Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Yogyakarta
At school I was too Muslim. At the mosque I was too Indonesia. I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly 8 Muslim families in Yogyakarta when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted shop on Mill Lane — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At school, I was the kid who didn't eat pork sausages at birthday parties. The one who disappeared during Ramadan lunch breaks. The one who had to explain, every single December, why there was no Christmas tree at home.
But the mosque wasn't refuge either. The aunties would whisper if my thobe wasn't perfect. Uncle Abbas once told my mother I was 'too Westernised.' I was 10.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a kid in my geography class asked if my mother was a terrorist. She said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. She said nothing..
I want to tell you there was a dramatic turning point. There wasn't. It was slow. It was reading Surah Ad-Duha during a panic attack in my dorm room and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding 3 Muslim friends in my freshman orientation who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Yogyakarta aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I'm 50 now. I work in the arts. I pray five times a day — not because anyone is watching, but because those five pauses are the only times my brain goes quiet.
I stopped asking for permission to exist as both Indonesia and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.