Forgive me oh God..for not believing in your omnipotent power and wisdom in deciding what is best for us, weak human beings....
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Mountains, Don’t Erupt Too
From Kompas Newspaper,
Any mistakes in translation is solely mine.
FOR Aceh disaster, I must see Kiai Sudrun. Can words describe its great impact? Can literature express its depth of sorrow? Can science find and calculate its meanings? The expression of Sudrun’s ugly face with saliva kept crawling out from the corner of his lips almost enraged me. Because I couldn’t tell if he was in grief or not. Because, I will kill anyone who does not grief the grim of the disaster and the sorrow of the victims whose soul were shattered.
“Then, why Aceh, not me nor
“Because you are engaged with the depravity of the world, while Acehnese are married with heaven.”
“Acehnese have gone through the most severe and tremendous sufferings in the recent years, compared to the people in the whole country. Why they are put in such an abyss of sorrow?”
“Suffering is the most expensive deed human beings can offer to their God. Therefore their degree is heightened, and you are left behind to continue being low.”
“Including you, Kiai…”
Spat! He spitted on my face. Like always. I wiped it out in patience.
“If it was a punishment, what have they done wrong? If it was a warning, why it was not given to the mob of thieves and corruptors in
Sudrun was laughing uncontrollably. None I understood what was the funny part of my questions. His body was shaken in laughter.
“You examine God? Question God? Blame God for his injustice?” he asked.
I answered firmly, “Yes.”
“What if God remains silent?”
“I will keep questioning him. And I know all Indonesian will keep questioning him.”
“Until when?”
“Until forever!”
“Until death calls?”
“Yes!”
“Until you die?”
“Nuts!”
“You are nuts. You logic is insane. It’s better to question why your knowledge failed to find out that the earthquake would strike Aceh. You don’t even now what you will say in the next five minutes. Neither you know how many hairs in your armpit. You’re coward. Why you only question God’s acts. Why don’t you go into battle against God? We will move from His land, move from His universe, then you roll the drums of war, against Him!”
“I came to you, Kiai, “I shouted, “to discuss things that will prevent me of accusing God of being a dictator and authority…”
In response, Sudrun jumped up and down. And his whole body was shaken in laughter. His lips smiled widely, mocking me.
“You are wicked,” said he, “because you want to avoid duties.”
“What duties?”
“The moral duty of admitting that God is a dictator and authority. The duty to admit it, to find His logic, then to accept it, and finally to achieve the pleasure of letting it go. God is the only one, who has the right of being dictatorial and authorial, as a painter has the right to love his/her paintings, or to rip them up and throw them to the garbage. God has no obligations because He is not indebted to anyone, and His existence is not the result of anyone’s work. He is not tied to good or evil because He WAS the creator of good and evil. God does not have to comply with right or wrong, because indeed the right or wrong which must comply to Him. Ainun, Ainun, what are you doing? Here, here…” He grabbed my arm and dragged me to the wall. “I’ll lend you this wall…”
“What do you mean, lending me this wall?” I did not understand.
“Use it as you want.”
“For what?”
“For instance, you can bang your head against it…”
“Crazy!”
“To bang your head against the wall is the initial learning step which is good for your way of thinking at the present.”
He brought me to sit.
“Or you can be god, and you decide what is good for human beings’ destiny, based on your wisdom.” He held on my upper shirt.
“Do you know Muhammad?” he continued, “Do you know him? The Prophet Muhammad shallallahu ’alaihi wa alihi wasallah, you know him? He is the jewel of human beings because he chose to live as a poor. Never did he feed himself full in three days in a row, because by the second day he had no possession of food. He sown his own clothes and fixed his own sandal. The dimension of his house was 4.80 long and 4.62 wide. God loved him the most among other human beings, because God let people of Thaif village to throw stones on him that he bleed his forehead. God even let him be severely ill because Zaenab, a Jewish woman, poisoned him. God let his first grandchild to be poisoned by his own wife. And the second grandchild was beheaded and the head was dragged hundreds of kilometers by the horses, thus forced him to bury the child in two graves. God guaranteed him to be in heaven, but he was always in fear of God and cried in each of every prayer that he lifted to God. And all of you, your job is to steal, your action is low, your politic is rotten, your attention to God is divided and half-hearted, you expect to have a better destiny than Muhammad? And when disaster strikes you, you blame God?”
“Kiai,” I said in half voice, “I want to keep my faith that the main icon of God’s existence is His nature of being Compassionate (Rahman) and Merciful (Rahim)…”
“It is very true,” he answered. “What made you lose your faith?”
“Because of Aceh, Kiai, Aceh…For Aceh, I’m willing to receive your spit.”
“I didn’t spit on you. What happened is not that I spitted on you. What happened is that you deserve the spit.”
“As you wish, Kiai, as long as the Compassion and Merci…”
“Compassionate is love in broadened sense, Merci is love in deepened sense. Compassionate is a social love, Merci is the love from the deep of the heart. Why?”
“Aceh, Kiai, Aceh.”
“Compassionate licked Aceh from the ocean, Merci sucked Aceh from the center of the earth. The noblest human being is the one which immediately separated by God from the world. Angels bring them directly to heaven where they reside in the houses of lights, readily available for them. To their families left behind, the destroyed villages and cities are their battle of trial so that the Acehnese come out as people with great characters. After this trial, God will help them to rise and find the hero within their soul. The disaster was made to be that enormous, so that it will solve all problems between Aceh and
“But it was too horrid, Kiai, and it is difficult to imagine how the victims can bear such misery.”
“The world is not the main stage for human beings. If for you, people who live are safe and those who died are not safe, you must first throw away the concepts of God and eternity from your life values. If for you, the houses which are still standing, the worldly possessions which were safe, and the lives which were spared means goodness; and the opposite is bad --- stop protesting God. Because it means that God has no existence in the scale of your thoughts, and for you life stops when you die.”
“But why God took the lives of His innocent servants, and let the nation criminals and society evils live in abundant?”
“Maybe God is not satisfied if those evils do not stay long in hell. So, He let them double their sins and stupidity. Did it happen before that God took many good prominent figures in your country to His eternity; and on the contrary, the ones whom you pray for God to take their lives because they are awfully evil to their people are granted to live long?”
“Oh God Almighty,” I sighed, “we all and myself, Kiai, do not have the sophisticated and precise mind in the caliber of what God has displayed in His action.”
“Don’t act as if you never know the patterns of God’s actions. If human beings’ heart is sick, and they let it worsened so that their politic is disgusting, the economy is shattered, and the culture is full of mockery to the human values, God will even add up the sickness, and provide them with a more devastating disaster which will await them in the end. What happened in Aceh is not a disaster in God’s perspective. It is an exultation to those whose lives were taken by the angels, and an enlightenment and awakening for those who were let alive.”
“For us the commoners, it all still seemed unfair…”
“You stupid!” Sudrun retorted. “Chickens are joyful and grateful if they are butchered for the contentment of human beings. They had no awareness of knowing, but they are joyful and grateful.”
“So the corruptors and tyrants will still live prosperous?”
“Until this afternoon, yes. Actually God still loves them that for the last one or two months, He still gave warnings, in the form of natural, technology and human disasters, in higher frequencies than the previous months. But, they failed so God decided to bring a greater warning. If the greatness of Aceh disaster did not move the hearts of
“Don’t say that the mountains will erupt too, Kiai.” I cut his words, horrified to imagine what Sudrun will tell next.
“Tell it yourself to the mountains!” said Sudrun, rose and left me.
“Kiai!” I jumped and chased him,” Please tell God to take a break from his decision to create natural disasters….”
“Why you called it natural disasters? If you blame God, why don’t you call it God disasters?”
I can’t hold Sudrun. He ran and disappeared.
Emha Ainun Nadjib
Literary Figure
