Not until the small Fokker jet was off the ground and headed north over the Java Sea did I relax and enjoy the prospect of what I was to witness in the coming days. As a field worker in comparative religion, I had had to conquer my fear of flying years before, whether through sheer will power, desire for promotion, ritual trance, or a combination of all three. But fear of bumping is a more persistent anxiety, which can only be cured by clout.
The cabin was packed, mostly with prosperous looking Indonesians, the men in smartly tailored safari suits of batik shirts with solid tone trousers, the women in chic, custom-designed "Islamic" ensembles with hair-covering. Two or three Arab gentlemen could be seen in robes and color-coordinated burnooses. Several passengers moved about, heartily salaaming and embracing each other. My seatmate, a Malay language teacher from Singapore, was tactually curious about my presence in that company. He jotted things down in a small notebook.
One of the principal events that I was to observe during my research year in Indonesia was the biennial, national-level Qur'an chanting tournament. Only two days before, my travel agent had hurried out to our suburban Surabaja house to inform me that my Garuda reservation had been peremptorily cancelled in order to accommodate an important Muslim group on the crucial flight from Djakarta. I could fly the following day, but my colleagues at the Islamic University of Sunan Ampel in Surabaja had warned me that if I failed to attend the opening ceremonies. I would miss the full impact of the competition as a mass event. To be bumped from my flight, then, would have serous consequences for a portion of my field work on Qur'an recitation in Indonesia. But my agent proved to be a resourceful person. He somehow came up with a numbered code that permitted me to breeze through Garuda check in with the Muslim group. Clout.
After a while, the plane descended and flew for some time over unbroken tracts of giant trees until the pilot set her down on a lonely runway at the edge of the rain forest. We had arrived at Pontianak, the capital of the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, on the island that, from my faithful reading of the National Geographic as a youth, I had learned to call "Borneo." There were flags, banners, and posters everywhere welcoming visitors to "MTQ 14", the abbreviation for "The Fourteenth Musabaqah Tilawatil Qur'an" (Contest of Chanting the Qur'an). "Made it," I muttered.
I was met at the terminal by a smiling Dayak couple, who were to become good friends during my days in Pontianak. They had no trouble spotting me, because I was one of very few Westerners in thousands of square miles. As we reached Pontianak proper, a big parade was about to begin. I had not known until I arrived that the opening ceremonies were not to be held until the following day, but that the people of Pontianak were mounting a preliminary celebration the afternoon of my arrival. Trucks, jeeps, and floats sponsored by religious, educational, and civic organizations as well as businesses passed by, maybe a hundred in all. The Qur'an was the most common theme, and so there were displays of large open scripture representations, calligraphy, mosques on wheels, complete with papier-mâché minarets, and trucks carrying recitation teams from the twenty-six provinces of Indonesia, all in native costume. One float was sponsored by a Catholic school and featured Gregorian chant with a tableau of Chinese Christians dressed as monks. Another display featured a large
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