The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (36 page)

He waved off
the cookie, wearily picked up a stick, and drew a diamond in the sandy soil, an ad hoc blackboard. “This is the world,” he said, sketching his people’s view of the universe, with the sun at the top of the diamond. “Our universe and our villages have four corners.” Within those corners, spirits live in the village’s trees, fields, and ponds. “Spirits are good or bad depending on how you treat them,”
he said. “That’s why when we open a rice paddy field, we have to ask permission. We don’t kill animals or cut down trees without doing this. We even apologize when we pee anywhere.

“After death, the body transforms into its origin: the earth. The earth where your grandfather died is considered your relative. The blood from your birth is on the ground.” As he spoke, I thought of the 1960s environmental
theory called the Gaia hypothesis. Its main proponent, James Lovelock, a nonagenarian former NASA scientist, argued that the world is a single living organism—a negative feedback loop that regulates itself like a human body. Although this thinking sounded radically hippie-ish at the time, its innate common sense underlies much of today’s environmental science. Many indigenous communities,
including some Native Americans, saw the world as a single living—and divine—entity. So, too, it seemed, did the Orang Asli.

“Our connection becomes not to the people but to the whole earth,” Edo said. Without land, it was impossible to perform their rituals. Without rituals, their way of life was dying. Deforestation, logging, and development broke the Orang Asli’s ties to the land and made
it easier—and more necessary—for them to choose a new set of beliefs, a practical how-to guide to modern civilization: Christian or Muslim. This was the choice before them.

The smell of roasting chicken wafting uphill from the rubber glade hinted at Bah Selamat’s anger. His sulking from the other day had given way to rage. Chicken was cheaper than beef, and his daughter’s
wedding day feast should have been much more elaborate—and expensive—but he was in a punishing mood.

“I warned my daughter not to marry a Malay,” he grumbled. “When they become Muslim, they don’t come back.” The guests were beginning to arrive, so he rolled up his blue jeans and dragged tree stumps through the clearing to make seats for them. Like most Orang Asli, he had no deed to his land.
If the government told him to move tomorrow, he would have to do it. He had no doubt the Orang Asli way of life was vanishing.

“Our culture will die depending on how fast development comes,” he said—a predicament that had begun with the building of roads decades earlier. “After the road, a lot of things happened to our community that we didn’t want,” Bah Selamat explained. “Roads allow us to
travel for work outside the village, so this has had a big effect on our families.” The road had led his daughter, Sorya, from the safety of her family. The road had led her to Cameron Highlands, the Malaysian resort town where, waiting tables, she met the Muslim busboy who was now her fiancé. A whisper went around the glade that the bride—his prodigal daughter, Sorya—had arrived via overnight bus,
along with her fiancé and her future mother-in-law. She was hiding in her brother’s hilltop shack, and not planning to appear until her parents and her new Malay family met to haggle over her dowry as a precursor to the wedding ceremony. That event all of us would watch. No one went up to see her, so, along with a zaftig girl cousin of hers, I climbed the hill.

Through the hut’s open door, I
could see the fiancé’s mother collapsed
in a yellow chiffon heap on the floor. Sorya, twenty-four, in sweatpants, crouched on the porch—her skin gray as the wall-eyed river fish, her dull black hair bundled sloppily against her neck. She looked as if she’d been up all night studying for finals, but instead she’d been up, sleepless on the rattling bus, dreading this wedding. All of this talk about
abandoning her people was a convenient revision of history, she said. Her father had wanted her to get a job—and an income—at the resort. And it wasn’t as if some pure ideal of indigenous life was at stake in this village. Sorya explained, “Most people’s job here is to spray poison on the paddy fields.” She drew her knees up and, receding deeper into herself, looked down the steep slope at the
cooking fire’s smoke rising from her father’s house. With little else to say, I wished her a happy future.

“My future isn’t happy at all,” she said vacantly. “My father’s Christian; I’m marrying a Muslim. I haven’t told my father yet, but I’ve already converted.” Her cousin and I looked at each other. “I really don’t know very much about Islam because I’ve been working, so I don’t have time to
learn. I just went to a one-day seminar. They haven’t even taught me how to pray.” That was not unusual; as her father had said, for those converting her, this process was more about her children’s identity than hers.

Puffy-eyed and blinking, her fiancé, Norsyam, twenty-eight, came out of the hut and plopped down near her. “Today we’ll discuss the dowry, and if our parents agree, we’ll get married,
but I don’t think my mother and her father will agree,” he said. Sorya blanched. Together, they guessed at the mortifying questions she was about to be asked, such as “Are you sure you want to marry him?” and “When did you convert to Islam?”

“This is the test of my faith,” she said. It was a test, all right, but of much more than her newfound faith: it was a test of her and Norsyam’s relationship,
and of the law, which would soon prevent her from turning back. They gazed at each other with wide, cowed eyes. Then our unenthusiastic procession marched down the hill to the government-built meetinghouse, a cement two-story structure on top of which a Muslim prayer room had been raised. For years, it had seen little use, since Sorya was one of the village’s first converts. About a hundred
guests sat pressed against the four walls of the large, stuffy room, empty but for two standing fans that only stirred the heat and unease as the entire community awaited the outcome—and lunch. Children, who had been instructed by their parents to stay outside, darkened the windows. In the gloom, I caught the eye of an old man with striking white eyebrows—like hirsute gothic arches—sitting
across
the room. Underneath these remarkable brows, his eyes seemed unusually pale. He had that thousand-mile stare that comes after a brush with death or God.

The two families gathered in the room’s center, along with a male relative of Norsyam’s, an Orang Asli elder, and a wizened man who turned out to be Sorya’s grandfather. Bah Selamat, jeans still rolled up, brooded behind his wife. She, in turn,
glared at the groom’s mother while pointedly avoiding the groom’s gaze. Norsyam had combed his hair, donned a fresh polo shirt, and strapped on a fanny pack. Next to him sat Sorya, who had changed out of her sweats and into a shapeless Islamic dress; she picked her nails and didn’t dare look up. Edo sat next to me and translated Sorya’s mother’s harangue: “My daughter came to me and said, ‘I want
to be married in a month,’ so we surrendered to this thing,” she began. The onlookers chuckled at her brazen sourness.

“Is it true you want to marry him?” the village elder asked Sorya. “Did he force you? Did you borrow money from him?” Everyone laughed, except the bride and groom.

“We don’t want to interrogate further,” Sorya’s grandfather said. “They talk together; maybe they sleep together.”
The crowd gasped. “Just finish it. You can settle your Muslim procedures some other time.”

Looking unmoored, the groom’s mother struggled to cross her legs under the chiffon, and began to massage her feet. Heels had been a poor choice for walking around a rubber glade. She had probably meant to look cheerful, festive, but suddenly she appeared cheap and out of place—a balloon in a morgue. When
Sorya’s mother demanded one thousand dollars as dowry for her daughter (which Edo said was a large sum, but not an obscene one), Norsyam’s mother looked like she might cry.

“If you can’t fulfill today, maybe tomorrow?” the village elder asked.

“What about less?” Norsyam’s mother countered.

“If you think you can’t pay, don’t marry my daughter!” Sorya’s mother barked. “If you want to get married
don’t expect it to be cheap!”

“Okay, if that’s the case, we accept,” Norsyam’s mother said.

“Don’t cheat us!” Sorya’s mother warned. “If this were a buffalo,” she indicated her daughter, “we’d hang on to its tether, but since this is a person, we hold on to your promise.” She meant essentially that she had no choice but to offer her daughter on credit.

Later, at some unspecified date, Sorya’s
family would hold a more formal Orang Asli wedding party, or so they said. But for all practical—conjugal—purposes,
the two were now married, and it was time to scrabble back down the hill, mope, and eat chicken. As the crowd filed out of the meetinghouse, the man whose pale eyes and arched brows I had spied from across the hall approached me. He introduced himself as Bah Rahu, a Methodist preacher,
and the first aboriginal pastor, one who had himself been baptized during the sixties by American missionaries. Having overheard my earlier questions about religion, he took me for an anthropologist, or a missionary. “I’m neither,” I told him, but it did not seem to matter to him who I was. “I am the pioneer of my faith, but we can’t talk here,” he murmured mysteriously, and asked if I might
come to spend a night in his village so we could talk about God.

At the bottom of the hill, the marriage party ground on. The dejected bride stood behind her mother-in-law’s chair, waiting to serve her and stealing glances at her own mother. “You see how angry my mother is?” she whispered in English when I approached. “This is not about money; this is about my marrying a Muslim.” On this, her
wedding day, her father did not speak to her once. When the sun dropped behind a ridge, the glade cooled fast, and the guests began to leave. Bah Selamat started to put the stumps away. “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter,” he said.

By law, every citizen of Malaysia must at all times carry a “biometric smart chip identity card,” called MyKad, from the age of twelve onward.
(The child’s version is called MyKid.) In addition to a microchip that stores the bearer’s name, address, fingerprints, blood type, and other information, the card carries the bearer’s religion. In contemporary cases of apostasy, like that of the Malay convert Lina Joy, the state would not allow her to change the religion on her MyKad, so she could not officially convert from Islam to Christianity.
Sometimes among the Orang Asli, the village chief is the only person to hold such a card, simply because the others have not yet been integrated into the government system. In some cases, his religion determines the religion of the whole village.

Searching for one such village, I stumbled upon word of a recently relocated Orang Asli community. Because a multinational company wanted to build a
hydroelectric dam where their village used to be, the entire community had been moved five miles deeper into the wilderness. In June 2006, I attempted to find this new settlement by following a logging road. (Logging roads do more damage to the forest and rivers than logging does.) The silted river ran so thickly with displaced soil, it looked like Willy Wonka’s chocolate stream. Few living things
can survive in such opaque water. The soil was killing the river.

I happened into a clearing on a shorn ridge built up with around seventy-five small houses. At the edge, on stilts, its bamboo rungs lashed with blue string, was the largest house, which belonged to the village headman, Dero. When I arrived, Dero, who looked to be in his forties, was sprawled out in a pair of Hawaiian shorts on
the tree house floor with a younger friend, Ramlan. The only thing they had to do was watch the chickens below them peck at morsels of food that fell between the floor slats. They would have been out fishing, they said, but the mud had
changed the river. “We have no more fish,” Dero said. They also would have been out harvesting durian—a stinking, delicious fruit—but a chain-link fence now blocked
their route to the wild orchard. Plus, what little fruit they were able to harvest they could no longer transport to the market in Kampar. “It’s too far,” Ramlan said. “The government moved us here, but the road is bad, especially for pregnant women and old people.” A young woman who was breast-feeding an infant moved farther back into the hut.

After asking the easier questions about the road,
the river, the weather, I inquired about religion. Dero chuckled low in his throat—the sound less a laugh than a kind of confession. He was responsible for converting his entire village to Islam, he said. During the 1980s, a government-sponsored Muslim missionary came to see him. “The missionary persuaded me: ‘I’ll take you to the right way. We’re in the same country, we’re in Malaysia, join Islam
so we can live in harmony,’ ” Dero said. “It took a long time for him to convince me, but he told me we could practice loosely.” The government gave him twenty-five Malaysian ringgit—less than seven U.S. dollars—to become a Muslim.

Dero fished through a pocket and pulled out his identity card. In the right-hand corner, under his name, it read, “Islam.” Now on every major Muslim holiday the government
gave them money for new clothing and food. To the Orang Asli, it wasn’t so much a holiday as a handout day. “We get paid once a year at Eid [the festival that ends the fasting month of Ramadan],” Dero said. There was a government-built prayer hall here, too. “We don’t use it,” Dero said. “We don’t pray, and we still hunt monkeys with blowpipes.” Islam forbids the consumption of monkey meat,
as it does pork. These days, the Orang Asli ate less monkey, but only because it was harder to find.

“We don’t practice our traditional religion, either,” his friend Ramlan added. “Our old people are gone.” By old people, he meant shamans. Thanks to the logging road, several Baha’i missionaries had recently visited the village. But the Baha’is did not stay long. Perhaps, Ramlan mused, there had
been a problem with the Muslims.

No Christians had come yet, Dero said. “I don’t know why. Maybe their missionaries can’t come because the road is no good.” (In fact, now that the villagers, through their card-carrying chief, were nominally Muslims, it was illegal for Christian missionaries to proselytize among them.
Missionaries caught preaching to Muslims can be sentenced to up to six lashes
and fined the equivalent of $2,800.)
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