#Reflecting on the Colonial Bias Still Living Inside Us
Banten is marâh labîd—“a resting place for birds that come and go.” Marâh Labîd is also the title of Sheikh Nawawi Banten’s thirty-volume Arabic Qur’anic commentary. Since the late nineteenth century, that work has been published by Middle Eastern presses—and, of course, by Indonesian publishers as well.
Following in Sheikh Nawawi’s footsteps, we may read Banten as “a resting place for birds that come and go,” a place where ideas and the spirit of an age briefly perch, catch their breath, and then take flight again bearing new messages. In that metaphor, Banten appears not merely as a geographic region, but as a cultural space that receives, tends, and sends forth spiritual and intellectual energy into the open sea.
And now, at the harbor of Banten, the ringing of two bells sounds out—clear, forceful, but pitched differently, and coming from different directions. The sea of Banten knows that one of those bells tolls from Mecca, the other from the Netherlands.
History, though, has often heard one of those tolls more clearly, while allowing the other to reverberate in silence—a distortion that lays bare the colonial bias embedded in our memory. Amid the rippling water, Sheikh Nawawi and Multatuli are the tolling bells of the nineteenth century, still answering one another in the twenty-first. Their imagined conversation is an unfinished inheritance, an invitation not only to listen, but to ask: why is one voice remembered with grandeur, while the other must be excavated from layers of historical dust?