Sanwar was a young girl of sixteen when she married Anwar Jalil, a teacher of exegesis at a local Islamic school in the nearby town of Padang Panjang. She remembered it as the first day of Ramadan – the Muslim fasting month – in the year 1364 on the Islamic calendar; that was August 9, 1945 on the Western calendar. After the small village wedding, her husband kept commuting by foot to the school. A few weeks after they were married, on Ramadan 17 (August 25) “he came home from Padang Panjang and said maybe we were free. We had no radio. No one trusted the newspapers. We trusted what the leader of the school said.”1 The world’s largest Muslim country had thrown off the burden of non-Muslim rule. This news of independence came to Sanwar on the authority of an Islamic scholar, at the holiest time of the year for Muslims.