Hunger does things to a man’s mind. Twists it. Bends it.
Makes the unthinkable suddenly seem not just possible, but necessary. And when
you gather a few hundred hungry young men together in one place—well, that’s
when the real darkness finds its way in.
That’s what happened at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor in ‘67.
The locals called it “zaman gemblong”—the era of rice cakes. A polite way of
saying nobody had enough to eat.
I’ve seen what hunger does. Hell, we all have. Your stomach
starts talking to you, first in whispers, then in screams. And sometimes—God
help us—it makes you listen to other voices too.
Wasn’t there enough food before?
Where did it all go?
Someone must be stealing it.
Someone must be responsible.
Someone must pay.
The students at Gontor called themselves “Sawadzul A’dzom”—the
influential masses. Fancy name for a lynch mob, if you ask me. Most of them
were fifth-graders, seventeen or eighteen years old with just enough education
to be dangerous and just enough hunger to be desperate. The kind of boys who’d
strike matches just to watch things burn.
“There was an extraordinary commotion that morning,”
Nashrullah Zarkasyi would later write, his pen trembling slightly as he
recorded what happened on March 19, 1967. Not that he needed to write it down.
Some memories burn themselves into you, like a brand on cattle. They become a
part of who you are.
The ringleaders started before dawn. A whisper campaign that
spread like wildfire through the dormitories. The kitchen is stealing our
food. The administration is corrupt. The Trimurti—our revered leaders—have
betrayed us.
Akrim Mariyat had been tasked with investigating these
claims. Being a sixth-grader gave him a certain authority, though not enough to
stop what was coming. After checking the records, he found nothing. No
corruption. No theft. Just a simple, terrible truth: forty percent of students
hadn’t paid their monthly dues. The boarding school, in its mercy, had been
feeding them anyway.
But a hungry mob doesn’t want truth. They want someone to
blame.
By mid-morning, the campus had transformed. You could smell
it in the air—that electric charge that comes before a storm. Students gathered
in packs, their faces twisted in expressions that didn’t look quite human
anymore. They’d been possessed, Nashrullah would later say. By Satan or by
hunger or by something else entirely, who could say?
K.H. Imam Zarkasyi, one of the three founders who made up
the Trimurti leadership, confronted them directly. There was steel in his voice
when he challenged them: “If my children see that what we eat, wear, and occupy
is better than what you experience, please protest!”
But they were beyond reason now.
The Jaros Bell began to ring—that sacred bell that marked
the rhythm of Gontor life, never to be rung except at appointed times. Its
irregular tolling echoed across the campus like a death knell. Dong… dong…
dong…
And then they came.
Hundreds of students flooded the quad, dragging their
mattresses behind them. Books followed. Then administrative
records—irreplaceable documents cataloging generations of Gontor students. They
piled it all in the center of the field and set it ablaze.
The fire reached thirty feet high that day. You could see it
from the neighboring villages. Some of the older folks would later say they saw
faces in the flames—hungry faces with mouths open in silent screams.
“Huuu… huuu… huuu…” The students chanted as they circled the
bonfire, a primal sound that would haunt K.H. Ahmad Sahal until his dying day.
To this day, that sound is forbidden at Gontor. Some taboos are written in
blood.
The hunger and madness reached its peak when someone broke
into Rahmat Sukarto’s yard—he was the village head and brother to the Trimurti.
They stole his goat, slaughtered it right there on the school grounds, and
feasted like primitives while the administrative building burned.
You have to understand something about places like Gontor.
They aren’t just schools. They’re sanctuaries. Sacred ground. What happened
there was more than rebellion—it was desecration.
The leaders of the “Sawadzul A’dzom” had their plan ready:
replace the Trimurti with K.H. Shoiman Luqmanul Hakim. They’d be the power
behind the throne, of course. But old Shoiman wasn’t playing their game. He
knew a deal with the devil when he saw one.
“I will not be your puppet,” he told them. His loyalty
remained with the Trimurti, even as the boarding school burned around them.
The next morning, the Trimurti made their decision. All
students—all 1,500 of them—were sent home. Gontor would close indefinitely.
For four months, the campus sat empty except for a few
soldiers who offered protection and the ghosts of what had transpired there.
The leaders held their counsel and waited for the hunger—both physical and
spiritual—to subside.
Then the letters went out. Four hundred students—less than a
third—would be allowed to return. Conspicuously absent from that list was every
single fifth-grader, except one: Syamsul Hadi Abdan, who hadn’t participated in
the madness.
As for the others? Strange stories began to circulate. Some
went insane, their minds finally broken by whatever dark force had possessed
them that day. Others died in freak accidents—car crashes, sudden illnesses. “Whoever
plants, reaps; whoever sows the wind, reaps the storm,” as Nashrullah put it.
The boarding school leaders forgave the instigators—that’s
what men of God are supposed to do. But they never forgot. Every year on March
19, the story is retold at Gontor. A warning.
K.H. Ahmad Sahal’s words echo through the decades: “His
knowledge will still benefit society, but not for himself who is cursed… As a
Muslim, we must not fall into the same hole twice.”
Sometimes, at night, when the wind blows just right across
the Gontor campus, old-timers say you can still hear it—faint but unmistakable.
“Huuu… huuu… huuu…”
The sound of hunger. The sound of madness. The sound of a
fire that never quite went out.
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