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SIX Earthquake When the earth shudders most violently. And forces out all that it contains. And people say, “Why is the earth like this?” On that day the earth will tell its story. For God has ordered it to do so. On that day all the people in their graves will come out, to see what they have done. Whoever has done a mote of good, surely they will see that good. Whoever has done a mote of evil, surely they will see that evil. Quran, Surah 99 The epigraph is from chapter 99 of the Quran, “Earthquake,” translated from “Soerat Az-Zilzal (Gempa, Gojang),” in Mahmoed Joenoes, Tafsir Koerän Indonesia (Padang: Boekh. Mahmoedijah, 1938), 516–17. Yunus’s was the most popular Quranic exegesis in West Sumatra, and the first two printings of this edition sold out in months. In his posthumous autobiography, Yunus mentions that he had written a tafsir as early as 1921; Yunus, Riwayat Hidup, 22. 1. On the religious schisms, see Zaim Rais, Against Islamic Modernism: The Minangkabau Traditionalists ’ Responses to the Modernist Movement ( Jakarta: Logos Wacana Ilmu, 2001); Abdullah, Schools and Politics. Literature on the period has been dominated by Muhammadiyah-influenced Minangkabau (particularly Hamka and Mahmud Yunus), who characterize the traditionalists as superstitious bumpkins. In pedagogical techniques and political networks, however, the traditionalists were no less sophisticated or “modern” than the reformists. Earthquake In the 1920s, colonial West Sumatra was turned upside down. For Minangkabau , it was not unreasonable to believe that the day of reckoning, foretold in the Quran, was imminent. In smaller villages, the conflict between reformist and traditionalist religious leaders had proved divisive; in separate mosques and prayerhouses, doomsayers awaited Judgment Day and final arbitration.1 This religious factionalism was particularly significant for the nagari—the Minangkabau autonomous village republics whose ideal composition included a single prayerhouse.2 Two decades of social and bureaucratic intervention had transformed the nagari, and in 1914 the Nagari Ordinance formally reorganized local authority. Dutch-sanctioned headmen, panghulu, administered taxes through a new nagari council. Its mollifying nod to tradition and restoration fooled nobody .3 Less visibly, dogmatic disputes began to cleave families. Uncles, nephews, fathers , and sons were set against one another in their adherence to particular ideological groupings.4 With both religious authority divided and the traditional leaders corrupted, the sacred pillars of Minangkabau society were teetering precariously . More than anywhere else in the region, West Sumatra in the early twentieth century experienced the transformations and contestations of modernity not only in the cities and towns but also in the smallest villages. Villagelevel religious schisms, village newspapers, and village politics were the front lines of debates that elsewhere in Southeast Asia were confined to the colonial capital. At the same time, the West Sumatran urban centers were caught up in the pergerakan—the varied movements of political and social awakening. In the hill town of Padang Panjang, the famous modernist Thawalib schools had become the loci of a peculiar form of intellectualized Islamic communism. Disaffected Communist Party members in Silungkang plotted with Ombilin coal-mine workers, and in the final hours of 1926 a communist uprising broke out in the nearby industrial town of Sawahlunto.5 So West Sumatra was experiencing its “age in motion”—giddy and tumultuous and fraught with infinite possibility. The earthquake of June 28, 1926, tore down a century of change in West Sumatra (figure 6.1). When it hit, thirteen-year-old Muhamad Radjab (then called by his childhood name Ridjal) was playing in the yard of his father’s traditionalist prayerhouse. He first supposed that a comet had slammed into the far side of the Earth, pulverizing the Americas and setting off tremors in Sumatra. This moment of scientific reason did not last as panic—kehilangan akal (the vanishing of rational thought)—consumed his village of Sumpur.6 Radjab remembered people chanting “La ilaha ilallah!” so that at the moment of death this holy phrase might be on their lips. He remembered cowering with Earthquake 139 2. The nagari is composed of five fundamental institutions; it must have a road [berlebuh], bathing place [bertapian], meeting hall [berbalai], mosque [bermesjid], and field or square [bergelenggang]. Sanggoeno di Radjo, Kitab Tjoerai, 96. 3. Oki, “Social Change,” 82–91. 4. Kaum, an Arabic word, means “group,” and by the twentieth century these groups were usually ideologically defined. In Minangkabau, there were modernist reformists (Kaum Muda, the young group) and traditionalists who might...

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