Islam, Nationalism and Democracy: A Political Biography of Mohammad Natsir

Chapter 1. Childhood, Education and Influence from his Minangkabau Homeland

Childhood, Education and Influence from his Minangkabau Homeland 1 1 Childhood, Education and Influence from his Minangkabau Homeland 1 Mohammad Natsir was born on July 17, 1908, in the small town of Alahan Panjang, which lies in the foothills of Sumatra’s highest mountain, Mt. Kerinci (3,805 meters), in the southern part of what was then the Dutch Governorship of Sumatra’s West Coast. Stretching across the equator, West Sumatra is home to the Minangkabau people who term the region “the Minangkabau world” (alam Minangkabau). The heartland of this world lies in the fertile interior highlands of central Sumatra where the Minangkabau people traditionally lived in self-governing extended villages (nagari). From their ancestral home area they migrated both to the narrow plain that stretches down Sumatra’s western coastline for some three hundred kilometers, and also to the cosmopolitan trading world of east Sumatra bordering on the Strait of Malacca. From these 1 Much of the material in this chapter is drawn from the account of his childhood given by Natsir in letters sent to his own children in 1958, which they collected under the title Kumpulan Surat-Surat Pribadi. Most words within quotation marks in this chapter come from these letters and I am grateful to the Natsir family for letting me have a copy of them. The letters were later published in a book that Natsir’s children brought out in 2008 in memory of their father, Aba: M. Natsir sebagai Cahaya Keluarga, ed. Raja Juli Antoni (Jakarta: Yayasan Capita Selecta, 2008). I have also drawn on Ajip Rosidi, M. Natsir: Sebuah Biografi 1 (Jakarta: PTGirimukti Pasaka, 1990), pp. 145ff, Mohammad Natsir, Politik Melalui Jalur Dakwah (Jakarta: Media Da’wah, 2008), and interviews with Natsir in the early 1970s and with his children in 2003 and 2009. 1 2 Islam, Nationalism and Democracy coastal regions they traveled further to trading and religious centers throughout the Indonesian archipelago and beyond. More than fifty kilometers south of the region’s heartland and in striking contrast to its prosperous irrigated rice-fields, the upland areas around Natsir’s birthplace of Alahan Panjang were mainly devoted to the cultivation of coffee, vegetables, tea and cinnamon. Today the road to the town is still lined with the red cinnamon bark stretched out to dry in front of the houses. The small, rather scruffy town of Alahan Panjang is close to two of the most beautiful of the region’s small lakes, known merely as Upper and Lower Lake (Danau Diatas and Danau Dibawah). The house where Natsir was born stood on the banks of a fast-flowing river on the outskirts of the town, near what is now the bus station, but the original house was burned down and the only reminder of Natsir is a photo of him on the wall of the new house, and a pesantren named after him in the town itself.2 From the outskirts of Alahan Panjang, Mt. Kerinci looms in the distance, its peak clear through a gap in the mountains. 1908, the year of Natsir’s birth, was a year of rebellion in West Sumatra. Many peasants, led first by their traditional heads and then by their Muslim teachers, revolted against the taxes that the colonial government had introduced in violation of a pledge made in 1837 when the Dutch first brought the highlands under their control at the end of the Bonjol war.3 The 1908 tax rebellion was bloody. But neither Natsir’s birthplace nor his family was involved in the struggle. Natsir was the third of four children born to his father, Idris Sutan Saripado, who was at the time a minor clerk (juru tulis) in a government office in Alahan Panjang. Idris had only graduated from a local primary school and could not speak Dutch, nor could his wife Khalida, who had not gone to school but had nevertheless learned to read.4 Shortly after his wife gave birth to their first son, Mohammad, Idris was sent north to Bonjol — the center of the earlier anti-colonial war — as a government official (assistant demang). He remained there with his family for several years before being again transferred, this time to the small town of Maninjau, on the shores of the spectacular lake of the same name, where he served as a clerk in the Assistant Resident (Controleur)’s office. 2 I visited the town at the end of 2003, and it is possible that more memorials were built to...