Subject: [world-vedic] Bali: The Paradise lost
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 02:52:38 +0000
From: "Vrn Davan" <vaidika1008@hotmail.com
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From: BJP News
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To: vaidika1008@hotmail.com
Subject: [BJP News]: Bali: The Paradise lost
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 07:34:30 -0700

Title: Bali: Paradise lost
Author: Alexander Boldizar
Publication: Globe and Mail
Date: October 15, 2002
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Six centuries of smouldering antagonism exploded into flames Saturday 
night, says Canadian writer ALEXANDER BOLDIZAR in Bali

A few years before the world went mad, Ketut had a Javanese 
girlfriend, a Muslim. As their relationship grew, she became sad. 
"It's a shame I can't marry you," she would sigh.

There was no need to ask why not. Although she was liberal, never wore 
the veil in Bali, she made it clear that he was an infidel. He was a 
Balinese Hindu and, unless he changed, they had no future.

"Would a Muslim man ever change to the religion of his wife?" Ketut 
asked. "Of course not," she answered. "Islam is the true religion. And 
I will not become Hindu."

Ketut thought about the problem for a few days. Islam was brought to 
Indonesia by Arab traders, gained a foothold in Sumatra in the 13th 
century, spread to the coastal areas of Java, then eroded the great 
Hindu Kingdom of Majapahit in the early 16th century. The aristocracy 
of the Majapahit, the priests, jurists, artists, artisans, painters, 
sculptors, architects, goldsmiths, gongsmiths, writers and dancers 
were, for the most part, unwilling to accept Islamization. They fled 
to the nearby island of Bali and the protection of its King 
Waturrenggong.

King Waturrenggong had "lion-hearted courage, incomparable daring, and 
magical powers" in battle. He unified the aristocracy with the people 
and built a military and cultural bulwark against Islam, stopping it 
from spreading to the shores of "Paradise." His priest and teacher, 
the Just-Arrived-Magic-Powerful-High-Priest Nirartha, floated to Bali 
on a palm leaf, another refugee from Java. Nirartha redesigned the 
temple system in Bali so that each village would have its own temples, 
forging a closer bond between the people and their Hindu gods, a bond 
unlike that of any other Hindu Kingdom, and one which Islam would find 
difficult to sever. It was this exodus and the fear of Islam that 
created in Bali the paradise that Western tourists have been admiring 
since the mutiny of the first Dutch explorers in 1597, when many of 
Captain de Houtman's European sailors refused to leave the island that 
was so beautiful, where women bathed nude in the rivers, where the 
King's chariot was pulled by white buffalo and his retinue was made up 
of 50 dwarves whose bodies had been bent to resemble traditional 
dagger handles.

The historic hatred of Islam by the Balinese is one of the reasons 
Ketut admired his girl, that she had been willing to come here from 
Java on her own, to risk ancient racism in order to enjoy the much 
higher standard of living and greater freedoms that Bali offers in 
comparison to the other islands of Indonesia.

"Very well," he said after a few days of thinking, "let's both become 
Buddha."

No, she had answered. Nor Jewish, Jainist or Zoroastrean. Not even 
Christian which, to Ketut, seemed very similar to Islam, especially in 
its need to proselytize and spread. It was Islam or nothing. So Ketut 
ended the relationship, but without acrimony. He had seen too many 
Muslim daughters in Bali pulled along the pavement, their fathers 
dragging them by the hair, beating them senseless, outraged at their 
dating an infidel. It is difficult to be strong in the face of such 
pedigree.

Muslims live now in Bali -- Bali is part of Indonesia, after all, and 
Indonesia is 90 per cent Muslim -- they come despite local objections, 
though they are at times subject to vandalism and random attacks by 
young Balinese. Most come for the freedom, some come to see the enemy, 
a few do both in a psychologically unstable mix.

"I see her in the village sometimes," Ketut concludes. "She is the 
fourth wife of a Muslim man. He lives in another city and rarely sees 
her or their child. And I think she is very unhappy, but she wears the 
veil now and has become much more fanatical."

Today, Ketut is again unhappy about fanatical Muslims. He runs an 
Internet cafe and a tourist agency. It used to be a good business. 
Americans stopped coming a year ago, afraid of Laskar Jihad, the 
Islamic Defenders Front, and other radical Islamic groups in Java who 
have threatened to "sweep" all Westerners out of Indonesia. Who will 
come now?

Villages in Bali have put their traditional guards on alert, the 
Balinese People's Council has promised to fight any hostile Javanese, 
and the Balinese are ready to release 600 years of antagonism against 
Java. "If the Javanese come to sweep, we will make lawar out of them," 
Ketut said a year ago -- in the aftermath of the first "sweeping" 
threats, before losing a friend in Saturday night's bombing. Lawar is 
a type of haggis made out of pork stomachs. "Maybe it would be good, 
maybe it would begin a war for independence. The Balinese are quiet, 
quiet, until they decide it is time for puputan. The Javanese remember 
this."

Puputan is a suicidal fight to the death which, historically, has 
seemed necessary once every 50 years or so. In 1906, the Balinese 
royalty burned its own palaces, then, wearing their finest jewelry and 
waving golden swords, the Rajah led the royalty and priests out 
against the modern weapons of the Dutch. 4,000 Balinese died in 1906 
and a larger number in a similar puputan in 1945, falling again under 
the guns of the Dutch. Suicidal armies scare the Muslims as much as 
they do the West. Unlike radical Islam, however, in Bali it is not the 
uneducated and abused who become human bombs; it is the priests and 
leaders themselves. The battle between Bali and Islam that began 600 
years ago has never really been put to rest. For centuries, Balinese 
medicine men continued to fight against Muslim medicine men from Java 
and Lombok. Curses were thrown back and forth over the narrow Bali 
Strait, Islamic clerics put love spells on Balinese women to fall in 
love with Muslims, and Balinese holy men rubbed the affected in pigs' 
blood to undo the spell. Now the war that has been waged for centuries 
within the invisible dimension has surfaced.

In Indonesia this means the government doesn't clamp down on 
"sweeping" threats, that years of Islamic bias in all aspects of 
Indonesian public life have become more and more institutionalized, 
and that Islamic political parties are increasingly pressing for 
Koranic law to become the law of Indonesia, whether the subjects be 
Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or Animist.

From love spells and pigs' blood, the war has moved to car bombs in 
front of discos. But if the war comes into the open, Bali also has 
many young men ready to fight. The young generation can imagine an 
independent Bali, another puputan.

This weekend, Javanese fanatics bombed the main tourist strip in Kuta. 
By November, there will be many innocent Javanese street-vendors 
floating in the sea. The reaction will cause another, and that 
another. Ketut and other young Balinese still think about King 
Waturrenggong and the Just-Arrived-Magic-Powerful-High-Priest. They 
celebrate the latter's memory twice a year. Muslims still think about 
Mohammed's war to take Mecca and destroy the 300-odd religions 
represented there. It is only the West that has a stunted sense of 
history, with anything predating the Second World War classified as 
"ancient," and it is only the West that insists religion and politics 
are separate issues.

U.S. President George W. Bush has said "you are either for us or 
against us," and blindly called his war against terrorism a "crusade." 
Osama bin Laden agreed, countering that "you are either a believer or 
an infidel." In the post-World Trade Center world, in country after 
country, movements and complaints that had seemed long buried are 
emerging back into the visible dimensions. Slowly, behind the scenes, 
fault lines which go back thousands of years are beginning to show.

Even in Paradise.

Alexander Boldizar, former columnist with the Harvard Law Record, is 
director of the Gaya Fusion of Senses gallery in Bali, Indonesia.