The Good and the Bad in the Javanese Calendar

The Javanese believe there are good days and bad days for everything. There are good moments for every event. You should pick a good day to move into a new house, and never start a journey at noon.
A story when parents discussed the day for they children’s marriage a fierce debate broke out. Mother picked a certain date, which happened to coincide with the first day of idul fitri. Father feared no one would bother attending a wedding set on holiday.

Mother insisted, “When you buy a fish, you look for a good fish, for a fresh one. You don’t buy bad fish. Days are just like fish. There are good days and bad days. And the day I picked is the best day. I want my daughter to get married on that particular day, so that her marriage will last forever. And that is final!” she said.
Father exploded, “You cannot equate days to fish! All days are equal. There is just no such thing as good days and bad.”
In the end, he capitulated. So the couple was married on that strange day. It turned out that many people came to congratulate them and their marriage has lasted forty-two years. The mother would have said, “Told you so.”
Death can also come on good or bad days. Since the moment of death is decided by God the Almighty, the day is considered God’s judgment on the deceased person. Friday is a good day to die. God is considered to have judged the person as good. But dying while being entertained in a message parlor or the like is considered a bad death. That is dying both in a bad place at a bad moment. A much desired way of dying among Indonesian Moslems is while performing the fifth Islamic duty, on the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. This is why so many elderly and sickly Moslems insist on performing hajj in spite of their poor physical condition. They are not afraid to die on this pilgrimage. They pray to God to be summoned to Him while being on this pilgrimage. If possible, they want to die in Mecca on the idul adha day. People who die on the idul adha—the day of sacrifice—are considered to have a good death even if they are not in Mecca. To die on this day is considered an expression of God’s approval of the way the deceased person lived.
It was thus natural and decent when House Speaker Wahono said in his speech during the burial ceremony of Mrs. Tien Soeharto, that she died at a beautiful moment, during dawn prayer, on a beautiful day, idul adha. It was God’s will that she died on that particular moment. Equally beautiful are the deaths of many other people who died on the same day, at the same moment as Mrs. Tien. May Allah the Almighty and the Most Merciful accept their good deeds, forgive their mistakes, and give them their due place beside Him.
There are other good days and moment to die. To die while performing one’s duty, especially a religious duty, is considered is a good death. To die while fighting for God’s cause is also considered ideal. To die while conducting a war against the “demons of this world”, for instance, is considered a good death. This is called to die while performing jihad. The reward is a journey straight to heaven. This explains why Hamas has no difficulty recruiting suicide bombers. The expression “to die while performing religious duty” can be interpreted to include any death while performing a good deed. The death of noted intellectual Soedjatmoko is considered by many as a good death because he died while giving a lecture to a group of dedicated young Moslem intellectuals. By extension, it can also be said that late Schumacher, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, died in a beautiful way. Each of them died while performing their duty.
The Javanese have developed an elaborate system which is basically based upon assigning each day and month a value. The Javanese follow a seven-day week and a five-day week and add the value of the days together to determine if the particular day is good or not. The seven-day week is familiar to all of us, starting with Sunday and ending on Saturday. The five-day week consists of five days: Pahing, Pon, Wage, Kliwon, and Legi. May 3, 1996, for instance, was Jumat-Pon (a Friday which coincides with a Pon-day in the five-day week system). This particular day has the value of 13 (6 for Friday, and 7 for Pon). According to a Javanese almanac, this particular day falls on the fifteenth day of a Dhesta month, a month whose value is symbolized by a highly cherished jewel. A good month? may be. But babies born on this day will be greedy. To figure out if a day is good for a planned activity, a guru may have to be consulted. They can figure out what particular day an event should be conducted.
For the lay public, however, certain practical hints are available. A Tuesday which coincides with a Kliwon, for instance, is not a good day for anything. Don’t even die on this day, if you can help it. A Friday which coincides with a Kliwon (Jumat-Kliwon), on the other hand, is an important day, a day with a strong, forbidding character. So, do not do anything wicked or foolish on this particular day.

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The Age of Madness

“ Jaman Edan” is a Javanese expression meaning the age of madness. This expression was coined by late Ranggawarsita (1802-1873), a Javanese literary personality who served as a literary expert at the Paku Buwana court in Surakarta. He served six kings, from Paku Buwana IV to Paku Buwana IX. Through his literary and linguistic intercourse with the Dutch scholars assigned by the Dutch East Indies government to study Javanese language and literature, Ranggawarsita adopted western modes of literary expressions to enrich the Javanese literary styles of his time.

He was acknowledged as one of the modernizers of Javanese literature. Ranggawarsita was also considered a great Javanese artist and philosopher. He wrote not only poems and prose, but also essays on issues about education, economics, law and general social issues. His philosophical works were widely read by the Javanese public, which greatly influences the way modern Javanese society thinks today. His thought have become a torch for the morality which has evolved in Javanese society. Late in his life, when he was physically weal and very fragile, he wrote Serat Kalinda (A book about the age of social upheavals). This book is a collection of poems through which Ranggwarsita expressed his disappointment, chagrin and frustration about the moral decline that occurred within Javanese society, especially within the Surakarta court.

A part of this book later became very popular. It said: Amenangi jaman edan/ Ewuh aya in Pambudi/ Melu edan ora tahan/ Yen tan melu anglakoni/ Boya keduman melik/ Kaliren wekasanipun/ Dilalah kesa Allah/ Begja-begjani kang lali/ Luwih begja kang eling lan waspada.
Roughly translated: “Living in age of madness/ Facing very difficult choices/ Want to act crazy like the others, conscience forbids/ But if you do not act crazy, you will never get your share/ At the end you will suffer from hunger/ But it is Allah’s will/ However fortunate people may be who are forgetful/ More fortunate still are those who are always mindful and vigilant.”

Ranggawarsita personally experienced one of the darkest periods of Javanese history. This was period from 1820-1860, during which Javanese society, especially the Javanese villages, underwent a severe pauperization process. The process was a consequence of the exploitative practices conduced by the Dutch colonial government and aided by the bureaucracies of the Javanese kings. It was Prince Dipanegara who finally protested the injustices directed against the Javanese people. This led to the outbreak of the Java war between 1825 and 1830. Prince Dipanegara was defeated through a political trick, and he was imprisoned by the Dutch government and died in exile in Ujung Pandang, South Sulawesi. His followers were exiled to several different places, including Gorontalo and Tondano in North Sulawesi, and in Sri Lanka. It is not difficult to imagine that the Javanese became demoralized during this time of political disintegration, and that various forms of deceit and hypocrisy emerged within the court. In these courts political intrigue thrived, and violations of norms became common. People skillful in winning the trust of those in power have always won, no matter how wicked such person may be. On the other hand, those who are considered too rigid and inflexible in upholding exiting norms, and are unwilling to overlook violations of norms conducted by others, are not able to win the trust of others. Such a person will never get close to the power holder, and will in the end loose. This has always been the case no matter how right such a person may be.

It was said such was the political atmosphere existed in the court of Pakubuwana IX when Ranggawarsita wrote his famous work. To later generations of Javanese people, jaman edan has come to mean any time or period during which villains who violated ethical norms not only get away unpunished, but are actually rewarded. Those who try to uphold the norms are punished. For later generations of Javanese people, jaman edan has come to mean a period during which ethical norms are turned upside down, and developments or events have become very difficult to comprehend. It is a period during which the normal becomes the abnormal, the sane become the insane, and the villain becomes the hero. Guided by this understanding, Javanese people tend to consider certain periods in the past as temporarily mad: times like the Japanese occupation, the revolution and the old order.

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“Bondo Nekad”: Another Dimension of Hooliganism

The soccer match between Mitra of Surabaya and Mastrans of Bandung was marred by hooliganism primarily by Mitra supporters from Surabaya. When Mitra was defeated in a penalty kickoff, its supporters went wild, stoning cars and buildings in the streets as they moved from Senayan stadium to the railway station, snatching food from street-side stalls without paying and then boarding trains to Surabaya without purchasing tickets. On their homeward journey they hurled stones at anything: station platforms, watch houses at crossroads, shops along the track, passing cars and others.
That youths group proudly called themselves the bondo nekad group, meaning a group of daring young people with guts to embark on something risky or dangerous. To go to Jakarta, to stay there for at least 15 hours, to go back and forth between the railway station and Senayan stadium in Jakarta and then to go back to Surabaya without enough money for tickets, food or drinks is a “very daring” act indeed. But at the same time it is also “very risky” and “very stupid”. nekad means: risky, stupid guts. The word has a negative connotation, which is a readiness to violate rules and regulations if necessary to accomplish whatever one has decided to achieve from the outside.
Bondo Nekad roughly translates to only having stupid guts as one’s capital, as one’s driving force for an action. This expression is usually used to denote an act carried out solely on the basis of guts, without the support of adequate knowledge, skills or logistics; without the simplest calculation concerning the risks that may be involved. Vandalism by soccer supporters is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia. It has happened many times before. Hurling stones from train wagons at anything outside is also not new to Surabaya soccer fans. This happens every time the Surabaya team ids defeated. This incident has customarily been attributed to fanaticism and a lack of good sportsmanship. But there is a new element in the latest incident. In earlier incidents soccer fans involved in vandalism were people with money to pay for their trios, food and drink, but last time they were practically-bankrupt youths. This new events are something which may reflect a more serious social situation than just temporary acts of vandalism.

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Violence: A Living Reality in Indonesia

For some time now we have been living in an atmosphere of violence. Even before the July 27 violence broke out, there had been ample evidence that physical violence was part of our daily life in Jakarta. Every day we have been reading news about criminal robbery committed with rape and murder. In addition to this “hard violence” there has also been evidence of “soft violence.” We have been talking in a violence language to each other. The language of law and civility has been replaced by the language of force and coercion. Threats of physical retaliations have been issued to warn those inclined to assault others verbally. The boundary between verbal violence and physical violence has become blurred.

One such violent act is accusing others of being communists. This is very violent behavior because in this country such accusations can have lethal consequences. Someone has lost his wife and home after was falsely accused of being a communist. In addition, he was prohibited to practice as a doctor for a number of years. Such is the damage that can be caused by verbal violence: accusing someone of being a communist. The physical violence on July 27 and the subsequent verbal violence that ensued were triggered by a political dispute. The sad thing about this is that is not the first time that physical violence has been used in this country to solve a political problem. In the past—and not so distant a past at that—similar crises resulted in the death and injury of a great number of people, the exact number of which will perhaps never be revealed.

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The Prophet Muhammad (2)

Shortly before Muhammad’s birth, the Byzantine Empire, based in Constantinople, reached the zenith of its power under Justinian. Throughout the Prophet’s lifetime, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia were ravaged by wars between Byzantium and Persian. The Persians captured Damascus in 613, sacked Jerusalem in 614, and briefly took Egypt. Then the tide was reversed, and in 625, seven years before Muhammad died, the Byzantines scored a decisive victory over the Persians at Nineveh. Southern Arabia was a Persian satrapy for a time, but most of these events on the northern fringes of the peninsula had little direct impact on the Prophet. Their importance to him was that they left both Byzantium and Persia exhausted and vulnerable to the advance of the inspired Arabians who were to overwhelm them within a generation. It is often said that Muhammad was the only great religious leader to live in the full light of history, meaning that his life and works known to us in detail, recorded by himself and by contemporaries whose works survive. But it is difficult to distinguish facts about Muhammad from pious tradition passed down as fact. Scholars do not even agree on the year of his birth. Information about the years before he undertook his prophetic mission is almost as scanty as information about the young manhood of Jesus. There are wide variations in accounts of such crucial events as the Battle of Badr and the hijra, and the bias of each narrator influences his accounts. Muslim biographers and hostile commentators have irreconcilable views about Muhammad’s character and motivation and about the nature of his mission. What Muslims believe was divine inspiration and a command from God has been ascribed by some Western writers to epilepsy or fakery or insanity. Dante, in the The Divine Comedy, consigned Muhammad to the ninth circle of the Inferno, with the “sowers of schism and of discord,” as if Muhammad were a renegade Christian. Henry Treece, his story of the Crusades, attributed Muhammad’s revelations to the sun-crazed musings of a semiliterate trader lulled into a trance by the swaying of his camel. Because of the tradition that Muhammad actually fell down, groaning and sweating, as the revelation came upon him, Tor Andrae, a sympathetic biographer, observed, “it has long been thought that Mohammed was an epileptic. Even certain Byzantine writers made this discovery, and for a long time past western writers have edified their readers with this compromising fact about the archenemy of Christianity. Even in recent times some authors have held fast to this idea, influenced by the scientifically superficial and hasty theory, which the medical psychology of the past century has made fashionable for a while, that the inspired state is ‘pathological.’” However, Andrae says there is no evidence that Muhammad was clinically epileptic; even if there were, that would not necessarily undermine his claim to have received divine revelations. This accounts of Muhammad’s life and work is derived from both western and Muslim account, including the Koran, which is the only source of detail about many episodes in the Prophet’s career. Dates and events that are presented as factual are those on which all accounts, Muslim and non-Muslim, agree.


Muhammad’s father was of the Hashem (or Hashim) family, a minor but respected clan within the powerful tribe of the Quraish. Later generations of Hashemites, collateral descendants of the Prophet through the line of his great-grandfather, claimed the status of nobility among Arab families. The Quraish, who dominated Meccan commerce and controlled the lucrative traffic in pilgrimages to the idols enshrined in the Kaaba, later became Muhammad’s most determined opponents and are condemned in the Koran as unbelievers. Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, died before Muhammad was born. The Prophet’s mother, Amina, died when the boy was six, and he was entrusted to the care of his grandfather, Abdel Muttalib. The grandfather was a distinguished personage, said to have been a descendant of Ishmael, and was the custodian of the Kaaba. Abdel Muttalib is honored in Muslim tradition as the man who rediscovered and excavated the well of Zamzam, which had been filled during a tribal dispute. Abdel Muttalib died only two years later, and the boy Muhammad was passed on again, this time to an uncle, Abu Talib. The Koran’s stress on justice and charity toward orphans is apparently attributable to these events of Muhammad’s childhood, though of course those who believe that the Koran is entirely and only the eternal revealed word of God would minimize the extent to which its contents were influenced by the personal experience of the man chosen as the conduit for the revelation.

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