Bandung 50 Years After
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

The London terror bombings have consigned events of the last few weeks to distant memory. Headline – grabbing demonstrations in Edinburgh and the “Live 8” concerts that preceeded them today seem particularly very dated. Even more so, the celebrations to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic Bandung conference, with which the pop music concerts and the calls for the leaders of 8 wealthy nations to take concrete action share a common thread – third world poverty. Only a few among the young of today’s generation have probably heard of or cared about it, and those old enough to have a memory of it so disillusioned by its failures that they probably would rather prefer not to remember “the spirit of Bandung”.

Of my numerous trips to Indonesia over the years, my most recent one was as a guest of the Ikatan Dokter Anak Indonesia (Indonesian Paediatric Association) triennial convention in Bandung. This was only a few weeks after the celebrations of 50th anniversary of the Bandung Conference (which was held in April 1955). Gedung Merdeka, the venue of the original conference, a magnificent colonial era building is the heart of the city, was still dressed in celebratory mood, with banners and posters to remind visitors the historic event 50 years ago where Sukarno hosted leaders of newly independent nations of the 2 continents. Among them were also leaders of liberation movements of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, then in the midst of struggle for independence from French colonial rule to compare notes and take inspiration from the newly sovereign leaders. The atmosphere must have be electric, a gathering charismatic leaders who were then larger than life in the eyes of their people like Sukarno, Nasser and Hocine ait Ahmed (of Algeria’s FLN). Attempting to neutralize the air of radicalism, there was the pro American camp of leaders of Turkey, Ceylon, Pakistan and Iraq with their denunciations of Soviet colonialism, while Nehru stood as a symbol of relative moderation, having successfully avoided the excesses and violence of India’s independence process.

More than half of humanity was represented in Bandung in 1955 to proclaim the end of the colonial era and the emancipation of the coloured peoples in Asia and Africa. It was hailed as a new dawn for “the wretched of the earth”, whose goal was not just political independence, but ultimately economic, social and cultural liberation.

The new dawn was supposed to herald a new vision and strategy of freedom, solidarity and progress for the formerly colonized peoples, to take their destiny in their own hands after centuries of colonial oppression, exploitation and humiliation. Some sympathetic western intellectuals likened Bandung to humanity’s 1789 (the French Revolution). It was in relation to the historic event that the economist Affred Sauvy invented the term “third world” (tiers-monde), the peoples of Asia and Africa, who collectively hold immense material and human resources of the planet. Alas history has not been very kind to the denizens of the third world. For many, not much has changed 50 years post Bandung – remaining the wretched of the earth, and for some others, things have taken for the worse.

As for Bandung the city, those of us who know Indonesia through our experience of visiting Jakarta might be persuaded to think that she has lived up to the spirit of the conference she hosted half a century ago. She carries the burden of embodying its vision if Indonesia the nation cannot. The compact former hill station of the Dutch retains many of the beautiful colonial era buildings, notably the Governor’s residence, the Gedung Merdeka, a couple small churches and those used today as government and military offices. The pride of Bandung are her educational and scientific institutions, notably the Institut Teknologi Bandung and Universitas Padjajaran. But perhaps one institution that the conference hosts may want to pride themselves as their success in alleviating disease and poverty in the third world even if this is purely co-incidental is the Bio Farma, a biotechnology complex that manufactures vaccines and sera for Indonesia as well as supplying them to the third world in collaboration with the WHO. This is located in the “Pasteur” district of Bandung as Bio Farma was once called “Institut Pasteur”, next to the sprawling Hassan Sadikin Hospital complex, a teaching institution for the Universitas Padjajaran medical school. This former Dutch company was nationalized after Indonesia’s independence and now runs profitably as a state-owned company.

Unlike Jakarta, we do not see in Bandung the poor living in squalid squatter colonies and under flyovers, nor do we see children begging in the streets. The elegant old bungalows along her narrow, tree-lined streets are turned into commercial offices, or increasingly as factory-outlet stores of branded fashion goods- Bandung’s main attraction today. The new tolled highway has cut down traveling time from Jakarta to 2 ½ hours, such that hordes of the capital’s residents invade Bandung on weekends and during school holidays, making the traffic jams nearly as bad as that of the capital city. For this reason, I had to leave for the airport immediately after giving my lecture at the convention as it was held in the midst of school holidays in Indonesia. The driver deftly weaved through the congested traffic and the city’s back streets, having been told that I could not afford to miss the flight home as I had one to catch for Japan the next day.

Our familiarity with our neighbour with whom we share many things in common is such that one would not be easily deceived by Bandung’s air of new prosperity and old elegance, for Indonesia is another of those third world country that could not hide its extreme inequality, where there is an unbridgeable chasm between the rich and the poor. The two seemingly mingle but live in separate social universes outside the work place. When occasionally I get invited to help with some work in a private hospital, I would be chauffeured from the 5 star hotel to the hospital and have meals in Jakarta’s expensive restaurants, enabling me to catch a glimpse of how that section of society lives. Thankfully most of the time they’re institutional invitations where I get to see up close Indonesia’s poor and those who just manage to get by who are lucky enough to live near an urban centre.

In his opening address, the president of the Ikatan Dokter Anak read off startling statistics of the nation’s infant mortality rate and maternal deaths (during delivery), figures that would shock today’s public health experts in the developed world. And notwithstanding Bio Farma as Indonesia’s biotechnology showcase in the area of vaccine production, the nation recently saw outbreaks of polio among children that were highlighted in the international media.

Given what I do to earn a living, I can’t help using health indicators to illustrate the failures of nation building of a third world country like our neighbour, not out of condescension but as a sobering reminder for our own trajectory. For greater accuracy on this, one can always consult the UNDP reports. Its experience is by no means unique. Many of the new nations and those in the process of political liberation that were represented at the Bandung Conference had a disturbingly similar trajectory, particularly the Arab states. Political independence did not lead economic prosperity and social well-being for their citizens, self confidence and flowering of local culture. Instead, oppression and exploitation was continued by the new ruling elite, corruption became endemic, and poverty remains the lot of many.

Emanating from the grand ceremony of Bandung, the concept of the third world has however lost much of its moral weight in the last few decades. One of the more sympathetic figures of that generation that had expressed solidarity with the spirit of Bandung, the recently deceased Paul-Marie de la Gorce, gave a melancholic account 20 years ago, “Many hopes have been deceived, many illusions have vanished, many predictions proven false by history. The fashion today, even if seemingly excessive, is of disenchantment and skepticism : the third world would not have been able to resolve any of its problems – hunger, under development, disunity. The socialist experiments have turned into tropical dictatorships and the capitalist experiments into cosmopolitan corruption. No centres of power, no new international order could have been born from it. And it is remarkable that in France, Paul Bruckner’s Le Sanglot de l’homme blanc (Sobs of the white man) has had considerable success, a book full of bitterness and rancour, where all anticolonialism, every effort to understand the third world, our struggle against under development (on the part of western sympathizers) is seen as a sentiment of guilt, self-hate and masochism” (from “Bandung ou la fin de l’ère coloniale” by Jean Lacouture, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2005, the quote taken from a 1984 issue of the same journal which I have translated here).

From Bandung to the invasion of Iraq, via the defeat of Nasserism, the sterile victory of Vietnam, the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the Rwanda genocide, the third world has lost much of its moral capital. The Non-Aligned Movement, The G77, the South-South Commission – later incarnations of third world solidarity failed to gain respect and credibility as their meetings are nothing more than jamborees of corrupt dictators and semi-autocrats who have no respect for their own people.

Yes, there is the hypocrisy, unwillingness to relinquish its economic interests and sometimes naked desire for hegemonic control by some western powers, which means that the colonial masters never really left their colonies. We can blame these external forces as the cause of the continuing misery and poverty of ordinary people of the third world, but more than that, it is the leaders of the third world themselves on whom the responsibility rests. Long on rhetoric and short on ideas, not a few were autocratic, power crazed, corrupt and inept, readily accepting the role of proxies for the cold war warriors – even Sukarno, Nasser and the Algerian revolutionaries. They served as grave reminders of how power corrupts noble intentions and alienates those who wield it from their people if they don’t continually interrogate the whisperings of their egos.

Little wonder then that there was little to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bandung. The new face of transnational terrorism born out of failed nation-building in the muslim world is perhaps the most potent symbol of its failure, and the raucous scenes of europeans begging on behalf of Africa’s poorest in Edinburgh or media flashes of young westerners of the “me” generation who think their pop music jamborees can end world poverty, its greatest humiliation. In this era of economic globalization whose currency is ruthlessness and greed, is a new vision possible to lift the world’s poor out of poverty and confer on them a human dignity long denied?

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

The Legacy of Titus Burckhardt
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Having written about Martin Lings, I felt it is appropriate to write about his contemporary, Titus Burckhardt, as a matter of thematic continuity. Burckhardt, a swiss, was only a year older than Lings but he died in 1984. Lings wrote the introduction to Burckhardt’s Letters of a sufi master the Shaykh Ad Darqawi and Fez, city of Islam. Apart from his translations of classic Sufi texts by Ibn Al Arabi and Abd Al Karim Jili, making the metaphysics of the former known to the western world as well as his own writings on the subject, Burckhardt was also a distinguished art historian. With the intimate understanding of an ‘insider’, his authoritative work on Islamic art is unsurpassed. Thirdly, his role as an expert engaged by UNESCO in the conservation efforts of the city of Fez is another area where he has made a major contribution in the domains of Islamic intellectual, spiritual and artistic traditions. It is Burckhardt’s work in these 3 related areas that before returning to Malaysia in 1990, I took 2 months off and drove from England to Morocco, stopping for a couple of weeks in Andalusia, whose culture and civilization Burckhardt also wrote about (Ibn Arabi was from Murcia in Southern Spain). I was also drawn to Fez for the reason that Ibn Khaldun, credited for the birth of critical historiography and sociology, lived and taught in the Qarawiyyin mosque university in the heart of the medieval city for a period during the 14th century.

I first stumbled on Titus Burkhdardt some 25 years ago through his translation of Letters of a Sufi Master The Shaykh ad-Darqawi (simply known in Darqawi circles as Rasa’il or letters), first published in 1969. This was republished by Fons Vitae in 1998. The book consists of excerpts of letters of Mulay al Arabi ad-Darqawi (died 1823), founder of the Darqawi branch of the Shadhiliya Tariqa (Sufi order) to his disciples, instructing them on the spiritual path. The letters were collected and later published in a lithographed edition in Fez in early 19th century. They are a gem of Sufi literature, offering a fascinating insight into how a Sufi shyakh guides his disciples in the rigorous path of Islamic spirituality.

As these are letters of instruction, the emphasis was more on practical methods and operative aspects of Sufism rather than doctrine. In his counsel to his disciples Shaykh Darqawi referred heavily to aphorisms from Ibn Ataillah’s Al-Hikam (a widely used Sufi text even today all over the Islamic world), other masters of the Shadhiliya order including his own teacher, as well as the Quran and the prophetic tradition. Burckhardt’s translation has enriched Sufi literature and made available a document of extraordinary power and beauty that belonged to a recent past.

Here are some examples of these epistolary gems, “The Fuqara’ (pl. of faqir, novice of the spiritual path) of ancient times sought only for what could kill their souls and bring life to their hearts, whereas we do just the opposite… . They strove only to become free of their passions and dethrone their egos; but as for us, what we long for is the satisfaction of our sensual desires and the glorification of our egos, and thus we have turned our backs to the door and our faces to wall”. Subduing one’s ego forms one of the major themes of Rasa’il, and in another letter, “The first lesson that my master gave me was as follows : he ordered me to carry two baskets full of fresh fruit through the town. I carried them in my hands and did not wish, as the others told me, to put them on my shoulders, for that was unwelcome to me, and constricted my soul, so that it became agitated and fearful and grieved beyond measure, till I almost began to weep. Never before had my soul had to suffer such a thing, so I was not conscious of its pride and cowardice (Shaykh Darqawi, of noble lineage, was a young scholar then). While I was in this state, my master who perceived my pride and my inner distress, came up to me, took the two baskets from my hands and placed them on my shoulders with the words: ‘Distinguish thus between good and evil’. Thereby he opened the door for me and led me the right way, for I learned to discriminate between the proud and the humble, the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the orthodox and the heretical, between those who know and translate their knowledge into deeds, and those who do not. From that moment no orthodox person ever overpowered me with his orthodoxy, no heretic with his heresy, no scholar with his knowledge, no pious man with his piety, and no fasting man with his ascetism. For my master, may God have mercy on him, had taught me to distinguish truth from vanity, and wheat from chaff”.

Burckhardt also brought us an unlikely story that could only have come from classic Sufi literature, the account of Shaykh Darqawi’s first meeting with his master: “That night I asked God to confirm my intention (of becoming a disciple of the Master Ali al-Jamal), and I spent the whole night picturing him to myself, wondering what he was like and how my meeting with him would be, unable to sleep. When morning came, I went to find him at his Zawiyah in the Rumaylah quarter, located between the two cities (“old” and “new” Fez), on the river bank, in the direction of the Qiblah, on the very spot where his tomb lies today. I knocked on the gate and there he was before me, sweeping out the Zawiyah – as was his custom, for he never gave up sweeping it everyday with his own blessed hand, in spite of his great age and high spiritual function. “What do you want”, he said. “O my Lord”, I replied, “I want you to take me by the hand to God”. Then he began to reprove me furiously, hiding his true state from my eyes, with words such as these, “And who told you that I take anyone at all by the hand and why ever should I do so for you?”. And he drove my away – all to test my sincerity. So I went away. But when night came I questioned God once more (by means of the Holy Book). Then after performing the morning prayer, I went back again to the Zawiyah. I found the master again sweeping as before and knocked at the gate. He opened it and let me in and I said: “Take me by the hand, for God’s sake!”. Then he took me by the hand and said: “Welcome!”. He led me into his dwelling place in the inner part of the Zawiyah and manifested great joy. “O my Lord”, I said to him, “I have been looking for a master for so long!”. “And I”, he replied, “was looking for a sincere disciple”.

Burckhardt’s translation of selections from Rasa’il opens up a fascinating dimension of Islamic tradition whose vestiges was still present in late twentieth century to the western world. A more complete translation of Rasa’il was later produced by the English Sufi Aisha Abd ar Rahman at-Tarjumana titled The Darqawi way. What surprised me most was, not long after reading Burckhardt’s translation, I came across a jawi-malay translation by the Terengganu scholar Tok Pulau Manis in the early 1900’s (The Darqawi Tariqa is largely North African but many scholars of Tassawwuf from all over the muslim world lived and taught in Mecca before the collapse of Caliphate and the imposition of strict wahhabism).

How did Burckhardt came to write that translation? In his book, Fez, city of Islam, he gave an account of his visit to Morocco in 1933 – 34 as a young man of 25, “Seeking a spiritual master, I settled in Fez, where I divided my time between this search and the study of Arabic. After six months, however, I had reached a dead end …”. Then follows his account of his meeting with the sage Hajj Muhammad Bu Sha’ara, with whom he stayed and later recommended him to one of the foremost ulama of Fez, Mulay Ali ben Tayyib Darqawi, the grandson of the Shaykh Darqawi. It was Mulay Ali who completed Titus Burckhardt’s education – in Arabic, theology and Sufism, making him read and learn by heart many chapters of the Koran, as well as the essentials of Islamic doctrine and rituals by Ibn ‘Ashir, and also making him attend the courses in traditional science, which he himself and other scholars gave at Qarawiyyin University, then situated in the mosque of the same name (traditional Islamic universities were based in great mosques). He wrote, “On the day that Mulay Ali gave his lectures at the great mosque, a saddled and caparisoned mule was waiting for him at the door of the sanctuary to take him back home before midday. As soon as he was in the saddle, he told me to grasp the tail of the animal which trotted up the steep lanes of the Medina … . His garments were always in an impeccable condition and bore witness to his rank as a scholar. I sometimes saw him, however, in the garb of the Sufis, wearing a patched cloak”. Nevertheless, his presence in Fez raised the concern of the French Protectorate authorities. To them it was unimaginable that someone, especially a foreigner, could so diligently attend the courses at the traditional university, for other than political motives. In those interwar years, a swiss intellectual and artist officially converted to Islam could only be a cause of trouble and in the pay of a foreign power hostile to France. He was made to leave Moroccan territory. Once back in Switzerland, Burckhardt was only able to return to Morocco after she regained independence in 1956.

The book Fez, city of Islam was first published in 1960 in german but the English translation by The Islamic Texts Society of Cambridge only appeared in 1992 (It was part of a series which he edited – Homesteads of the Spirit to which he also contributed two other volumes, Siena, city of the virgin and Chartres and the birth of the Cathedral).

Fez, city of Islam conveys a profound understanding of the sacred roots that nourish Islamic culture and civilization, drawing from his own experience and the people he knew when he was young student of Islam, as well as references drawn from classical texts by scholars who had lived in the Maghreb in past centuries. For bonus the book is beautifully illustrated with photographs of many of the city’s rich architectural heritage as well as his black and white prints of 1930’s.

As Fez has been the intellectual, cultural, spiritual heart of North Africa, he dedicated whole chapters to traditional science, Islamic orthodoxy and Sufism. There is also a chapter on the houses of Fez, “The true unveiled face of Fez remains hidden to whoever knows Fez only from the street, and has seen only the shopping alley-ways and the grey outer walls of the houses …”, but once inside its exterior drabness gives way to a beautiful courtyard, some with a small garden and fountain, with arches leading to the surrounding rooms. As Martin Lings wrote in the introduction, Titus Burckhardt is an authority whose works are a constant source of inspiration … the publication of this book in English is like the unearthing of a great treasure”. It was in recognition of Burckhardt’s unrivalled knowledge and authority on Fez that he was appointed special advisor to UNESCO with particular references to the preservation of the unique architectural and cultural heritage of Fez.

Related to the architectural, cultural and intellectual heritage of Fez, Burckhardt is also an authority in yet another domain, Islamic (and religious) art. He is an accomplished art historian, following in the footsteps of a great-uncle, and his father was a sculptor. His last major work was Art of Islam. Unfortunately I am in possession only of its French version, L’Art de l’Islam. He was persuaded to write the book side by side with his activities as adviser to the Arts Council of Great Britain during its preparation for the exhibition of Islamic art during the World of Islam Festival in London in 1976. Unlike the many books of Islamic art, Burckhardt wrote from the position of an authoritative figure who also had an intimate familiarity and profound understanding of Islamic civilization and its intellectual and spiritual traditions.

Burckhardt gives his penetrating insight into the intellectual principles, contemplative nature and spiritual role of the Islamic art forms – architecture, calligraphy, the decorative arts, those related to worship and the mosque, the folk crafts – as well as thoughtful thesis on the influence of other cultures that greatly enriched it as the religion rapidly spread beyond the Arabian peninsula.

In a world stifled by the crushing weight of a secular materialism and uniformizing consumerism, Titus Burckhardt has left a precious legacy. In Fez, city of Islam, he expressed his concern over dehumanizing ravages of secular modernity on traditional muslim society, “Whereas previously men were differentiated only by their culture, the community is all of a sudden split into economically determined classes, and with the cheap products of the factory, a poverty without beauty invades the homes, ugly, senseless and comfortless poverty is the most widespread of all modern achievements”. Writing then in 1960, he could have been easily rebuffed as a western romantic irrationally smitten by the hollow charm of the Islamic orient, who wanted it remain stagnant for his own selfish romanticism. It is also true that sclerotic traditions that have no mechanism for self rejuvenation within themselves and the accretion of negative external influences have led to the stagnation and decay of Islamic civilization, hence the fixation for secular modernism for some and a reformist spirit driven with the puritanical zeal for others have formed our main responses to modernity. But today, the unintelligent embrace of modernity and the careless jettisoning of traditional wisdom has caused, the muslim world to sink deeper in crises of all forms imaginable – political despotism, poverty and ignorance of the common folks whereas the rich wallow in consumerist materialism, religious fanaticism on the one hand and the loss of values in the embrace of the latest post modern fashions on the other. As for his Fez, une ville humaine (badly translates as a human city, the title of one of his lectures), Burckhardt may have succeeded in preserving the many beautiful buildings and monuments, but the march of secular modernity and materialism is too overwhelming despite his noble efforts at rehabilitating its Islamic culture and tradition. Taking a look at today’s metropolises and urban environment of the muslim world reminds one of Burckhardt’s horror of “poverty without beauty”. Today, after all those costly false starts, what we need is to intelligently seek a balance between conforming to modernity and remaining faithful to our traditional wisdom and values. There is perhaps something to be learned in the romanticism of men like Titus Burckhardt and Martin Lings.

Dr. Mazeni Alwi