The Night of Whispered Glory

 

The village went quiet as dusk settled like a shroud. The holy month of Ramadan was ending, and there was something in the air that night—something electric, something old. The children knew it. The old-timers sitting on their porches with arthritic fingers wrapped around cigarettes knew it too.

In backyards and garages throughout the village, preparations had been underway since morning. Strips of bamboo stood in neat piles. Used fabric, the kind your grandmother might have saved in her attic trunk, lay in colorful heaps. Plastic jugs of kerosene waited, their contents sloshing with quiet menace whenever someone moved them. Tools lay scattered on workbenches, as if abandoned in haste.

Jimmy Cutler—who wasn’t even Muslim but had lived in the village for thirty-seven years—watched from his porch and thought, Something’s coming tonight. Something big.

He wasn’t wrong.

As darkness swallowed the last purple streaks of twilight, they emerged. First just a handful, then dozens, then what seemed like the entire population of the village, forming a procession that snaked down Main Street. Each person clutched a homemade torch in their right hand, flames dancing and casting grotesque, elongated shadows against whitewashed walls and shuttered storefronts.

And then the chanting began.

“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.”

The words rolled through the village like thunder, echoing off buildings and returning distorted, as if the night itself was answering back. The traditional drums joined in—the heavy thump-thump-THUMP of the beduk creating a heartbeat for the village as the procession wound through narrow streets.

This was takbir keliling—the circulatory takbir—a tradition that had spread across the country like a beautiful contagion, marking the night before Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

(I’ve seen such things before, in small towns across America, where tradition runs as deep as the water table. Different words, different gods, but the same human need to gather in the dark and feel less alone.)

“Allah is the Greatest,” the phrase means in Arabic. Simple words with the weight of centuries behind them. Words that have been spoken in prayer and in war, in moments of unspeakable joy and bottomless despair. Words that have bound communities together since before America was even a fevered dream in some colonist’s mind.

Salma Melysa stood at the edge of the procession, her nine-year-old son Amir bouncing with excitement beside her. She remembered her own childhood takbiran nights, when her father would hoist her onto his shoulders so she could see above the crowd. The smell of kerosene and the heat of hundreds of bodies pressed together had terrified and thrilled her then. Now, watching her son’s face illuminated by firelight, she felt the tradition slip from one generation to the next, like a family heirloom too precious to be locked away.

The takbir has deep roots, stretching back before the time of Muhammad. The old stories tell of Ibrahim—Abraham to the Christians and Jews—who was commanded by God to sacrifice his own son. The kind of test that gives parents nightmares for millennia to come. As Ibrahim raised the knife, his hand trembling (how could it not?), the angel Jibril stopped him and replaced the boy with a sacrificial animal.

And in that moment of reprieve, when the father realized he wouldn’t have his son’s blood on his hands after all, the first takbir was born:

“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” said Jibril.

“Laa ilaaha Illahu Wallahu Akbar,” answered Ismail, the boy who had stared death in the face.

“Allahu Akbar Walillahilhamd,” added Ibrahim, his knife hand still shaking.

(The instruments of sacrifice are never far from us, are they? The knives we keep in kitchen drawers. The words that can cut deeper than steel. The choices that can kill something inside us.)

The tradition of takbiran reached the Indonesian archipelago sometime in the 13th century, riding the trade winds with Arab, Persian, and Indian merchants. Like most imported things, it got mixed up with what was already there—the local cultures, beliefs, and practices. The result was something unique, something distinctly Indonesian.

Old man Nur Alim, whose face had more creases than an accordion and whose memory stretched back farther than anyone else in the village, once told a researcher: “Since before I was born, takbir keliling already existed. Those who started it were the scholars and the students.” His voice had the creak of ancient floorboards, the sound of history struggling to make itself heard.

The tradition evolved like all living things do. What once was done on foot, with torches lighting the way through dirt paths barely wide enough for two people walking abreast, now incorporated motorcycles and cars decked out in colorful lights and Islamic motifs. Loudspeakers mounted on pickup trucks broadcast the takbir across neighborhoods where, behind drawn curtains, some residents covered their ears and muttered about noise ordinances.

In Gresik, they carried Damar Kurung—lanterns that held flames like trapped fireflies. In Bengkulu, the Serawai people built towers of coconut shells called Ronjok Sayak, setting them ablaze after the Isha prayer on the night of 1 Syawal. The flames reached toward the stars, carrying prayers to ancestors who had long since turned to dust.

The Sundanese practiced Nganteuran, exchanging food with neighbors—opor ayam steaming in ceramic bowls, sambal goreng ati that made your tongue tingle, ketupat rice cakes wrapped in palm leaves, and sweet treats that grandmothers spent days preparing. In Gorontalo, there was Tumbilotohe, where homes blazed with lamps made from damar tree resin for three nights before Eid al-Fitr.

(We mark our faith in different ways, don’t we? Some with fire. Some with food. Some with the quiet certainty that when we close our eyes at night, something is listening to our prayers. Or maybe that’s just what we tell ourselves so the darkness doesn’t seem so absolute.)

Not everyone approved of how takbiran had changed. Some scholars—men with serious eyes and beards that had never known a trimmer—worried that the religious essence was being lost in the carnival atmosphere. They feared the sacred words were drowning under the thump of bass speakers and the revving of motorcycle engines.

“Preserve the sanctity,” they urged from pulpits and in newspaper columns. “Remember why we gather.”

But on that particular night, as the procession wound through the village streets, nobody was thinking about theological debates or the purity of tradition versus innovation. They were caught in the moment—the fire, the drums, the voices rising in unison toward a sky scattered with indifferent stars.

And in that moment, the words “Allahu Akbar” were neither a political statement nor a battle cry misappropriated by extremists who twisted faith into weaponry. They were simply an affirmation, passed from one generation to the next like a torch in the night.

The villagers moved as one body through the darkness, their shadows merging and separating in the flickering light. Tomorrow would bring the celebration of Eid—the prayers, the feasts, the new clothes and family visits. But tonight belonged to the takbir, to the fire, to the ancient words that reminded everyone of their place in the long, unbroken chain of belief that stretched back farther than memory.

And as they chanted, some swore they could hear other voices joining in—voices from long ago, echoing across time, whispering Allahu Akbar from century to century, from village to village, from heart to heart.

The night held its breath and listened.