Thursday, October 13, 2011 16:00 PM People Ahmad Fuadi: Journeys from under the volcano Trisha Sertori,

Contributor, Jakarta | Thu, 10/13/2011 8:04 AM As a child living in the caldera of the dormant Maninjau volcano in West Sumatra, Ahmad Fuadi spent his days gamboling with the children of farmers and fishermen.

Together they swam and sailed the great Lake Maninjau formed 52,000 years ago when his volcanic home erupted, exploding thousands of tons of ash and rock in a 50-kilometer-wide arc around the mountain.

The son of teachers, Fuadi topped his class and had great plans to attend Bukittinggi High School, perhaps to become a teacher like his parents and live a comfortable but ordinary life.

Instead, like the ash and lava of his mountain home, he was erupted out of his comfort zone and into a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) on another island a thousand kilometers away. He was just 15 years of age. His unexpected journey away from his mountains embrace created the fertile soil that inspired his best-selling trilogy, which opens with The Land of Five Towers, recently translated into English.

The trilogy is really based on my life. I was born on the shores of Lake Maninjau. There were 44 hairpin bends to climb out of the caldera and most of the people were fishermen and farmers, but I grew up in a family of teachers. My mother taught at an elementary school and my dad

taught at a madrasah, a pesantren, explains 39-year-old Fuadi in Ubud last week for the launch of the English edition of The Land of Five Towers at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

As a teenager, Fuadi, like the character Alif in his trilogy, was a top student, eying the challenge of a secular education at the local high school. But my Mom said no she wanted me to go to a pesantren. I had the best grades in my class, and she said that was precisely why I should go to a pesantren. These schools have reputation as being for the poorest kids or the kids not doing so well. Mom said she wanted to send the best kids to pesantren to plant there the best seeds so I half-heartedly agreed and spent three days and three nights traveling by bus to East Java to start school at Pondok Modern Gontor, says Fuadi of his early reluctance for the education that opened doors to the world. He rose quite accidentally, like a phoenix from the volcano, winding each of those 44 hairpin bends upwards and out into the unknown.

I am Minang. Our culture is to travel the thing is I did the trip because of my mothers wishes so I had some mixed feelings I was half-hearted, but excited, says Fuadi of that first journey that led him eventually to the US and Europe.

His choice of pesantren, Pondok Modern Gontor, was mainly, he says, because it was so very far away from home. I thought if I am going to follow my mothers wishes and go to a pesantren, I am going to make sure it is a long, long way from home, says Fuadi, laughing, of his teenage rebellion. His Medina-based uncle also had a hand in his choice of school, mentioning Gontor and its worldview in letters home.

It came right down to clothing. Most pesantren uniforms are peci [Islamic cap] and sarong. At my school we wore shirts and ties we looked like an English boarding school, says Fuadi of his earliest impressions of the school that was to shape his life.

He speaks of the scouting movement, a movement normally associated with Britains Lord Baden Powell and jolly hockey sticks; [At school] we had scouts everyone had to join and the school sent scouts to jamborees all over the world. Most recently, a group of scouts from Gontor went to Sweden for a jamboree, says Fuadi.

Students of his pesantren were given the tools to travel the world; English and Arabic were the cornerstones of his education. One week we spoke English, the next Arabic. After a time we even dreamed in the language. So through that language program we understood that to know your religion you need to master Arabic so you can read the texts and you need to know your world, so you need English. And they were very strict; if caught using Indonesian we were called to the language court and punished with two tickets. In 24 hours we had to find someone else speaking Indonesian and report them so everyone was on their guard. We called it spying, says Fuadi of his schools staunch language policy.

Today Fuadi speaks and writes of his school days with genuine affection. He says the school crafted from the raw clay of a young boy, a man with the tools to take on his world.

Fuadi, who worked as a journalist with Tempo and Voice of America and studied film in London and media in the US, is not the only extraordinary success story from Pondok Modern Gontor. Another friend went to Egypt and did his Ph.D. on Islam, another to Malaysia, one to Iran to study Sufism. I feel this goes to the heart of our school days. On the first day we were taught the phrase man jadda wajada, he who gives his all will surely succeed, says Fuadi who has taken this idea as his personal mantra and from that has become a best-selling author with The Land of Five Towers, currently in production for a 2012 film release.

The films stunningly beautiful trailers suggest Fuadi has another great success on his hands; this young man has spiraled up the 44 hairpin bends from deep in the heart of a volcano to become an inspiration for pesantren students across the country. His mother planted well her best seed. Related News >>

* Ahmad Fuadi, journeys from under the volcano * Fuadi launches sequel to bestselling N5M

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