BALI: Everyday after evening prayers, a large crowd moves down from the nearby Kampung Jawa mosque to Madam Hayati Ekalaksmi’s two-storey terrace house about 100-m away.
For the past six days, mosque leader Mokhtar Bashir and the 50-odd people from the side-street mosque have been rallying around Madam Hayati, 33, who lost husband Imarwan Sarjono in Saturday’s bomb attack on Kuta nightclub strip.
They pray that she and her two young sons, aged four and three, will be looked after. They pray for the victims. They also pray for peace and return of tourists to Bali.
A small group has been following Madam Hayati to every hospital and clinic on the island in the hope of locating the body. Emotion and fatigue took over at the provincial hospital in Sanglah yesterday, and the housewife had to be aided to her feet and onto a chair.
Mr Imarwan’s body has to be identified. His elder brother Aziz was also at the hospital yesterday to provide a DNA sample in the hope of speeding up the identification process.
Imarwan, an airport officer, had just returned from Jakarta and was said to be looking for a late meal around Kuta before returning to Kampung Jawa, a thirty-minute drive away.
It is the same everywhere. In major Muslim neighbourhoods on the island of the gods, many are giving up their time to help victims’ families, religious leaders said, in the midst of trying to help others understand that they are no different from the foreigners and other Balinese who died.
“From this neighbourhood alone, four people died,” said Mr Mokhtar. “But our prayers extend beyond just the four. We are also praying that people will not judge us, or the rest of the Balinese community, because people who know the islanders know we are not like that.”
Muslims here comprise around 15 per cent of the island’s 3.2 million population, and many have been living here for generations.
And while Mokhtar understands why some foreigners would group Balinese Muslims along with the handful of extremists elsewhere, he said it had been equally traumatic for them.
“We are grieving too. A part of the neighbourhood was lost but our lives may be lost too. You must realize that most of the Muslims around here are traders and depend on tourism,” he said.
And while some would now give them suspicious glances, he said they too were wary of “outsiders now”.
“We are afraid now when we see a strange car parked nearby, or a stranger we do not recognize. This is how paranoid we have become. It has been a traumatic week.”
There have been media reports here that several groups have been conducting “sweeps” looking for locals who may have abetted the bomb-makers in last Saturday’s attacks that killed at least 187 people. Many more are still missing and may never be identified.
But both Mr Mokhtar and Soleh, who lead the Masjid Ibnu Batutah in Nusa Dua, said the checks had been “non- religious”, and the police had not singled out any one group or mosque.
“Where else in the world can you find a mosque next to a Catholic church which is next to a Buddhist temple but Bali much less in Indonesia?” asked Mr Soleh.
Masjid Ibnu Batutah is one of five worshipping houses located next to each other at Puja Mandala, just a kilometre away from the five-star Nusa Dua resorts.
There are two churches (one Catholic and one Protestant), a mosque, a Buddhist temple and a Hindu temple — all within metres of each other.
When asked about the 10 Pakistanis quizzed by police who were here giving sermons before the bomb blast, Mr Mokhtar said: “I understand they were on the island but they were only at one mosque. Even if they do come here, how are we to understand them? They do not speak our language and we do not require outside help in our worship,” added Mr soleh over the din of religious classes on the basement level of the mosque.
So what kind of outside help do they require? “Pray. And help us to believe in Bali again,” he said.—The Straits Times/Asia News Network.
