The old men call it basuluak, and they say it changes
you forever. Not like a haircut changes you, or even like marriage changes you.
No, this is the kind of change that gets down into your bones and rewires the
soft gray matter between your ears. The kind that makes your family look at you
different when you come back home—if you come back home at all.
I first heard about it from Jake Timmons, an anthropology
professor who’d gone native in more ways than one after twenty years studying
the Minangkabau folks of Sumatra. He had that thousand-yard stare you see in
Vietnam vets and folks who’ve survived things they shouldn’t have. His office
at the university smelled of clove cigarettes and something else I couldn’t
place—something old and patient.
“It’s not something they advertise in the tourist brochures,”
Jake said, pouring us both another finger of bourbon. Outside his window, the
salty breeze rolled in from the ocean, a warm reminder that even in winter, San
Diego’s weather kept things easygoing. “The Naqshbandi Sufi Order’s been doing
it for centuries. Self-isolation. Soul-scrubbing. Riyadhah, they call
it—spiritual exercise.”
Jake pronounced the foreign words with the casual confidence
of a man who’d spent too many nights dreaming in another language. His fingers
trembled slightly as he raised his glass.
“But it ain’t just religion,” he continued. “For those
mountain people, basuluak is… Christ, how do I explain it? It’s like
opening a door inside yourself that maybe shoulda stayed locked.”
The practice began spreading through the misty highlands of
Minangkabau in the 1600s, carried on the backs of wandering holy men who’d
studied under Sheikh Bahauddin Naqshband. Now there’s a name that doesn’t roll
off the American tongue—Bahauddin Muhammad bin Muhammad al-Bukhari
al-Naqshbandi, born in a village called Qasr al-Arifin near Bukhara, in what’s
now Uzbekistan. The locals just call him Sheikh Naqshband, like he’s an old
neighbor they might bump into at the market.
The Sheikh’s teachings were simple enough on paper:
seclusion (khalwat), constant remembrance of God (zikir), and
guarding the heart from worldly distractions. But simple ain’t the same as
easy. Not by a damn sight.
“You know what they do?” Jake asked, his eyes suddenly
focusing on me with uncomfortable intensity. “They wrap themselves in white
shrouds—like corpses, you understand—and they stay that way for forty days.
Forty. Days.”
I thought about the longest I’d ever been alone. Three days
in my apartment after Wendy left, blinds drawn, phone unplugged. By day two, I
was having conversations with the refrigerator. By day three, it was answering
back.
The Sheikh’s teachings spread like wildfire across Asia and
eventually reached the Indonesian archipelago. The scholars who brought it
there had names that sounded to my ears like incantations: Sheikh Abdul Rauf
al-Singkili, Abuya Sheikh Muhammad Waly al-Khalidi, Sheikh Ahmad Khatib
al-Minangkabawi. Men who’d journeyed to Mecca and Medina and come back changed.
Over time, the practice split into branches—the way all good
religions do, I suppose—with the Khalidiyya brought by Sheikh Ismail al-Khalidi
and the Mujaddidiyya spread by Sayyid Muhammad Saleh al-Zawawi al-Makki. There
was even a fusion called Qadiriyya Naqshbandiyya, like some spiritual
cocktail mixed by a bartender who knows things the customers don’t.
In the highlands of Sumatra, where the fog creeps through
valleys like something alive and the air smells of wet earth and cloves, the
practice took root and flourished under men like Sulaiman al-Zuhdi and his son,
Ali Ridha.
“The thing about basuluak,” Jake said, reaching for
the bottle again, “is that you can’t do it alone. That’s the catch. You need a
guide—a mursyid or sheikh or khalifah. Someone who’s been
there before and made it back.”
Made it back. The words hung in the stale office air like
smoke.
The ritual takes place in prayer halls, mosques,
caves—anywhere a person can vanish from the world for a while. They say you
have to maintain constant ritual purity, chant sacred phrases until your throat
feels like sandpaper, and reduce your sleep to the bare minimum human beings
can survive on. Some go days without leaning against anything, sitting ramrod
straight as they whisper their devotions.
“You can’t just decide to do it,” Jake continued. “You need
to make sure your family won’t starve while you’re gone playing spiritual
hermit. ‘It should be sufficient for both the family left behind and oneself,’
that’s what they say. ‘If not, one should not participate.’ The family should
not suffer because of it.”
He chuckled darkly, sloshing bourbon onto a stack of
ungraded papers. “Funny how many men convince themselves their families will be
just fine without them.”
I thought about my own family then—what was left of it—and
wondered if they’d notice if I disappeared for forty days. Probably not until
the bills started piling up.
In the old days, they say, young men flocked to basuluak
like moths to porch lights. These days, it’s mostly the old-timers, the ones
with nothing left to lose and everything to prove. But Taufik Hidayat, a
professor at some Islamic university in Indonesia, swears there were mursyids
in their twenties once upon a time, which means they must have started when
they were teenagers. Kids seeking enlightenment instead of Friday night
keggers.
The real die-hards do the full forty days, but they break
newbies in gentle—ten days before Ramadan, then the thirty days of the sacred
month. Veterans might do twenty or thirty days at a stretch, building spiritual
calluses with each session.
And the food. Dear God, the food. No meat, no fish, no eggs,
nothing with blood or fat. Just tempeh and potatoes and cabbage and plain rice.
Barely enough to keep body and soul together—which I guess is the whole point.
After twenty days of this starvation diet, they get what they call maso
bajamu—a brief feast before returning to their spiritual starvation.
The worst part, though—or the best, depending on how you
look at it—is the isolation. No phones, no TV, no internet, no casual
conversations about the weather or last night’s game. Just you and your
thoughts and whatever demons have been hiding in the corners of your mind,
waiting for quiet enough to make themselves heard.
“And people still do this?” I asked Jake, finally finding my
voice. “In the 21st century?”
He nodded slowly, a thin smile spreading across his
weathered face. “Some things don’t change just because we invented smartphones,
my friend. Some hungers go deeper than technology can reach.”
He leaned forward then, and I caught a whiff of that strange
smell again—like old books and something metallic.
“You want to know the real kicker?” he whispered. “After
forty days wrapped in white, chanting until your voice gives out, eating
nothing but vegetables and rice, sleeping two, maybe three hours a night… after
all that, you know what happens?”
I shook my head.
“Sometimes, nothing at all. And sometimes—” he tapped his
temple with one finger, “—sometimes you come back with something extra.
Something that wasn’t there before. Or maybe it was always there, just waiting
for you to make room for it.”
Outside, the cool San Diego evening settled in, the city
quiet after the rush of the day, with just the soft hum of distant waves. The
sudden silence felt expectant, like the whole world was holding its breath.
“And what about you, Jake?” I asked, my voice barely audible
in the quiet room. “Did you bring something back?”
He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes reflecting
nothing, like two empty windows in an abandoned house.
“We all bring something back,” he said finally. “The
question is whether we can live with it.”
I never saw Jake Timmons again after that night. His
department said he’d taken an extended sabbatical. Back to Indonesia, they
thought, though nobody seemed quite sure. Sometimes I wonder if he’s there now,
wrapped in white, waiting in silence for whatever comes next.
And sometimes, on nights when sleep won’t come and the
darkness feels a little too attentive, I wonder if maybe basuluak isn’t
confined to those misty mountains after all. Maybe it’s what we’re all doing,
in our own way—wrapping ourselves in whatever shrouds we can find, whispering
whatever mantras keep us sane, trying to scrub our souls clean in a world
determined to stain them.
And waiting, always waiting, for that moment of revelation
that might change everything—or might not come at all.
Comments
Post a Comment