1960s as a political figure (he was an opponent of the political direction taken

by Sukarno in the late 1950s and had been imprisoned by him) as well as as

a writer of popular romantic novels in the 1930s. In the 1970s, thanks to television

appearances, the proliferation of popular religious magazines, and the

widespread circulation of cassettes, Hamka came into his own, not only in

Muslim communities throughout the Indonesian archipelago, but also in

Malaysia, where his books sold well and where he frequently preached.6

Hamka’s mantle was not taken up by any comparable figure after his death

in 1981*. *By then new types of religiosity had emerged in Indonesia, partly

as consequence of the changing international situation, which led young committed

Muslims to look overseas for inspiration, and partly as a consequence

of new middle-class tendencies to participate in religious instruction groups,

where the emphasis was on spiritual experience rather than on prescriptive

religious teachings. Both trends, though in fact at variance with each other,

contributed to making the kind of straightforward injunctions urged by

Hamka less universally popular. None the less there were preachers able to

make good use of expanding technological facilities and new developments

in communal attitudes and practices. One of these was Zainuddin MZ

(b. 1951),7 associated with the state-sanctioned Muslim party PPP (*Partai*

*Persatuan Pembangunan *– United Development Party). Zainuddin was, like

Hamka, not from the religious heartland of central and east Java. Hailing from

Jakarta, he was conversant with, and able to play to, national religious styles.

He was also able to develop a homespun appeal attractive to rural audiences.

These two figures, Hamka and Zainudddin MZ, are frequently mentioned

as the forerunners of Gym, but what Indonesian commentators often neglect

to mention – perhaps because they assume a knowledge of these other precedents

among their audience – are an older tradition of public oratory and a

historical continuity with other strands of popular religion, both of which

predisposed religious congregations to show strong support for Hamka and

Zainuddin. The tradition of public oratory, for example, that acts even today

as the standard by which others are judged is that of Sukarno. He was from

his earliest experiences as a nationalist politician in the late 1920s an outstanding

orator with an immense public appeal.The style which he had developed

was, even then, not wholly original but one which he had adopted from

an older figure in the nationalist movement, Tjokroaminoto, the leader of the

*Sarekat Islam*, an anti-colonial party of the 1920s and 1930s, whom Sukarno

had admired in his youth and whose oratory, modelled on the recitational

style of *dalang*, Javanese master puppeteers, he had consciously imitated

(Anderson 1972: 12, fn. 22). Sukarno’s rhetorical style, which he brought to

perfection in the 1950s, has the same resonance in Indonesia today that

Churchill’s well-known cadences continue to enjoy in Britain. This is true

despite the fact that for three decades mention of Sukarno’s political leadership

was suppressed by Suharto’s New Order government.8

Reference to Tjokroaminoto leads naturally on to consideration of continuity

with the emergence of leaders of millenarian movements whose activities

have been well documented by historians of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Dahm (1969) observes with respect to Tjokroaminoto

that, although he was the leader of one of the first modern political parties

and his theatre of operations was largely the towns and cities of Java in the

second and third decades of the century, there were distinctively millenarian

characteristics in the responsiveness of party members towards him (see also

Benda 1972 [1965]; Sartono 1972; 1978). Dahm in fact goes on to argue that

popular support for Sukarno himself should also be understood from this perspective.

There is, of course, a danger in the indiscriminate use of models of

millenarianism to account for social protest.9 None the less, what we can draw

from such analyses is a sense of the way in which religious congregations, and

indeed the Indonesian public at large, have been, and continue to this day to

be, influenced by strong individuals claiming to have received tokens of supernatural

sanction.10

A further and perhaps more direct line of continuity between Gym and

older traditions is the existence of a deeply embedded cultural institution of

religious scholars (*kiyai*) who own and run *pesantren *(religious schools)

(Zamakhsyari 1982) and who, according to Clifford Geertz (1960) in a much

quoted article, act as ‘cultural brokers’ mediating between the rural population

and the political elite of the large cities.11

We can now see how Gym’s contemporary appeal, his mode of communication,

and his use of a traditional religious school structure all suggest

emulation of not only the institutions and structures of the very recent

past but also the styles of leadership developed at the turn of the twentieth

century. He too has the support of a mass following who want some simple

(*sederhana*) rules by which to live. His style of communication is a carefully

honed oratorical manner in which humour and everyday analogy are used to

great effect. The organizational structure framing his activities is the *

pondok*

*pesantren *of the Daarut Tauhid. As we have seen, the latter is a new, somewhat

revolutionary, structure but one wrapped in familiar trappings. At this point

one might well conclude that the difference with the past is really only a

matter of degree, and that quantitative change can be attributed straightforwardly

to the development of an information technology which has revolutionized

the potential for mass communication throughout the world.

Reasonable as such a conclusion might be, however, we need to look again

at what distinguishes Gym from his predecessors before we accept too quickly

the argument of historical continuity. The first point to note is that Gym is

not a traditional *kiyai *insofar as he does not possess the usual legitimating

genealogical antecedents, something which he very well recognizes (Gym

2003: 118). He does not come from a family of religious scholars, something

which has up till now been considered a necessary condition for a reputation

as a scholar, nor has he been educated for any length of time within a traditional *pesantren.*12

Gym does not emerge from the same tradition of religious

scholarship as his predecessors, nor does he possess the knowledge of Arabic

and the familiarity with classic scholastic texts which are otherwise the essential

attributes of the *kiyai*.Very conscious of this difference, Gym has astutely

developed two different strategies to deal with his perceived deficiency.

The first strategy is to short-circuit the path to religious knowledge by

claiming, or at least not denying the claim made on his behalf, that he has

obtained his wisdom in a special god-given way. The dream of being in the

prophet’s presence establishes the claim; this achieves further endorsement

through statements of the traditional *kiyai *in West Java to whom Gym went

for religious instruction that he was a brilliant pupil and mastered everything

within a few months. Their only explanation for this was that he had been

divinely privileged with *ilmu laduni*, an immediate personal understanding of

religious knowledge and wisdom. Gym is wary of fully exploiting these claims,

both because, I think, he is genuinely modest and because, if taken to

extremes, he risks finding himself labelled by the MUI (*Majelis Ulama

Indonesia*)

– the state-sponsored Council of Ulama – as a heretical cult figure.13 None

the less, his experience of the dream and its mystical nature still regularly find

their way into the literature about him, as do accounts of the senior *kiyai

*

about his special gifts.

The second strategy adopts a different logic altogether, namely one of

implicitly asserting that Gym is not to be compared to great religious scholars

of the past but in fact represents a different kind of educational tradition

altogether. This tradition is firmly rooted in basic religious values yet has as

its principal intention the moral regeneration of the individual through

engagement with the world, rather than through religious piety or political

action, the two routes to salvation advocated by his immediate predecessors

and by the traditional *kiyai*.14 In this respect he is offering, and seen to be

offering, what might be called an alternative Islam, although it is one still well

within the bounds of orthodoxy. It is this perception of novelty and otherness

which appeals to his followers.15

Through these two strategies – one an acknowledgement of conventional

claims to religious authority and the other offering a promise of personal

ful-

filment by engaging with the world – Gym has caught the contemporary

public imagination. To illustrate more precisely this novelty and its wideranging

appeal, let me give an example of how Gym’s approach to professional

management practice and business ethics16 is perceived within the

culture of companies today in Indonesia. I have already described how regular

training sessions are held for middle-level managers under the auspices of the

*Manajemen Qolbu *in the Daarut Tauhid complex (Yopi, Deny & Murman

2003: 56-8). Among the companies, both government and private, which are

recorded as making use of these facilities are the National Bank, the National

Rail Company, and the Telecommunications Company (Hernowo & Deden

Ridwan 2001: 27). At these sessions professional business methods are taught

along modern lines and use is made of the now globally available books of

practical business advice and management tips. All this is firmly grounded on

simple moral principles of the kind described in the first part of this article.

Clearly this combination of professionalism, commitment to an enterprise, and

personal morality pays off, as is evidenced not only by the usual complimentary

remarks about how the efficiency and productivity of a work unit have

risen after attending such a training course but also by the increasing uptake

of these training sessions.Whether Aa Gym and his training methods can really

play a major role in tackling endemic problems of corruption and bad business

practice is of course an open question, but the fact that senior management

holds Gym’s MQ in such high esteem is an indication of the importance

attached to these new initiatives and to the promise of Gym’s approach,

different as it is from what is available elsewhere.

Gym’s immediate following would seem to be those of middle-age in the

urban middle class. Civil servants, teachers, and small and medium business

entrepreneurs come to the DT complex with realistic expectations not that

they will receive instant religious revelation but that they will receive good

wholesome advice of a spiritual and practical kind and have something to

relate when they return home. This constituency has expanded thanks to

Gym’s entrepreneurial skills and in particular to his awareness of the importance

of modern communications technology. Through TV, cassettes, CDs,

videos, and the print media, he has been able not only to extend his appeal

upwards socially (evidenced by his address to political leaders in the Istiqlal

mosque and the way he has subsequently become a focus of attention for

government ministers and foreign ambassadors) but also downwards, reaching

to the urban and rural poor.These persons do not have the means to become

*wisata rohani *but can listen to cassettes of his talks and derive from them the

same kind of benefit of ‘inculcating perceptual habits’ that Hirschkind

describes (2002: 551) with regard to Egyptian audiences of cassette-recorded

sermons.

Gym’s source of spiritual wisdom is Islam and consequently his points of

reference are familiar quotations from the Qur’an and the *Hadith *(the traditions

of the Prophet). Beyond these basic references he draws upon other

sources of Muslim knowledge, principally, it would seem, Sufi wisdom

presented in anecdotal and often humorous garb. Clearly there is a certain

unconventionality in what he has to offer both in terms of his command of

Islamic scholarship and his emphasis on how to deal with practicalities of

contemporary living in the contexts both of home and workplace. It is his

emphasis on simple rules for everyday life, rather than on hellfire and brimstone,

which leads to him being perceived as a source of alternative new

Muslim wisdom and places him in that category of ‘new people’ referred to

by Eickelman and Anderson (2003: 10-11).

However, before we can properly assess just how innovative Gym is and

where ultimately his contemporary significance lies, we need to make one

final comparison, namely between his activities and the approach of those

activists in Indonesia who argue from either conservative or liberal Muslim

positions for more active engagement in politics. The organization which

comes closest to Aa Gym in the range of its appeal is the *Partai Keadilan*

*Sejahtera *– People’s Justice Party or PKS. Over the past five years it has been

the most successful of all Muslim parties in winning electoral support and

putting across an image of itself as honest, incorruptible, and concerned with

people’s welfare. A strong part of its political programme, and here again it

shows affinities with Gym’s approach to the demands of contemporary living,

is its espousal of modern science and technology, which need to be mastered

if the Muslim community is to have at its disposal the technological capacity

it lacks at present and which it needs to compete with the (Christian) West.

The PKS is a movement which has strong echoes with the pan-Muslim

modernist revival movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

of which the still strong *Muhammadiyah*, founded in 1912 by its influential

leader H.A. Dahlan, was the first manifestation in Indonesia. The PKS

also sees today’s Turkish Welfare Party as something of a model. The imagination

prompting the movements is the same in both cases, that is, a feeling

of defensiveness towards the West and Christianity and an understanding that

science and technology are the key to competition with the West. Caught up

with these perceptions is a strong hostility towards colonialism and imperialism.

Ultimately, these reflections lead to the conviction that the surest way to

make progress is by reverting to a spiritual and moral lifestyle, with its concomitant

value judgements, approaching as closely as possible to that lived by

the Prophet and his companions. For the radical new Muslim theologians,

those who are labelled ‘liberal’ in contemporary polemical discourse, this

injunction to follow literally the practice of the Prophet and his companions

while at the same time taking advantage of the uses of modern science and

technology is absurd – an ostrich-like head in the sand approach to contemporary

life – and betrays a lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam.

Their opinions,17 however, are held by a relatively limited constituency.

Contrast, then, these two currents of an active Muslim movement spearheaded

by young urban intellectuals with the programme of Aa Gym. The

obvious differences are that Gym begins neither from the defensive premises

that Western influence is bad and that Christian missionary activity needs to

be checked nor from the assumption that the panacea to present troubles is

to be found either in a return to a utopian Muslim past or in an embrace of

a radical neo-rationalism. On the contrary, Gym, perhaps borrowing from

his Sufi-inclined mentors, takes a much more open attitude to social and

economic change. He embraces Western science and technology and a spirit

of professionalism, but implicitly denies the simplistic dichotomy between

science and culture made by those who argue that you can have the former

without the latter. The latter, Western culture is, in the vision of the extremists,

only definable in terms of the moral degradation exemplified by

night-clubs, casinos, and consumption of alcohol. Gym understands moral

degradation not as being an inherent part of any specific culture but as a set

of practices that can emerge anywhere in conducive economic and social circumstances.

He holds that the target of criticism should not be the West and

that there is no solution in a naïve nativistic retreat into the past. The solution

for him lies in a careful and continual rehearsal of moral debate and reasoning

in which individuals constantly carry out their own introspection. In

his opinion the way forward lies not out there in some form of political action

but in the creation of a climate of moral reasoning and its application to

immediate daily life.

**

*( Dikutip dari:

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL

ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

VOLUME 11, Number 4 (December 2005) )*

* *

Posting bagus dari MHI nih.

Sekalian kita praktekin 5M nya AA Gym :

Mulai dari yang kecil

Mulai dari sekarang

Mulai dari diri sendiri

Yang dua lagi apa ya… lupa euy.

Silakan…….

————————————————————————————————-

Sodara-sodara, meski banyak kerjaan di kantor, gue hari ini telat
dateng, demi misi mulia, yaitu ngurus Tilang secara jujur, tanpa nyogok.
Satu hal yg perlu gue sharing buat kalian adalah : kalo lu ditilang di
jalan oleh polisi apapun, jangan sekali2 damai atau ngasi duit, bilang
tilang aja langsung. hasilnya tuh plokis pasti bete karena gak dapet
duit, kedua, ngurusnya gampang kok, dan dendanya resmi…begitu
sodara..sodara.

Tips nya :

1. kalo lu ditilang di jalan sebenernya ada dua pilihan (gue juga baru
tahu), form biru dan form merah.

2. Form biru adalah kalo lu terima kesalahan lu (artinya lu gak perlu
berdebat ama hakim). Dgn form ini lu bayar dendanya di BRI yg ditunjuk
(nanti tabel dendanya ama lokasi BRI bisa minta ke gue kalo minat), abis
bayar denda resmi ke BRI, ambil SIM ato STNK yg disita ke kantor
Ditlantas POLDA Metro di Pancoran, gedung baru, sebelum Gelael arah
cawang. Disini ada ruang khusus loket Tilang, ruang tunggu nyaman
ber-AC, dengan hiburan SateliteTV (norak ya gue)

3. Form merah artinya lu gak terima kesalahan lu, dan dikasi kesempatan
untuk berdebat ato minta keringanan ama hakim. Biasanya tanggal sidang
adalah maksimum 14 hari dari tanggal kejadian, tergantung hari sidang
Tilang di PN (Pengadilan Negeri) bersangkutan. Contoh gue ditilang di
Kuningan, berarti sidang di PN Jaksel, jl ampera, disini sidang tilang
setiap selasa. Nah oleh polisi, barang sitaan (SIM or STNK) akan disetor
ke kantor Ditlantas pancoran itu sampai dengan H-1 tanggal sidang. Jadi
selama masih di pancoran SIM/STNK itu bisa ditebus tanpa sidang ke PN,
cukup ke loket yg gue sebutin tadi, serahin form merah, bayar dendanya,
SIM/STNK balik dengan sukses.

4. H-1 tgl sidang dan seterusnya, SIM/STNK udah dikirim ke pengadilan
sesuai daerah perkara, jadi kudu ditebus di PN masing2

5. Kalo pengen hadir sidang, dateng sesuai tanggal sidang yang tertera
di surat Tilang ke PN yg ditunjuk. Tapi ini gak gue saranin. Kenapa ?
karena antreannya luarbiasa banyak, kita gak punya kesempatan bertemu
hakim, karena sidangnya sebenarnya IN ABSENTIA, dan banyak banget CALO
yg nawarin bantuan. Mending enggak deh

6. Lebih baik cuekin aja tanggal sidang, ambil SIM/STNK terserah elu di
hari lain, hindari hari sidang tilang biar gak rame, terus langsung tuju
Loket khusus Tilang yang ada di masing2 PN. Tunjukin form merahnya,
dalam 5 menit SIM/STNK udah di tangan elu dengan bayar denda resmi.
Sebelumnya cermati berapa denda resminya, biar gak dilebih2in ama
petugasnya (tabel denda resmi gue punya in PDF). Contoh nih, gue tahu
denda masuk jalur cepat (gue naik motor) Rp.15000, petugasnya bilang
Rp.25600, dikasi angka 600 seolah2 itu perhitungan rumus2 njelimet,
padahal akal2an aja biar ada yg masuk kantong dia. Gue kasi uang bulet
15.000 dia diem aja kok..hehe

7. Udah ngerti kan. jadi intinya : jangan sekali2 damai ama polisi di
jalanan, tilang mah tilang aja, pilih prosedur sesuai tips diatas, gak
usah sidang kalo gak pengen bete, cuekin calo2 yg nawarin bantuan, bayar
denda sesuai tarif resmi. Semua ini demi INDONESIA yg bersih dan
berwibawa gemah ripah loh jinawi…hehehehe

salam
bakhtiarsutanto

PS : berdasarkan pengalaman dan bantuan dari berbagai milis, makanya gue
pede ngadepin mereka. Silakan disebar ke temen2, biar gak ada yg diperas
ama plokis, calo dll. Merdeka !!

FYI