devices of oblivion: how islamic schools rescue ‘orphaned’ children from traumatic experiences...

South East Asia Research, 20, 2, pp 225–000 doi: 10.5367/sear.2012.0107

Devices of oblivion: how Islamic schoolsrescue ‘orphaned’ children from traumatic

experiences in Aceh (Indonesia)1

Silvia Vignato

Abstract: Since the peace agreement has put an end to the 30-year-long civilconflict in the province of Aceh in Indonesia, poverty, parental loss, lack ofopportunities and an old tradition have caused a growing number of Acehnesegirls and boys to spend between three and ten years in residential Koranicschools [dayah or pesantren]. There, they process their experience of the con-flict, be it direct or indirect. In this article, thanks to ethnographical data, theauthor explores this labour of transformation. An idea of resilience which isculturally based in local societies is analysed. Key issues are the differencebetween personal and social resilience, plus the transformations that a resil-ient process enhances in the very culture from which it stems. The dayah haveproved very effective structures in facing the needs of the poorest Acehnesechildren. Nevertheless, the author argues, they tend to shape the children ac-cording to a general model that can create exclusion and crystallize pre-existingpsychic suffering. This paper indicates that different visions of trauma andmemory characterize different parts of the same society, and that selectingone or another is a political choice that is embedded in international policies.

Keywords: children; victims; oblivion; trauma; anthropology; Aceh

Author details: Dr Silvia Vignato is Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Diparti-mento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione ‘Riccardo Massa’, Facoltà di Scienzedella Formazione, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126Milano, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected].

In 2005 the peace agreement put an end to the 30-year civil conflict in the prov-ince of Aceh (Indonesia). An Islamic residential institution, the dayah2 RasyadAziziya,3 was then created on the outskirts of a major town with the explicit remitof sheltering child victims of the civil war and helping them to grow into peace-oriented adults through the Islamic practices of chanting and Malay martial arts[silat]. Although the dayah Rasyad Aziziya is particular in its outspoken inten-tions, it is based on the same pedagogical ideal as about 800 other dayah spreadthroughout the province of Aceh. A growing number of Acehnese girls and boys

1 I wish to thank Anne Guillou, Claudia Mattalucci and Matteo Alcano for reading early drafts ofthis article and sharing their precious comments with me. I also wholeheartedly thank Jesse Graymanfor his competent advice.

2 In Acehnese, a place where students [santri] live with an Islamic expert in order to receive reli-gious education is called a dayah. Alternatively, the Indonesian word pesantren is also used.

3 This is not the actual name. In this article I have systematically changed the names of people andplaces in order to hide the minors’ identities.

226 South East Asia Research

(about 150,000 in 2007)4 spend between three and ten years of their lives in thesedayah. There, they process their (direct or indirect) experiences of the conflict. Inthis article, I explore their labour of transformation.

I shall first approach the structural aspects of such labour and examine the ideo-logical framework in which the children grow up. The spiritual and material leaderof the dayah Rasyad Aziziya explains his pedagogical intent by drawing on bothnotions that stem from a long acquaintance with international aid and on Muslimideas of recovery and health. Although both ideologies imply an idea of trauma,they handle the consequences of traumatic experiences in quite different ways.

From the point of view of Islamic institutions, the experience of violence thatleads children to the dayah, be it war, tsunami or poverty, is understood within ageneral framework of compulsory compassion grounded in Islam and in localideas about what Acehnese society is or should be. Trauma in itself does not seemto be a relevant issue. The dayah children, generally referred to as ‘orphans’, areseen as capital for the institution: they earn the institution money and social pres-tige through donations. Such capital will – in turn – enable the children’s ownsurvival. From this point of view, trauma must be forgotten. It is neither capitalnor a resource. The children’s bodies, young and needy by definition, are enough.From the point of view of international aid, ‘trauma’ creates ‘victims’. It mustthen be recognized and declared; indeed, such recognition entitles individuals to aset of rights that echo an idea of internationalized citizenship.

On the structural level, I argue, the whole approach fostered by the dayah andtheorized by its leader can be seen as quite ingenious. The dayah illustrates howAcehnese society takes care of its weakest members by remaining devoted to its owncultural devices in a sustainable way. This can be considered as a form of socialresilience, which is the capacity of a group ‘to cope with trauma and strains generatedby severe disruptive change’ (Long, 2008, p 4) or the capacity to tolerate disturbance‘without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a differentset of processes’ (Resilience Alliance, 2005, cited in Manyena, 2009, p 43).

Such structural social resilience, though, resists being examined, regardless ofthe actual people involved in each concrete situation. Throughout my research,the children’s point of view shed an ambiguous light on the successful model inaccordance with which they grow up. In this text, I highlight the interplay be-tween the well functioning structure, the children’s interpretations of it and theunpredictable development of their subjectivities. The cases of individual andmass possession unveil some aspects of this development. These cases lead me tounderscore the difference between personal and social resilience and to questionthe political use of a hegemonic idea of social or cultural resilience.

Life in the dayah

I carried out my ethnographical research in the dayah Rasyad Aziziya. The re-search was conducted in a series of visits over three years (2009–11). One hundred

4 I thank the newly constituted (2010) Badan Dayah for sharing their data with me. They them-selves were not yet able to state how many children actually stayed in the Acehnese dayah in2010. Two Save the Children reports (2006 and 2007) state that 16,000 children were staying inhomes (in most cases run like a dayah) and 244,000 in dayah, out of a total population of roughly4,500,000 in 2010.

How Islamic schools rescue ‘orphaned’ from Aceh 227

and forty children aged between 6 and 17 from all over Aceh live there. Abouthalf of them have been directly affected by the conflict and the rest are either2004 tsunami survivors or come from very poor and socially unstable backgrounds.Most are fatherless and some are motherless; in the surrounding areas, people talkabout them as ‘the orphans’ [anakyatim].

Traditionally, in Aceh, a dayah is a residential place for children to learn al-Qur’an with an Islamic expert or tengku. I shall call the leader of the dayah RasyadAziziya tengku Bantasyam. What is becoming established in Aceh is a model ofexpensive super-equipped, bilingual or trilingual (Indonesian, English and Ara-bic) Islamic residential schools. However, this is an ideal and only two such boardingschools exist. In spite of the fact that everybody praises these types of schools,most dayah are very simple or poor institutions.

The dayah Rasyad Aziziya, classified as terpadu [integrated], provides or wouldlike to provide the children with school programmes that mix a traditional Koranicand Islamic education with the general Indonesian public school programmes.This implies having inbuilt schools. It took some years, but eventually the build-ings were constructed and the teachers hired. In 2011, most children did not haveto leave the compound in order to attend school.

We should remember that its leader’s vision is of a peace-building pedagogyunlike other Acehnese dayah. Apart from this, the dayah Rasyad Aziziya is nodifferent from most Acehnese dayah. The practice of Islam is considered to be atthe heart of any dayah. The children do the five prayers together, boys separatedfrom girls. Besides praying, they are expected to ‘study’ [ngaji] – that is, to joinclasses about the Koran and about Islam and study the recitation of the Koran.Ngaji takes place in the morning after subuh (about 5 am) and in the evening aftermaghrib (about 7 pm). During the rest of the day the children attend school, dotheir homework and go to less [additional teachings on school subjects].

Before and after maghrib, more chanting takes place. Wirid – literally ‘recita-tion’ – implies that the children recite a surat or just some verses from al-Qur’anand sometimes a hikayat, an epic poem – but I am told that in the dayah RasyadAziziya, none of the students knows a whole hikayat. Another form of chantingsometimes takes place: seuleuwet, or psalms glorifying the Prophet. In fact, mostoften in the dayah Rasyad Aziziya, the children chant the zikir, a repetition of thenames of Allah in a very rhythmic utterance often entailing a body swing. Allthese activities are for both boys and girls. Only boys, however, are taught likee,a specifically Acehnese way to chant zikir (likee or dikee is actually the Acehneseversion of the Arabic word dhikir) with a wide body swing and a pattern of differ-ent movements criss-crossing the rows of sitting boys or men, led by an expert inthat particular repertoire called sheikh (Kartomi, 2007, p 1; Braginsky, 2004, p141). The Dutch ethnographer Snouck Hurgronje called such practices ‘devoutrecreations’ (1906, Vol II, p 219, cited in Kartomi, 2007, p 2), thus emphasizingthe pleasure boys find in performing them. Zikir, or likee, along with Koranicchanting in general [wirid], is supposed to prevent the devout child from a condi-tion of emptiness that is the cause of instability and overwhelming bad memories.

A few words must be said to qualify the spatial meaning of a dayah in contem-porary Aceh. A dayah is, by definition, a separate space from the territory it occupies.The dayah Rasyad Aziziya is in a city. The compound is surrounded by privatehouses and located on an urban road where people come and go. No physical


barriers are there to prevent the children from leaving or to control people whoenter the place. Neighbours may visit; the boys may often play outside; and bothboys and girls occasionally visit the shops on the main street in order to buy anexercise book, a pen or sweets, or to visit a neighbour’s home. Nevertheless, it iscommon knowledge that there is a difference between inside and outside the com-pound. A woman, for instance, is immediately required to adopt what in Aceh isconsidered to be the most strictly observed Islamic dress code (long skirt, longloose blouse, big jilbab covering her breasts and her shoulders).5

In fact, the differentiation of inner and outer space relates more to an invisiblesymbolic awareness than to any specific sign or barrier. An Acehnese home isvery often a maternal home6 where new babies are born (and were born evenduring the war). Space is mostly free from gender considerations and childrencirculate quite freely. The dayah is dissimilar in that at its heart stands the leader’shome. He is referred to as abu, ‘father’. He supervises the children’s education,but does not have a direct relationship with all of them, especially not with thegirls. Boys and girls live in separate parts, even though they interact (small boys,in particular, often seek older girls’ care). Unlike in Acehnese homes, no idea ofbrother–sisterhood is encouraged in the dayah: boys and girls have no structuralrelationship.

So the dayah is basically the opposite of a home: it is a highly gendered, highlyhierarchized, father-oriented space. Not only are new babies not born there, butits purpose is to put an end to childhood. The children are sent to a dayah to learnto stand on their own [mandiri] as well as to learn in a wider sense.

Most children hosted in the dayah have a very good knowledge of the outerterritory. This knowledge is further increased by the constant comparison theyplay out amongst each other’s place of origin. For instance, when I showed upwith a map of Aceh I had with me for other reasons, the teenagers were very eagerto locate everybody’s village and could trace the usual set of locations they hadmoved around in before landing in the pesantren. A dayah, on the whole, is aplace where, by moving away from one’s origins – home, village or mother – onelearns about the rest of the world.

Children as a metaphor for post-conflict transformation

It has been observed that not only do wars – especially long-lasting ones – ‘dis-rupt the internalized culturally constituted webs of trust’, they also build alternativewebs of meanings (Robben and Suarez-Orozco, 2000, p 43). This is all the moreso for children, who do not have any experience of an alternative condition. If weconsider that wars and general catastrophes are not a parenthetic state that ‘hap-pens’ to a society, but rather a moment when a society sets its roots (Das andKleinman, 2000, pp 3–4) and constitutes memories, which can be chosen to bethe bricks for the future (Volkan and Itzkowitz, 2000, p 232), the children I dealtwith embody such selected bricks. This points to the methodological and theoreti-cal difference between carrying out research with adults who remember their past

5 The santri girls are required to wear socks outside but not inside the dayah, but visitors are not.Only one of the teachers wears a chadar on her face as a personal choice.

6 Acehnese matriliny or, as it is more commonly called, matrifocality, has been described by Siegel(1969, pp 51–55), Jayawardena (1977) and Vignato (2012).


and youngsters who, by the very fact of growing up, are enacting the transforma-tion of that past.

For a start, carrying out ethnography with children questions the ethnographer’sresponsibility towards minors and his or her freedom to enact different moral oreducational models from those adopted by the minors’ carers (Lignier, 2008).7 Inthe dayah Rasyad Aziziya, the children and their carers constantly raised the issueof my non-Muslimhood. I carefully framed my difference in a cultural context (‘Iam Italian and in Italy almost everybody is baptized’). I did not live within theinstitution, but visited it regularly in the short part of the day when the childrenwere not studying or attending to religious practices. When in the dayah com-pounds, I complied with the leaders’ vestimentary requests (long skirt, loose blouseand jilbab). Still, and even though I was welcomed, I was perceived as a distur-bance within an educational project very deeply and thoroughly embedded in Islamand inscribed in a region ruled by Shariat Islam (Islamic Law).8 When everybodygathered to pray or to chant, I was left alone, and children sometimes laggedbehind because my presence was deemed to be disruptive. Besides, much thoughI tried, I never fulfilled the vestimentary ideal: as I moved about, my legs becamevisible in the movement, a lock of hair would stick out of my jilbab, and so on. Iwas a powerful embodiment of what the young ones were not supposed to growup to be – a bad Muslim.9

Looking at it from a different perspective, carrying out ethnography with chil-dren means approaching a very unstable ethnographical object (Lancy, 2010, pp452–453). A strong element of agency and unpredictable development character-izes children, which only partly fits the educational or pedagogical project theirelders drew for them. If the adults strive to stabilize the memories of their war-time, the children will partake of the process of transformation of those verymemories. Changes are fast and the observer encounters them every day, and thusfeels that she or he is witnessing a process from too close a standpoint. This isexactly what the observer experiences when trying to make sense of a post-con-flict situation. The post-war children I spent time with can be understood as ametaphor for the process of growing out of the conflict while setting roots in it.

The best example of this process lies in the fact that, while during the waryoung people aged 15 or 16 were acknowledged to be old enough to becomeparents or combatants, in peacetime teenagers have all fallen under the same,wide category of ‘children’. Such normalization and stabilization of the idea ofchildhood is a consequence of the general opening to the world and to the interna-tional aid that has characterized Acehnese post-conflict (and post-tsunami) situations.Anybody under 18 is now considered a ‘child’ by the policy makers, according tothe International Convention on the Rights of the Child (http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm). This is all the more striking because, while agreeing to beofficially ‘small’, the children in the dayah themselves emphasize the steps they

7 Authors question the extent to which the anthropologist is supposed or allowed to participate inthe children’s life and in what role – playmate, neutral observer, peer, reference role, carer, teacher,etc (Laerke, 1998; Danic, Delalande and Rayou, 2006; Lignier, 2008).

8 The enforcement of Shariat is not written in the Helsinki MoU (2005), the peace agreement, butcame as a result of the negotiations in which the most radical stream of the rebels prevailed.

9 Through my disturbing presence, I elicited comments on Westerners and the West that helped meto understand the sympathy of the dayah for an international and very normalizing Islam which Imight otherwise have ignored.


are bound and proud to take out of childhood, if only to be able to stay within theinstitution: not crying at night, not wanting to see their parents, getting up forearly prayers, learning to chant, washing their clothes…10

If children are a metaphor for post-conflict transformation, non-traumatized,well educated children are a metaphor for a growing peace. In fact, even thoughthe children I dealt with had been exposed to multiple, severe and chronic disrup-tive painful experiences, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has no relevanceamongst them. I am not suggesting that they do not suffer from panic attacks,nightmares, depression and other symptoms clinically associated with PTSD11 –some of them do, or did – but simply that trauma-related suffering is not affordedmuch importance in the dayah, nor was ever diagnosed as such. Early anthropo-logical literature dealing with PTSD historicizes the categorization of symptomsinto a syndrome and sets it in a wider, complex political context (Kleinman, 1987;Young, 1995). The dayah I describe here practises a non-categorization of thevery same symptoms. This is not for lack of interest or appraisal. It is well knownthat the children who were brought to the dayah in an emergency and those whowere brought by their family in need have had very distressing experiences. But,in spite of this awareness, the pedagogical project at the core of the dayah playsdown the idea that trauma deserves a specific intervention.

From a clinical perspective, this can be read as a reasonable choice. Barenbaum,Ruchkin and Schwhab-Stone (2004) actually warn against trying to separate trau-matic elements from non-traumatic elements when dealing with war children,because living through horrible experiences is part of what positively constructstheir lives, and the line between good and bad memories is constantly blurred.Rather than focusing on the entity of trauma, these authors maintain, it is impor-tant to understand that among those behaviours that are clinically associated withtrauma (anxiety, dissociation, panic, nightmares, etc), which ones are healthyreactions to a dreadful event and which ones, if any, are destructive.12 Even then,continue the authors, it is not easy to know what to do with these traumatizedchildren. They underline that, according to existing literature, and contrary towhat is suggested by the ongoing work of NGO rescue clinicians, there is noevidence that getting children to speak and draw out their traumatic experiencesenhances a healing process or, on the contrary, that it reinforces automatic re-actualization of the traumatism.13 The authors hold that specific literature inpsychopathology has no final word about what strengthens children’s and adoles-cents’ resilience after a collective traumatic event: different sections of differentsocieties have or lack the specific resources to deal with children’s difficulties(Barenbaum et al, 2004, p 55). For the children’s health, continue Barenbaum et

10 Both Rosen and Trawick have dealt with the ideas of adulthood related to child soldiers (Rosen,2007; Trawick, 2007).

11 Actually, PTSD has been widely addressed as such in Aceh by IOM and USAID, and a broadclinical psychiatric intervention was planned and carried out under the direction of anthropolo-gists and psychiatrists Byron Good and Mary-Jo Delvecchio (Good et al, 2006 and 2007). Theword ‘trauma’ has become a common one by which to refer to past experiences of violence(Grayman et al, 2009).

12 Within their random sample of adult Acehnese highly affected by painful events, Grayman et alwere able to identify successfully nightmares that activated cultural elaboration of memories andnightmares in which only the traumatic event was repeatedly present (Grayman et al, 2009).

13 Strassler (2006) underlines how drawings reproduce standard images, and only children whoundergo a specific training course leave or transform those images.


al, there seems to be more importance in everyday settings than in clinicalapproaches. In fact, Apfel and Simon show that in spite of the difficulties of theireveryday life, the Intifada children do not develop PTSD or other psychiatricsyndromes when they can rely on people and places that are protective and shel-tering and allow them to benefit from a continuing positive experience, such asattending school or relating to teachers and educators. According to these authors,youngsters who grow up in a web of trauma need to gain a safe perspective ontheir future (Apfel and Simon, 2000, pp 117–119, 124–135). What seems mostrelevant, then, while children are children, is to provide them with a safe space sothat whatever psychic capital they have can be usefully mobilized. In this regard,as we shall see in the subsequent pages of this paper, the dayah Rasyad Aziziyaand other similar places can be seen as ideal models of a culturally specific andsuccessful way to handle traumatization in children.

Security and discipline in the dayah

In its first rough settlement, the dayah Rasyad Aziziya was specifically conceivedas a shelter. Even though, during the war, there had been a famous episode ofviolence directed against a traditional Koranic school in Aceh (Jakarta Post, 1999),the dayah were generally respected by both the rebels of the Movement for a FreeAceh (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) and the Indonesian Army (Tentara NegaraIndonesia, TNI). When homes and schools were destroyed and food was scarce,many families brought their children to the village tengku and left them in hiscare. In his turn, the tengku sometimes referred them to a more established resi-dential dayah where, at the very least, the young ones could eat and learn something.A charitable intention is typical of many pesantren over the whole of MuslimIndonesia. They take in poor children in exchange for very small fees or for noth-ing at all. In Aceh, furthermore, the needs of wartime were made more meaningfulby the Acehnese tradition that families ‘give’ one child ‘to the tengku’ so that hecan become a learned Islamic scholar (Martin and Sudrajat, 2007). In the dayahRasyad Aziziya, in fact, the children seem to consider being sent to the dayah as asign that their family is looking after them and securing their future as well asimposing a painful separation.

The feeling of safety is often mentioned by the dayah inmates. The older chil-dren do not relate it directly to the war or to the other catastrophic situationswhich their family or village has endured. They talk rather of moral dangers. Thedayah, they say, is a safe place because it is the place of Islam, and Islam is theonly safe life to lead. Enlisting their leaders’ words, a couple of 14-year-old boysexplained that they felt safe [aman] because they were sheltered from bad influ-ences [pengaruh]. Of course, I was also told by both boys and girls that in thedayah they could envision their future [masadepan] because they could go toschool, whereas in the village things were difficult. Susah, the Indonesian wordmeaning ‘difficulty’, is a common and polite way to denote poverty [miskin].When I visited some of the children’s home villages, I could actually see that theirparents or tutors could often barely provide them with food, let alone pay forschool uniforms and books or transportation. This misfortune is what the childrenfeel they have to be protected from. It is both a moral and a practical danger.

Protection and a vision of the future in the dayah do not come for free. Inside


the institution, a child has to abide by the rules in order to be safe from punish-ment and to be able to stay there.

In Aceh, praying, ngaji and wirid are considered to be the most important partsof the personal development of any child into an adult. The children in the dayahRasyad Aziziya are seen to be in a particular position in this regard. Their tengkuand teachers say that, because they were very unfortunate, they did not go throughthe correct process of Koranic learning, although, for the same reason, they needit more than other children as they are ‘wild’ [liar] and need to be ‘formed’[dibentukkan]. Consequently, in the tengku’s vision, they need to be even moredisciplined than other children or pupils in Koranic schools. At the same time,they need a lot of compassionate affection [kasihan].

Discipline is important in the compound. As in all dayah, being late for prayersor courses, lazing around, misplacing your Koran or schoolbag, not keeping upwith your washing, speaking dirty words or being caught with a mobile phone –in short, not respecting the rules – leads to rapid punishment with a bamboo stick.On a Friday, or whenever it is felt appropriate, the boys and girls separately un-dergo the ‘judgment’ [makamah] and receive the punishment – more often a talkand some tasks to be carried out, rather than corporal punishment, public shamingor both.

Tengku Bantasyam insists that he worries about the children and wishes he werenot forced to send them back to their tutors because the children are too undisci-plined. Moral and physical violence is always inscribed in such educational andcharitable frameworks. A very problematic boy, for instance, had chilli rubbed onhis body so that he would be in pain but would not develop permanent marks,which does show a concern about the boy’s body. This is partly shaped by theinternationalization of UN wartime ideas such as establishing ‘body maps’ of vio-lence (the tengku said he had purposely asked the doctor about the best way topunish without scarring).14 He and other tengku maintain that all the children theyreturned (there is always someone they can be returned to) have ended up as pettycriminals or drug addicts.15

In Tongan households, Morton describes child beating as a common practicewhich permeates otherwise warm relationships (Morton, 2000, pp 174–179). Re-search on Koranic schools and homes in the whole of Indonesia reports that childrenprefer to be beaten than to be shamed and do not consider beating to be a shockingexperience (Martin and Sudrajat, 2007). Many children did say that being homewas good because you did not get beaten so often. Still, they established a differ-ence between being hit as usual [biasa], something that also happened at home,and being hit in front of everybody, usually referred to as a horrible experiencespecific to the dayah. In any case, in spite of their obvious dislike for punish-ments, the santri I spoke to stood by the system of their dayah and said that whenone did something bad and was beaten or shamed as a result, then this was onestep in learning to watch oneself [jagadiri] and to put up with the situation [betah]in the dayah.

14 The idea that a map of the body can be drawn in order to assess experienced violence was quitecommon among the NGO workers in Aceh. I suspect that this is the reason it was mentioned tome by the tengku.

15 It is extremely difficult to trace these youngsters and I have seen very different trajectories amongstthe few with whom I have managed to keep in touch.


It must be pointed out that many children in the dayah Rasyad Aziziya show signsof bodily suffering deriving from their past: most of the boys carry some scars (it ismore difficult to tell with girls, who are always covered by clothes); some have aninjured eye; some of the younger children show signs of malnutrition; two of the girlshave a form of anorexia and it is said that they were raped. As they and their carersoften put it, their bodies are ‘tough’ [keras]. Most children have an idea of the degreeof violence or danger that their bodies can be exposed to and an idea of what they arechoosing by receiving punishment in the dayah rather than fleeing back to what, intheir past, has proved to be a more violent world.

Moreover, when we consider the children’s compliance with the dayah system,we must also remember that in Aceh, as in a large part of Muslim Indonesia,acquiring intelligent control [akal] of your inner drives is the well known result ofIslamic education, which helps any child to become an adult or, as a tengku states,to become a human being [manusia] (Siegel, 1969, pp 100–112, 143–145; Peletz,1995, 1996; Vignato, 2009). The post-conflict dayah might undertake this rolemore intensely than any ordinary Javanese or Bugis pesantren, and much morethan any Acehnese, Javanese or Bugis father, but there is no rupture or evidentchange in what is seen as the basic ideal of Islamic education. It is very difficultfor a child to criticize the dayah without criticizing the deep roots of her or hissociety and of an educational model that transcends Aceh.

Even at the level of personal relationships, the safety the santri experience intheir dayah is double-edged. Inside the institution, they have to look after them-selves and their own safety: nothing is private, and the fear of being accused ofsome transgression often lingers. As one girl puts it, ‘Here, as soon as you haveyour period, you have to fight for your life’.

In spite of the tension many children experience, and notwithstanding the am-biguity of the security the dayah provides for them, the dayah is neither a prisonnor a Foucauldian nightmare. Foucault (1975) described the way in which disci-pline could become the structure of a person’s subjectivity thanks to technologyand an architectural environment; but this is not the case in the dayah RasyadAziziya. For the santri, life in the dayah proceeds according to a symbolic set thatis different from that of the village, but, in many ways, everyday life does notdiffer that much for the young ones if compared to the everyday life of the child-ren of ordinary poor families.

Finally, if we return to what Apfel and Simon consider to be a healing environ-ment for children who were exposed to violence, in the aftermath of the civilconflict the dayah can still be seen as providing its santri with a generally safespace and a vision of the future. Life inside the dayah can be hard and even dangerousfor the children, but so can life outside.

A device for oblivion: practices and structure

In Tengku Bantasyam’s words, the dayah Rasyad Aziziya is a place where anychild who is a victim of the civil conflict can forget his or her parents’ deeds orsufferings:

‘Here we do not give any importance to what happened to the children. Theyhave to forget.


I put them together so that we build peace. […] It doesn’t matter who didwhat. Who knows, maybe the sons of a dead GAM officer will marry the daughtersof a dead Indonesian Army Officer…

They do not have to become empty [kosong]. We have a programme. Everyday one surat. We have them study al-Quran [ngaji] and this cleans[membersihkan] their thoughts. There is a special surat for each point, and everyevening we change. If they have too much empty time then they daydream[lamun] and they start being homesick [rindu] because they remember theirvillage [teringatkampung].

We got somebody to teach them silat. This is good power [kekuatan] formen! Acehnese men like revenge [dendam], they are hot tempered.’ (TengkuBantasyam, 2009)

In the beginning, I had mistaken and even saluted Tengku Bantasyam’s words fora sort of ethnic-Islamic practice of psychiatric healing. This was due only to theinexactness of my medically informed ideas, not from Bantasyam’s actual expla-nation. Over time, his ideas have proved to be quite clearly hierarchized: somethings are essential, other things are not. Regardless of this, gender is relevant inestablishing this hierarchy.

For the tengku, ideas of war and peace were primarily concerned with the boys:girls were not involved in his talks about peace and reconciliation. The only time Iheard Tengku Bantasyam say something about their involvement in peace buildingwas, as I have already reported, while he was joking about the possibility that someof them might marry the dayah boys. It was a joke that was given no emphasis inreality; still, it matches the general attitude. Even the boys’ practice of the Indone-sian Malay Islam-inspired martial art, silat, which at first had been put forward as atechnique to foster peace and dissolve past tensions, did not fulfil its objective.When, in 2009, the boys were taught the basics of silat, the practice only seriouslyconcerned those who were good at it. It resembled more the kind of mystic disciplinethat, in Aceh as well as in other parts of the Malay world, the santri often learn attheir teacher’s place. It has been further discredited as it was connected to an aidprogramme, sponsored by a Japanese institution, which eventually flew the tengku,eight of the best fighting boys and one girl – she was there as a cook – to Japan so thatthey could participate in an international martial arts competition. When the fundingceased, the silat teacher vanished and the practice was abandoned. Apparently, itwas not very relevant to the life of the dayah or to the children.

This lack of credibility can also be said to be the case for the ‘specific healingprogramme’ of daily chanting. In 2010 I questioned Tengku Bantasyam more pre-cisely about his programme of specific surat aiming to help the children forgettheir bad memories. He told me that as far as specific programmes were con-cerned, he had hired a highly learned Islamic expert, an ustaza, a woman, to teachthe girls an appropriate sequence of daily surat: one day for health, one day formoney, one day for gaining knowledge and so on. However, as far as the boyswere concerned, in 2010 only the fundamental ideas concerning the correct wayto live and raise children seemed to matter to the tengku. He said that the girlscould learn and chant whatever their very expert ustaza decided, but what wasimportant for the survival of the dayah was that boys chanted surat Yasin everyday.


This surat, argued Tengku Bantasyam, preserves one’s body from being injuredand heals it when it is wounded; it is a remedy that heals and most importantlybrings prosperity:

‘If the kids don’t chant it for fifteen days, we don’t eat here. No money left. Idon’t have a salary, I only have Allah. People come from all around the neigh-bourhood and even further. They bring a goat, rice, chicken. SuratYasin is amedicine [obat]. It also brings you wealth [rezeki].’

The surat Yasin, then, is a part of al-Qur’an which concerns life and death. Bowenrelates the therapeutic use of the Yasin in the Gayo highlands to protect a dyingwoman from being invaded by a jinn, a malignant spirit (Bowen, 1993, pp 96–100). The tengku says that when you know Yasin, you know the basics and theheart of al-Qur’an. Reciting the surat Yasin, then, is the core activity; the recita-tion of it enables the dayah to survive and at the same time constitutes the onlyreally acknowledged cure for the children’s memories of a painful experience.

The wirid of the surat Yasin is always linked with zikir, or recitation of thename of God. This, too, is seen as relevant in order to secure the children’s re-sources. Tengku Bantasyam maintains that, when you really engage with studyingand are ‘given’ your personal zikir by your teacher – a sequence of the names ofGod with a certain rhythm and algorithm – you acquire strength and invulnerabil-ity. This stage of initiation and knowledge, he admits, is something that few childrenin the dayah attain or are even aware of, because they are problematic children.Nevertheless, the fact that someone actually gets to that stage qualifies what theordinary and the personalized zikir mean for everybody – the mystical student aswell as the war victim. It is an initiation into a state of personal oblivion, in whichthe practitioner is filled with God. This state is considered intrinsically therapeu-tic.

All the children in Aceh are taught to chant Yasin and various zikir, which istheir primary aim; nothing outside Islam is required to heal and, within Islam,nothing exceeding the correct practice. Thus, in the dayah, any recreational activ-ity offered to the children is welcome, but is not considered necessary. Western-stylelocal self-development or therapeutic programmes such as silat, counselling, peace-building activities such as storytelling or drawing originating from NGOs, or theanthropologist’s presence are welcome as long as they do not interfere with thatprimary idea; however, they are irrelevant to the actual healing, and are consid-ered only as recreational diversions. The likee Aceh and their particularly artisticway of chanting zikir typical of Acehnese boys and young men is also considered‘recreational’ [hiburan].

The children’s healing is equated with growing up to be good Muslims. Thedayah itself is the structure that enables them to start the process and the leader,Tengku Bantasyam, is the man who enables the dayah to exist. He is the father[abu], whose own children live there; he dispenses pocket money [pengjajah] tothe children and administers whatever little money he receives from their fami-lies, or donations. For the students, the very concept of the dayah as a separateplace fosters distance from the personal past and enhances the creation of a ficti-tious one that is common to all the children. For instance, during Ramadan schoolholidays, most children ‘go back’ to somebody’s house, often a relative’s home,


which they usually refer to as being ‘their’ village, the one they remember andlong for. In many cases, such villages are more fictional than real. During a draw-ing session I organized, for example, both girls and boys repeatedly drew thestandard Indonesian picture of a country village (two mountains, a rising sun, ariver and paddy fields),16 and only occasionally did they add some realistic detail(often a tank, a helicopter or a car). Talking of their home village while drawingthe standard village, many of the older children admitted that it was only one ofthe villages or places they had lived in. On the other hand, some of the youngestones had difficulty in saying anything at all about their homes as they had littledirect memory. In all cases, however, the village as such was evoked as a happy,free, indulgent, plentiful place. Actual longing for one’s family, often intertwinedwith sad or dramatic memories, was usually commented upon by santri with wordssuch as ‘oh let go of that’ [biarindeh] or ‘enough’ [sudah].

The dayah itself, because of the way it is structured, is the symbolic anti-villageand is a constant device for effecting the oblivion of past events in favour of theactual identity of being a santri. For example, dendam, ‘revenge’, dam in Acehnese,is considered a serious problem for the boys and is no small matter in the after-math of a civil conflict. The boys talked at length about how the Acehnese arequick to want revenge. The girls never mentioned it to me, even though they toounderlined how hot-tempered and reactive some of them were. According to Siegel,in Aceh, feelings related to revenge have always played an important role, buthave changed with the general political and religious organization (Siegel, 2004,pp 369–371), so it is not a utopian view that they will change again. In the con-temporary process of the reconstruction of Aceh, enormous efforts are made toavoid discrimination both of former combatants and of those who had no active orimportant role in the GAM resistance movement (therefore in the 2011 govern-ment), but resentment is growing at various levels of Acehnese society. In villages,jealousy about who has received assistance and economic benefits in the post-conflict process can be very strong and can supply new interpretations of thepeople’s role during the conflict. In the dayah, not only are the boys taught tomodify their vengeful attitude, but they are also separated from the kinship andvillage structure that support it. Indeed, they are suspended from those dynamicsand everything is equated to a model of poor, innocent, child victims, whateverthe situation in their home village and families.

Blurred perpetrators, clear feelings: the political and emotionalimportance of being a victim

The device for oblivion enhanced by the dayah and its leader is only meaningfulon the level of territorial relationships. On a more national or international scene,the idea of victimhood can become very relevant for the santri too. It is interest-ing, then, to examine what Fassin and Rechtsman would call the ‘scene ofvictimhood’: that is, the multiple social meanings of the condition of sufferinginflicted by an external agent (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009, p xi).

Like many other Acehnese, the children living in the dayah Rasyad Aziziya are

16 Strassler reports this image of an ideal village among the Javanese children she studied in adrawing context, and states that it is common to all Indonesian children (2006, p 56).


used to referring to themselves as ‘victims’ when relating to the two most cata-strophic events that happened in Aceh – the civil conflict and the tsunami. Theyare usually quite aware of ‘what kind of victim[s]’ they are (‘korbanapa?’ is thequestion): tsunami victims or conflict victims. Those who are neither quickly de-clare that they are ‘not victims at all’ or ‘victims of nothing’ [bukankorbanapa-apa].They might add, if it is the case, that they are just ‘ordinary orphans’ [yatimbiasa].

Alongside the idea of victimhood, orphanhood is another category of sufferingthat is very relevant in the dayah. The people who come to bring food refer to thedayah as a place for ‘orphans’. Children whose fathers have died are importantcharacters in the Islamic charity system. Charity [zakat], one must be reminded, isone of the five pillars of Islam. In an ideology in which the father has to providefor his wife and children, it is the source of identity and self-positioning in soci-ety; being fatherless is a very hard condition, a metaphor for any child’s helplessness.It is compulsory for a good Muslim to look after fatherless children. Those whocame to the dayah and offered food or money insisted on the moral importance ofcaring for the children there. Besides, in important Muslim celebrations such asMoulid (the Prophet’s birthday), which in Aceh goes on for over three months inturn in homes, mosques, public spaces, schools, etc, the dayah ‘orphans’ are al-ways summoned to chant. When the celebration takes place in homes, girls oftenjoin in too.

Being a victim, for a child, implies that her or his parents or close family,whomsoever they sided with during the civil conflict, died in the guerrilla con-flict, during raids, or were simply around at the wrong moment, or died in thetsunami. It is a narrower definition than the one used by the international aidorganizations, which considers anyone who has suffered from either catastropheas a victim. The children, then, seem to relate being a victim to having sufferedfrom a close death or from a physical wound.

Indeed, the word korban, ‘victim’, evokes, in their understanding, internationalaid money. As everybody in Aceh knew at the time of my research, this could beobtained through a unique multi-donor governmental organization such as thevery rich Badan Rehabilitasidan Rekostruksi (BRR), the ‘Organization for Reha-bilitation and Reconstruction’ for tsunami survivors, or the less well funded BadanReintegrasi-Damai Aceh (BRA), the ‘Organization for Reintegration and Peacein Aceh’ for post-conflict interventions. In post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh, theBRR and BRA are as common a reference as the township or the district. Thechildren named them along with the governor [gubernur] as relevant administra-tive or political entities. In this regard, being a victim is more a description of anadministrative status than a statement about the existence of a perpetrator. First ofall, it acknowledges a situation of entitlement. As an informant put it, victimsneed to be ‘rehabilitated’ [direhabilitasi] and ‘receive help’ [dapatbantuan]. InAceh, to ‘receive help’ means to be allotted a house [‘rumahbantuan’, ‘internationalaid house’] or a certain sum of money. In the end, the category of victim17 has astrong link to that of citizenship, or at least to a local imagery of specific Acehnesecitizenship.

17 Typically, whenever I talked in English about victims to any NGO worker, she or he invited me tosay ‘survivor’, especially when the tsunami was involved. Even though it was explained to methat it was necessary in order to stress the positive side of a catastrophe, as far as my experiencegoes, the word was never used in Indonesian.


In the dayah, trauma becomes a useful notion again when it comes to judgingperformances and addressing government policies. A young tengku, a mathe-matics teacher, was angry about the lack of governmental interventions in theschool.

‘Let’s face it: these children are all traumatized [bertrauma]! They need coun-selling! I see it from inside because I teach mathematics. Their heads are empty,they cannot sit, the classroom is like a battlefield. They are really wild. Nocomparison with any ordinary primary school. Much though you punish them,they keep on repeating their behaviour. They do not learn anything, they aretraumatized. Poor children.’

It is believed that some functionalities might be improved both on the children’scognitive level and as far as facilities are concerned, if the state, the NGOs, theWorld Bank or any other aid organization intervened in those specific fields. Ontop of personal losses and hardships, many children have missed one or two yearsof school, and – so say teachers – even their Koranic learning is defective. Traumais seen as a sort of technical problem.

Still, the notion of victimhood implies an identification of oneself that is relatedto a violent experience. In the dayah Rasyad Aziziya, though, this experience isconstantly devoid of its historical content. I would like to return to the fact thatperpetrators are not present in the usage of the category of victim that is made inthe dayah. When, in 2004, Tengku Bantasyam travelled to the USA to raise fundsfrom religious institutions (all religions alike, as he underlines), he argued theneed for shelter for the young victims of the war. Notwithstanding his own per-sonal and familiar engagement on one side of the conflict (the winning, resistanceside), he declared that any child was an innocent victim of the conflict, whateverthe circumstances of her or his parents’ death. In this regard – and easily so onbehalf of both childhood and Islam – no difference was made between the chil-dren of the resistance, the Indonesian Army soldiers’ children or, for that matter,children who had suffered because of the tsunami. The same goes for other fundsfor which the tengku has applied to keep the institution running. The identity ofthe perpetrators was purposely blurred for the sake of peace and in the name ofneed. By blurring their identity, the content of the traumatic event that creates avictim is not given importance either. For the children, the idea of being victimstakes on other, more emotional meanings that are also related to how the sufferingof the few benefits the many:

Silvia: ‘So you are not a victim of anything?’Saiful: ‘No I’m not, look he is and he [points to a few other children about hisage, 10], and he is the biggest victim – it gives you goosebumps, his case’ [theboy witnessed his father’s and mother’s murder when he was 4].Silvia: ‘Wah, so many victims … just explain to me, what is a victim?’Saiful: [laughs] ‘This!’

All the boys laugh too, because he points to a goat tied to a nearby pole. A manbrought it there to be slaughtered in a small ritual that would bring his child,recently circumcised, good fortune. At the same time, the sacrifice will give the


man good credit for his afterlife [pahala] because it will feed orphaned children,a duty for a good Muslim.

In fact, for the Acehnese children of the dayah, ‘victim’ recalls the animal vic-tims in a sacrifice as much as the humans in a catastrophe. While spending timewith me, the children, especially the youngest ones, often compared themselvesto the animals brought to the dayah to be sacrificed. As far as I could witness, it isa playful, non-morose comparison: animal victims are a good sight. When ani-mals are brought to the dayah, the meal will be much nicer than usual. Victims aregood, useful and must be treated with compassion [kasihan]. The boys look atthem and pity them, but quickly shift to discuss the merits that the person whobrings them will gain or the good meal they are going to enjoy. I could neverwitness the same reactions on the girls’ side: violence should not be boasted aboutby a girl, as I shall underline further in this article. Besides, the children knowthat, like animal victims, they too are needed for some rituals to be complete,particularly so for the Moulid celebrations, as we saw.

Inside the dayah, the boys and the girls who are considered to be victims de-serve no special treatment. They are rather a useful group for the other children,those who are only ‘ordinary’ orphans (fatherless, motherless or both) or verypoor, as it is written in their registration record, to be granted shelter and foodthanks to international sponsors. Like sacrificed victims, they benefit everybody.

The condition of victim, for the children, is not only intertwined with sacrifice,but also with horror and suffering as an identifying feeling and as an acknowl-edged experience. In this regard, I often remarked the difference between girlsand boys. Horror is addressed as such by young boys, or those among the youngboys who ventured to talk to me or be around me. ‘Ngeri!’ – ‘It gives you thecreeps’ – is the quality of that experience. That is often associated with memory;remembering gives you the creeps as much as the actual facts. Most of the youngboys I spent time with did not tell me anything about their story, and sometimesdid not even know or remember the details, but things were said and constantlypassed around about how horrible their experiences were and how tough they had(or had not) become as a consequence. In the group, girls tended to qualify theirown experience in a different way, more centred on pain and sadness, but the ideaof horror came back in their comments as well (again, the word ngeri). In eithercase, this points to the limited effectiveness of the dayah as a device for oblivion.The children might have forgotten the causes of horror, but they certainly remem-bered the feeling.

On the other hand, it must be noted that, individually for both boys and girls,when the expression of precise memories did take place, it was often entirelydifferent, much more varied and unexpected. We have already said that, whentalking of a happy village, the children recalled dramatic memories. Luckily, manyof them also recalled happy moments when evoking wartime. For instance, a 12-year-old boy talked at length about the animals they used to have at home in thevillage. Another spoke with enthusiasm about a motorbike belonging to some‘captain’ (panglima, the word used for the GAM rebel troops officers); he alsoevoked the pleasure he had had in being washed in the open air by his mother. Thechildren emphasized their suffering only when playing at who had had the worstexperience – that is, when gaining some identifying strength from it.

In any case, if we consider the importance the children of the dayah give to a


violent past event, we must admit, once again, that they are not oblivious at all –not, at least, to everything. What is true is that they do not pay much attention tomemories. Apart from boasting about their position as outstanding victims, theydo not often talk about war, which is seen as a very distant circumstance: six orseven years ago, before 2005 (the Helsinki MoU), described as ‘once’, ‘a longtime ago’, ‘when I was small’, as is normal for children. I was more surprised todiscover that a few of the younger girls were not even able to say in what year thepeace agreement had been signed. In a certain way, the dayah children do notlearn from the war in homely surroundings and they are not taught about it in theirinstitutional surroundings, so the war fades away rapidly. Instead of rememberingprecise events and people, the children seem mostly to retain feelings connectedto them.

Common themes in the children’s present

We have seen how, thanks to their presence in the dayah, the children are reshap-ing their memories of violence and personal bereavement in new frames ofunderstanding. Rather than the production of oblivion, the dayah operates a guided,controlled action of memory building. Not everything is controlled, though. Somecommon themes in the children’s lives seem directly connected to their distress-ing past.

One theme concerns the attention paid to the body and its suffering. Boys andgirls are very interested in what happens to the body after death. One of the rea-sons why, each time we met, they insisted on my conversion to Islam was, in theirwords, that they were ‘sorry I would suffer so much after I was dead’. They aretaught that non-Muslims feel the pain of dying. The boys talk about dead bodies.They chant the salvific surat Yasin without understanding a word of what they arechanting, as they are not taught Arabic; on the other hand, whenever they have thechance to access the Internet (for example, on a neighbour’s computer) they searchwebsites on subjects such as sakaratulmaut, ‘the drunkenness of death’, in whichthe subjective feeling of a horrible death is, quite ingenuously, described or shownin a video clip (see, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkDjjbd9rG0;I accessed this website following some of the boys’ indications).

Another common theme is the feeling of anger and resentment that many santrishare. On a personal level, the children develop interpretations of their short, eventfullives and why their mothers had brought them to the dayah. There seems to be,from some boys’ viewpoints, an accusation of betrayal more meaningful than thewell known fact that there had been a war. ‘Here [in the dayah] we all have “newyounger brothers and sisters” [adikbaru] back home. Look, your mum remarriesand what happens … We get abandoned here, while she has fun and spends all themoney,’ says a 10-year-old boy from a mountain village in the Takengon area. Hehas not seen his mother for two years. When he translates this into Acehnese,most young children around us agree and tell their own, similar stories. Theirfeeling of anger, voiced with a mixture of moral judgment upon the mothers andcommotion at the thought of them, contrasts with their happy memories of war-time as a time when they were with their parents or family, which I have alreadymentioned. One boy talked with tenderness about his younger siblings, and re-lated how dreadful it was to discover that the mother’s new husband was not good


to them. Some girls, on the other hand, judge their mothers negatively becausethey consider them backward-minded and ignorant, especially as far as the cor-rect practice of Islam is concerned. One girl said she was happy to be in the dayahbecause she would not be able to tolerate her village-minded mother – and hernew husband – any longer. This resentment always surfaced unexpectedly. Usu-ally, all – really, all – the children and youngsters I spent time with showed anunquestionable respect for their living or dead parents, and a quiet acceptance ofremarriage.

Resentment can be more generalized. Many children argue that it is unfair forthem to be so poor and to learn new explanations for that in the dayah. Mustafa, a15-year-old, brilliantly relates what others have said:

Mustafa: ‘Why don’t you start studying Arabic?’Silvia: ‘I am old, it would be too difficult.’Mustafa: ‘You are right, you do not need it. I know a word in Arabic, you do notneed it. In the West you do not need it.’Silvia: ‘Which word?’Mustafa: ‘Poor [miskin]. It is only us, here, who are poor. Is this right? WeMuslims have the word for it.’

Historically, the sultanate of Aceh fought the Dutch in the name of Islam andjihad. The two contenders of the recent civil war, the Acehnese and the mainlyJavanese soldiers of the Indonesian Army are both acknowledged Muslims; nev-ertheless, the Acehenese often treated them as kafir, ‘unbelievers’, as they wereoppressing the Acehenese Muslims. The idea of unjustly prosecuted Muslims isthen quite meaningful for the children I have met during my fieldwork. Theytalked about Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, equating their status to that of thevictims out there, identifying themselves with other Muslims unjustly persecuted.Most boys are ready to say that they are poor because the West never cared aboutAceh, as Aceh is a Muslim country. This is another example of how in the dayahmemories of suffering are offered a set of new understandings. In particular, theidea that non-Muslims were responsible for the suffering of Muslims appearedhere and there; or that the Christians wanted to convert the Muslims. I am nottalking of the adults’ ideas. Nobody in the dayah I describe here ever objected tomy Catholicism by birth or accused me of aiming at conversion, as had oncehappened elsewhere. It was the children themselves who had this feeling of beingmenaced.

Jinns and vampires: teenagers handling the dead

During my fieldwork, for the children of the dayah, memories and fears also foundtheir way in a somehow classic manner through disturbing images and ghosts.Once I was talking to some of the girls about dreams, daydreams, bad dreams andnightmares. I had not wanted to discuss that topic, but some of the girls thrived onit. They talked about children dying,18 the significance of seeing old women in adream, how you had to pray to cleanse your dreams when they were filled with

18 In Aceh, babies’ deaths are quite common; Tengku Bantasyam’s last son had suddenly died whenhe was four months old.


disturbing elements. Angels [maleikat] were another cherished subject. Until theyare two, said Safri (13), children can see the angels who are creatures of light. Theyounger girls were deadly silent. Safri asked me if ‘we’ had angels. To ease thetension, I sketched on a sheet a very simple standard angel, with a long triangulargown, a smiling face, long hair and a pair of wings that recalled a chicken morethan a heavenly or hellish creature. Safri got up and shouted at me, and the oldergirls left. Ina (eight years old) quietly explained that they were saying I had drawnthe devil [seitan]: if it had been an angel, we should not be able to see it. Accord-ing to Ina, Safri had said that I was a kafir [a non-Muslim] who wanted to temptthem. Ina was happy that those rumours had stopped. She said that sometimes thedayah was full of jinns and seitan and those ghosts whom ‘we’ also had – ‘pampir’[vampires] – which they knew from reading about the film Twilight.19 Ina ex-plained that it was permitted for non-menstruating girls to cry at night and to benostalgic. Even so, she always thought of her mother and daydreamed [melamun]that those beings [makhluk] would not come after as small a child as she. But ifthe older girls felt empty and nostalgic and sad, they were liable to be entered[kenamasuk] by them. What would happen to them? As we see, the girls seemedquite close to a supernatural world that could overwhelm them at any time.

Indeed, possession has become part of the teenagers’ language in Aceh. In 2010,collective possession happened in schools in the whole region: dozens of childrenscreamed, jumped and stripped off their jilbabs, and if they were girls they re-quired treatment after that. When it happened in one of the biggest school compoundsof the town in which the dayah is located, it was dealt with by the recitation of aparticular verse of al-Qur’an, AyatKursi, ‘the verse of the throne’, which pro-claims the uniqueness of God. Half of the verse consists of zikir, which, in oneschoolteacher’s words, calmed the possessed pupils. Ghosts, he said, had to befought against like bad memories and sad thoughts, thanks to wirid and zikir. Theteachers who handled the matter in that school said that most girls had been pos-sessed by the unmourned dead: somebody who had been killed but whose bodyhad just been dumped in a field; a mother who was killed when pregnant; youngpeople who had been beheaded; and the more classic cases such as suicides orwomen who had died in childbirth. Actually, it was said that the whole school hadbeen built on a field where, during the conflict, many bodies were dumped, unburied.Alternatively, other teachers said that there used to be a graveyard exactly in thatspot.20 A very big, secret, nightly ceremony of purification was held in the school.The leaders of the ceremony were a renowned tengku and a so-called ahliraza,‘expert of remedies’.

Possession in a school – and all the more so in a dayah – seems to have adifferent, somehow less refined quality than possession that takes place in a morecoded, articulated environment such as a village or a home.21 Schools, like dayah,

19 The girls could not actually see the film: there is no cinema in Aceh and the only TV set in thedayah is in the tengku’s house.

20 This is the same reason that the Malay factory workers described by Aihwa Ong gave for beingpossessed (Ong, 1987, pp 195–214). Even though the whole episode of the possessions in Acehnesehigh schools echoes Ong’s description and even the cited causes are similar (the former grave-yard), I think this provides a good example of a cultural resource that is activated by a group tohandle different historical matters.

21 For an extensive description of the relational and therapeutic value of possessions in Aceh, seeSiegel, 2004, pp 309–415.


are not the typical arena for such events. Furthermore, even if in the dayah someteenagers, both girls and boys, were said to have been possessed by supernaturalbeings, it was never a collective matter. Tengku Bantasyam said that the childrenwho were possessed had brought along those beings from their village, becausethe dayah was a clean space and was not haunted by ghosts. A young tengku didnot agree. He gave a very clear (and quite common-sense in Aceh) explanation ofdifferent categories of jinn: those who have agency [punyainitiatif] and those whoare sent [dikirim]. If someone ‘sends’ you a malignant ghost thanks to an ‘ex-pert’s’ science [ilmuraza], there is nothing you can do about it. But the jinns whohave their own initiative can only enter a person who is empty, who wastes timefeeling nostalgic and homesick or sad. If children become possessed in the dayah,according to this tengku, it is either because somebody has some reasons to ‘send’them a malignant being or because they are empty and are good prey for all thejinns wandering around. To free them from their possessing spirit, according toTengku Bantasyam, one needs to recite the Ayat Kursi, as they did in the schools,or the surat Yasin. Alternatively, if someone’s evil intention is suspected, an ahliraza– the expert in remedies who is also a sorcerer – is needed.

On the whole, when we look at the children’s attention to dreams, immaterialbeings and possessing spirits, we can see them as a way to deal with whateverdirect or indirect memories they have of the past. Most often, such memories aredescribed by educators as dangerous, like a possessing jinn, and unhealthy, re-quiring medicine, if only in the form of hearing a surat from Al-Qur’an. However,children seem to have their own understanding of being possessed. Mass posses-sions are described by those in the schools who have experienced them not onlyin a double language – of terror and bewilderment – but also of excitement andamusement. Individual cases happening in the dayah are more delicate to talkabout as they are more loaded with an intention to disturb. They should not hap-pen in the dayah, but they do. Younger children are curious and afraid. Older girlsfeel ashamed: as is often the case, there is a lot of seductive behaviour during thepossession scene. Some girls feel deeply disturbed by the behaviour of their pos-sessed friends. It should be pointed out that, in the dayah Rasyad Aziziya, it wasnot the smallest or most problematic children who experienced possession, butthose who did not really risk being sent back because they were otherwise good.Even in this case, the dayah seems to aim to shape what is remembered and whatis forgotten. It allows memories only to those who would not be too disturbed bythem.

This shows a limit in the way the dayah handles or controls the children’s memo-ries. In Aceh, as in a large part of Indonesia, there is nothing very extraordinaryabout being possessed, so nobody denies it happens, but the children in the dayahseem to lack the general tools of interpretation of the possession, most likely forthe lack of a diversified social surrounding like a family or a village. As a 15-year-old girl from one of the schools puts it,

‘It is strange. I am used to possession. I always go with my father to the place oftengku so and so and people are affected by jinns and ghosts or also animals,like the snake or a tiger, even a dog! But that, at school, in the morning … It isdifferent. That is a school, we are all young girls! There is nobody who sayswhat is happening.’


Thus, the fact that in the dayah children do not dare to undergo too many posses-sions can be read more as a limit of the institution than as help in dealing with badmemories.

Resilience versus healing

In 2011, UNICEF, which has fortunately been ever-present in Aceh since the tsu-nami (2004), launched some research on children living in institutions and on‘traditional’ ways to look after children in Aceh. The intention made explicit inthe bidding is to encourage and strengthen the identified ‘traditional’ ways toraise children. Although the research and the ensuing programmes have not yetbeen carried out, questions arise concerning what tradition is to be strengthenedon behalf of the ‘international community’ when it comes to a dayah such as theRasyad Aziziya.22

For a start, the efficacy of such institutions seems to rely not so much on whatis traditional, but on what could be set up anew, thanks to an existing tradition.The dayah Rasyad Aziziya did not exist before peace. In the past, the dayah wereplaces where children (mainly boys) would acquire religious knowledge. Theyare now boarding schools confronting child poverty and lack of opportunity as faras education is concerned. In tune with the rest of Muslim Indonesia, they havedeveloped a discipline that enables a few carers to handle hundreds of childrenand teenagers. In this resilient system, though, jinns and ghosts, which seem suchgood traditional metaphors for memories, are kept at bay. If they want to strengthentraditional care, then UNICEF experts might come to implement expertise onpossession. In fact, the latter is as overtly linked to past traditions as the idealmystic condition of graceful plenitude or the discipline offering security and avision of the future, which are sought after in the dayah.

It is unlikely, however, that UNICEF will choose to implement policies on ghostpossessions. It is, of course, a political question. On the one hand, UNICEF musthandle its relationship both with the Indonesian and the local Acehnese govern-ment with extreme care and, on the other hand, it proposes a general model ofchildcare in which frightening exorcisms are not taken into account. As things arenow, contrasting models of health, personhood and healing can be present in dif-ferent segments of Acehnese society, but none is given an overwhelming priority.23

In the dayah Rasyad Aziziya, the jinns, the Twilight vampires [sakaratulmaut],the advantage of being a victim, the unimportance of traumatization and the fun-damental importance of wirid and zikir exist together, even though in a differenthierarchical organization if compared with what happens in villages and cities.There are, however, strong tendencies to impose a dominant notion of trauma andhealing relating to policies and ideas about, among other things, the correct Islamicapproach, the rightful relationship with the Indonesian state and the best attitudetowards foreign investors.

22 The research is intended to strengthen traditional childcare in homes rather than in residentialinstitutions like the dayah. According to the international Charter of the Rights of the Child,UNICEF tends to see all institutionalization as worse than home-based care.

23 While going through the last proof editing of this article in Aceh, I have been informally updatedabout some of the results of the UNICEF research. Apparently, one of the recurring issues is thedifficulty of relating to the dayah and the necessity of differentiating between them and otherresidential institutions for children.


Fassin argues that trauma, whatever its clinical consequences, is a core conceptin the ‘moral economy’, which seems to raise one of the strongest contemporarypolitical emotions: clinical diagnosis and appraisals are constructed as powerfulproofs in order to validate or oppose moral and political choices (Fassin andRechtman, 2009, pp 7–8; Fassin, 2010, pp 269–286). In the dayah, the fact thatsymptoms are not taken into account and PTSD has no reality seems to point,indeed, to a more general moral and political choice that places Islam at the heartof any action concerning the Acehnese, and entitles Islamic institutions to opposeother Acehnese traditions (sometimes specific traditions such as rememberingthrough possession by ghosts and jinns).

We have seen that, for the children’s psychological health, this is not an unrea-sonable position. This can be true on a collective, historical level as well. Eventhough one is tempted to think that remembering is better than forgetting on amoral as well as a psychological level, elsewhere in this special issue of SouthEast Asia Research, Guillou points to the forgetful times needed by the Cambodi-ans before and after they could enact personal mourning rituals. Seemingly, talkingabout Sierra Leone, Rosalind Shaw has questioned the efficacy of a universalparadigm which sees memory as a pattern of healing and reconciliation (Shaw,nd). It would seem, then, logical to encourage the dayah to impose its model evenin a village context.

The children, though, do not comply unanimously with such resilient models.In various ways, they remember and resist. What needs further enquiry concernsthe individual life of the weaker children, those whose fragility makes them steeraway from the system or simply prevents them from finding many viable solu-tions to the tension and the effort that the very socially resilient mechanism ofoblivion or controlled memory suggested by the dayah is engendering in them.Even the path of engaging in a dialogue with ghosts seems to be too demandingfor some.

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