Democracy and Islam in Indonesia

Zainal Abidin Ahmad was a leading politician and modernist thinker in Masyumi and a member of the Konstituante.2 In the 1956 book Creating an Islamic State, he outlined the foundational elements of such a state; discussed why countries such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt that called themselves “Islamic” failed in fact to meet this claim; and how Indonesia could establish a genuinely religious state while also remaining true to its cultural identity as a multireligious country with a large part of the population adhering to non-Muslim, mystical, and local variants of faith.

Zainal’s envisioned polity presents itself as a curious mix of Muslim supremacy and popular sovereignty. On the one hand, Zainal postulated a political system in which laws of the state must not conflict with Islamic law, the head of state must be Muslim, and demographic factors were to be represented in all legislatures in the form of quotas, so that, in particular, the majority of seats in Parliament would be reserved for Muslims. At the same time, Zainal envisioned that freedom of religion to pay worship to God would be upheld in the widest sense. There would be no coercion, pressure, or persuasion that would remove the sense of freedom and free will.³

Zainal also explained that religious or eternal laws “are not numerous, so their character is not to limit or diminish the Supreme Authority of the people’s representatives, but to give clear guidance and enduring leadership.”⁴ Although he thus indicated the possibility of a limited scope of religious law, he failed to delineate clear procedures by which religious law and thereby its scope would be derived. In fact, one may doubt whether his system of government, if ever enacted, would have been able to sustain the people’s sovereignty over experts of Islamic law. His further suggestion that “although the right to determine the law and statutes is the right of the people’s representatives, the Constitution contains a guarantee that each regulation that is passed is not contrary to Islamic law”⁵ would have corroborated that doubt. Notwithstanding Zainal’s insistence on religious and other freedoms as well as popular sovereignty, the implementation of his constitutional vision would have resulted in an Islamic state where those endowed with the authority to interpret Islamic law would necessarily have had supreme authority.

Not all Masyumi delegates were as concerned as Zainal with developing an authentically Islamic system of rule for Indonesia. Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah—or “Hamka,” as he is usually referred to—was another prominent Masyumi leader and one of the country’s most important theologians. Hamka became the first chair of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (Indonesian Ulama Council), but he focused on normative bases that could unite the Indonesian nation. In a 1957 address to the Konstituante, Hamka tried to remind delegates that it was the spirit of independence and freedom from colonial rule that sparked the regional rebellions against Dutch reoccupation. To portray these separate struggles as a formative and unifying experience for the Indonesian “nation,” he referred to them as “the revolution.” Even those advocating a Pancasila state would have to concede, cried Hamka, that the source of their revolutionary yearning for freedom and sacrifice was the divine: “If I asked the defenders of Pancasila what they felt in their hearts when their beloved sons died and they took them to be buried—was it Pancasila or Allahu Akbar? Surely they would respond Allahu Akbar.”6 In contrast to Zainal, Hamka pleaded for the symbolic acknowledgment of Islam as the foundation of the independent state but did not develop an institutional model of Islamic government.

Both Zainal and Hamka were modernist Muslims receptive to a larger transnational discourse about religion, modernity, independence, and government. The NU position was slightly different at the time. Hard-liners within NU also advocated the establishment of an Islamic state, but arguably less so in the context of an engagement with Sayyed Qutb’s and Abul Aala Maududi’s ideas of Islamic government and more out of a concern for loss of their social and political influence in a postindependent secular state. The pragmatist camp within NU gave greater preference to general jurisprudential maxims than to specific legal provisions. For instance, pragmatists would invoke amar mahruf nahi munkar (promoting the good and preventing evil) and maslahat (benefit) as general guidelines rather than discuss how codified religious law could be integrated into the emerging constitution.⁷ The head of NU’s syuriyah (advisory) council, the rais aam, was Wahab Chasbullah at the time, a pragmatist and political strategist. Most NU politicians and Wahab Chasbullah in particular understood these precepts primarily as justifying political flexibility and expedience. Whereas conservatives placed a high value on Islamic unity, pragmatists were concerned not to alienate non-Muslim Indonesians and were in their policy stances indeed more often aligned with the nationalists than with the Islamic modernists and Masyumi.⁸

Once the Konstituante was dissolved in 1959 and Masyumi was outlawed, President Sukarno proclaimed the return to the 1945 Constitution and reaffirmed Pancasila as the state ideology. Debates about the nature of the Indonesian state then subsided and Islamic organizations invested their efforts primarily in the societal rather than the political sphere. When modernist and traditionalist Muslims aided General Suharto in his quest for power and participated in the killings of thousands of so-called Communists in 1965, many had hoped for accommodation in the emerging Orde Baru (New Order) and a reopening of the debate over an Islamic state. In fact, this expectation may have been the primary motivation for most confessing Muslims to support Suharto’s ascendance against Sukarno. When the new president then decided not to relegalize Masyumi, to reaffirm Pancasila as the state’s ideational basis in 1966, and, moreover, to force Masyumi’s weak successor, the Partai Muslimin Indonesia (Parmusi, Indonesian Muslims Party), and NU into an official opposition party held under strict supervision by the regime, debates over sharia-based legislation became impossible. After 1971, Islamic movements redirected their energies toward dawa (propagation of faith) activities in the rural areas and considerably expanded their educational and health programs. The Muhammadiyah (Followers of Muhammad) even proclaimed explicitly in 1971 that it would not join Parmusi and instead devote all its activities to proselytization and education.

One of Nasution’s most profound contributions was his rehabilitation of Mutazilite thought9 in Southeast Asian Islam. Nasution reexamined the reception of the Mutazila in Indonesia and sought to correct what he felt was a reductionist view of this rationalist strand in Islamic thought prevailing in Southeast Asia. As in other parts of the Muslim world, the discrediting critique of the Mutazila by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah had eradicated it from the curricula of Islamic education. The dominance of Ashʾarite theology in the kitab kuning—the classical books of Islamic instruction in Southeast Asia—discounted the notion of free will in Islamic theology, Nasution argued, and was partially responsible for the discouragement of sciences and technological developments among traditional Indonesian Muslims.

When Nasution became rector of IAIN Jakarta, he seized the chance to integrate his research on the Mutazila and other rationalist approaches to the study of religion into a new vision for Islamic education. He reformed the IAIN curricula by complementing the predominantly Ashʾarite Qurʾan commentaries with Mutazilite sources and expanding the program of study. Epistemology and hermeneutics were from then on integral parts of the curriculum.

Nasution’s vision for a new curriculum was in part also a result of his reexamination of twentieth-century Egyptian reformism in order to determine how its methodologies could be applied to Islamic modernism in the Southeast Asian context. While revisiting the early work of Muhammad Abduh, the Egyptian religious scholar, and exploring its relevance for Indonesian Islam, Nasution excavated the early Sufi influences on Abduh’s thought. By making Mutazilite thought accepted again and by reactivating the Sufi and more contextualist elements in Middle Eastern reformism, he laid the groundwork for developing a rational and dynamic interpretation of Islam in the country, facilitated by a new generation familiarized with alternative sources and methodologies to study the religious scriptures.

The new curriculum, called an “Introduction to Islamic Studies,” comprised philosophy, mysticism, theology, sociology, and research methods.10 The reforms not only paved the way to a more critical study of religious sources but also made studies at IAIN more attractive by expanding the nonreligious curriculum.¹¹ Nasution’s curriculum development was so successful that the national convention of IAIN rectors in 1973 decided to adopt it in all State Islamic Institutes, and it has been the foundation of all teaching in Islamic studies at IAIN ever since.

Education, in Nasution’s view, laid the basis for a more Islamic and ethical society. Instead of being occupied with institutions and symbolism as Zainal and Hamka had been, Nasution was concerned primarily with the role of Islamic education in generating responsible leaders and citizens. To the ulama (religious scholars), Nasution wrote, “Islamic institutions have nothing to do with political parties but are about the spirit or soul of the rule. If the ruler has an Islamic spirit, the Muslim umma will develop; Islam will develop in a country if her leader or power elite is mentally Islamic [and] therefore will be close to the power elite. [It will] [b]ring him or her the spirit of Islam. So men and women who are anti-Islam will regress.”¹²

Nasution’s project was later complemented by an explicit policy promoted by Minister of Religion Munawir Sjadzali, who instituted a program that would send IAIN students and faculty abroad to receive further education in institutions of Islamic studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States, particularly at the University of Leiden, McGill University, and the University of Chicago. Several of the leading Islamic thinkers of the past twenty to thirty years in Indonesia have pursued Ph.D. degrees at these universities abroad, and several claim that Munawir’s program helped relax ideological tensions that were beginning to rise in Indonesia in the 1990s.

Even though Madjid was elected chair of the Himpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia (HMI, Islamic Students Association) in the year of Suharto’s final takeover in 1966 and remained in that position until 1971,¹⁵ he never became a prominent Muhammadiyah or NU member, let alone an activist for either of these two organizations. Rather than working through one of the multimillion-member Islamic organizations and thus risking political appropriation, Madjid remained a distinctly independent voice in society. When Suharto in his final days in 1998 called on nine Muslim leaders to advise on how best to react to the street protests and demonstrations, it was this independence that permitted Madjid—the only one of the nine—to inform Suharto frankly about the state of affairs. The announcement of another reform package would not do, Madjid told Suharto: the people demanded no less than the president’s resignation.¹⁶

Upon returning to Indonesia from graduate studies at Chicago, Madjid published a series of translations into Bahasa Indonesia of writings by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Mohammad Abduh, and al-Afghani that would build upon Nasution’s project of laying the groundwork for dynamic interpretations of Islam in Southeast Asia. Madjid later founded a religious studies institution in Jakarta called Paramadina, which especially catered to the modern middle class and became a popular center for dynamic Islamic thought, including a center for Sufi teachings. As noted later, Paramadina and the discussion circles, networks, and nongovernmental organizations created by its students became major transmitters for Madjid’s thoughts.

Already in 1970, when Madjid was still national chair of HMI, he gave a visionary speech about the necessity to renew religious thought in Indonesia, which provoked a wave of critical responses. “The paralysis of the umat these days is due, among other things,” he wrote, “to the fact that it is closing its eyes tight to its bodily defects. This necessitates the existence of a movement aimed at the renovation of its ideas so that the defects may be removed.”¹⁸ Only through this renovation of ideas could the Muslim world also start to reacquire an authenticity and autonomy from Western culture that would allow for its political and economic development. Dynamization of Islamic thought was a core concern for Madjid, not only for religious reasons, but also social and political reasons.

In that vein, Madjid proposed to rethink what Islam is and had been over the course of the centuries. Instead of conceiving of Islam as a demarcated religious tradition, he postulated it first and foremost as a way to approach God: Islam as a method, possibly the best available method, of self-surrendering to God. In this vein, he interpreted Sura 3:19, “Inna ad-dina ʾinda Allah al-Islam” (often translated as “The Religion before Allah is Islam” or “The only religion at Allah’s side is Islam”),¹⁹ as meaning that “the only religion in the sight of God is man’s self-surrender to him,” conceiving Islam as “self-surrender to the divine” rather than to one singular religion—and, hence, as one of several possible ways to approach God rather than the only way.²⁰

He similarly interpreted Sura 3:85, “If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah), never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost (All spiritual good),”²¹ as implying “All religions are one because there is only one truth. It is the religion that is taught by all prophets”—once again understanding “Islam” here as submission or self-surrender to God. Madjid went so far as to argue that Islam as surrender to God was a generic value common to all religions and that religions were but different vehicles by which to reach spiritual proximity to God.²²

This supraconfessional or universalist notion of Islam also expressed itself in Madjid’s view of the relationship between Islam and Indonesian (multireligious) nationalism, which he viewed as perfectly compatible. Martin Van Bruinessen comments, “One senses in Nurcholish’s understanding of ‘Indonesian-ness’ the influence of [Islamic scholar and world historian] Marshall Hodgson’s concept of ‘Islamicate’ civilization, with which [Nurcholish] became acquainted during his stay in Chicago. Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists are equal citizens in Nurcholish’s view of Indonesian society, but Islam provides the overarching civilizational unity.”23

To what extent were they [Indonesian Muslims] attracted to Islamic parties and organizations? Except for a few, it is clear that they were not attracted to Islamic parties or organizations. Their attitude may be formulated more or less thus: “Islam yes, Islamic party no!” So if Islamic parties constitute a receptacle of ideas that are going to be fought for on the basis of Islam, then it is obvious that those ideas are now unattractive. In other words, those ideas and Islamic thinking are now becoming fossilized and obsolete, devoid of dynamism. Moreover, these Islamic parties have failed to build a positive and sympathetic image; in fact they have an image that is just the opposite.²⁴

Although Madjid here appears to diagnose only the relative lack of Indonesian support for Islamic parties (the Islamist parties Masyumi and the Partai Sarekat Islam Indonesia [Indonesian Islamic Union Party] gained only about 22 percent of the vote in 1955), he came to be known as an opponent of Islamic parties because he felt they would reinforce exclusive identities and in the long term divide and polarize the country. The idea of parties catering to an exclusively Muslim community violated his notion of Islam as an overarching civilizational umbrella for the Indonesian nation.

Like many of his Indonesian Christian counterparts and the early Masyumi, Madjid viewed the model of a democratic welfare state as the best institutional arrangement to facilitate a good Islamic religious life in the sense that its socioeconomic ideals of justice and equality enable a believer to live up to his and her religious duties.

As van Bruinessen points out, Madjid could also be a shrewd strategist in the dissemination of his ideas. Early on in his career, he alienated many Muslim modernists by suggesting that secularization was necessary in order to desacralize profane things that had been unduly sacralized over the turn of the centuries. The “temporal” character of worldly values had to be recognized, he argued, and the human materialist and social drives differentiated from the spiritual. “The temporal role of man as God’s vicegerent on earth [must] be fully consummated. Acting as vicegerent of God provides man with enough space for his freedom to choose and decide for himself, in the context of improving his life on earth.”25 Madjid thus called for the recognition of a demarcation between things in modern life that are fundamentally affected by religion and those that are not. Similar to Abdolkarim Soroush, the Iranian philosopher and religious theorist, he argued here against the totalizing tendencies of some modernist Islamic currents that seek to extrapolate Islamic teachings by the method of precedence and analogy (qiyas) to modern phenomena. Secularization, in Madjid’s conception, signified the appreciation of the inherently limited nature of religion to regulate all realms of modern life.²⁶ Because this stance could be interpreted as legitimating New Order policies, many modernists remained skeptical of Madjid’s supposedly apolitical agenda.

When Madjid started a private exchange with senior Masyumi leader Mohammad Roem²⁷ during his time in Chicago, he recognized an opportunity to rehabilitate himself by publishing this correspondence, even without Roem’s explicit consent. As intended, Madjid emerged from the correspondence and from the discussions sparked by its publication as a “worthy interlocutor” with a senior Masyumi leader, who himself had once been a conciliatory force between nationalists and Muslim modernists during the 1945 negotiations for Indonesian independence.

Madjid significantly pointed out in his exchange with Roem that the revered Ibn Taymiyyah himself had written about the Prophet’s ability to err. Madjid used this insight to insist that any law based on prophetic hadith and even the Qurʾan could not be beyond human error.

As a consequence, Madjid vigorously opposed any role for the state in promoting religious law: “It is already clear that despite the renovations of the reformists, fiqh [jurisprudence] has lost its relevance to the present mode of living. Its complete renovation, however, such that it might become suitable for modern life, would require a comprehensive knowledge of modern life in all its aspects, so that it does not become an interest and [a matter of the] competency of the Muslim umat alone, but of others as well. Its result then, does not have to be in the form of Islamic law per se, but of law that embraces everybody for the regulation of a life shared by all.”28

How did Madjid’s ideas reach the wide audience that they did? How could Madjid, despite the fact that he never became a prominent Muhammadiyah or NU activist, let alone the chairman of either of these organizations, become one of the most—perhaps the most—influential Islamic intellectual of twentieth-century Indonesia?

One major vehicle for the transmission of his thought became the already mentioned Paramadina Foundation, which under Madjid’s aegis developed into a major center for nonorthodox Islamic thought and debate and which issued influential publications that further disseminated Madjid’s and other reformist thinkers’ ideas. Madjid also served as visiting professor in the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (Indonesian Academy of Sciences) and as a senior lecturer at IAIN Jakarta, and he delivered monthly lectures at the Jakarta Klub Kajian Agama (Club of Religious Studies), a network of mainly middle-class Muslims. Several institutions—such as the Lembaga Studi Agama dan Filsafat (Philosophy and Religion Study Circle), the Lembaga Penelitian, Pendidikan dan Penerangan Ekonomi dan Sosial (Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education, and Information), and the Perhimpunan Pengembangan Pesantren dan Masyarakat (Association for the Development of Pesantren and Society)—became recruitment grounds for IAIN graduates and Madjid’s students who would transmit his thought into concrete programs for social work, adult education, development, and community building. Dawam Rahardjo, a senior Muhammadiyah member and close associate of Madjid, edited two publications in which he invited authors to discuss social implications of theological approaches (Prisma magazine) and to debate theological issues (Ulumul Qurʾan). As Kamaruzzaman Bustamam-Ahmad has noted, “If Nurcholish Madjid is known as a man of ideas, then Dawam [Rahardjo] may be called a man of practice.”²⁹ Both Madjid and Dawam had been thoroughly trained in the pesantren system but later were also educated in modernist institutions such as IAIN. This dual background enabled them to develop sophisticated Islamic thought and to connect theology to real-world problems and express ideas in a language accessible to those not trained in Islamic studies.

As was the case for other major Indonesian thinkers, Madjid and Rahardjo’s works were published by Mizan, a renowned publishing house that also translated Arabic, Persian, and Urdu works on Islamic thought into Bahasa Indonesia, notably Ayatollah Mottahari’s and Ali Shariʾati’s works, and therefore provided an important international link.30 Paramadina also published the Ensiklopedia Qurʾan in Bahasa Indonesia, which became a new standard in Indonesian modernist Islam and substantially drew on the debates in Ulumul Qurʾan.³¹ Through such discourse-defining publications and a number of regular lectures, newspaper columns, and editorials, Nurcholish Madjid and his colleagues “inundated” Indonesian Islamic thought in the 1980s and 1990s.

The NU was the country’s largest Islamic organization, with strong roots in Java’s pesantren and a membership of 30–35 million in the 1990s. Throughout the Sukarno presidency, an NU member always served as the minister of religion, and the NU probably profited from the ministry’s patronage like no other organization or party in the state. After Suharto’s takeover, the NU remained a political party, and, as the major faction in one of the two pro forma opposition parties, it often tread a fine line between opposition to and accommodation with the regime. Toward the late 1970s and early 1980s, confrontation between the NU and the regime intensified as Suharto did not deliver on his initial promise to serve only two presidential terms but let himself be reelected in the 1978 session of the Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (MPR, People’s Consultative Assembly). Moreover, in that same year (1978), the New Order introduced mandatory Pancasila classes in high schools and two-week-long intensive Pancasila workshops to be held at the start of the semester at all universities. Two years later Suharto elevated the Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (Indonesian Army Forces) to the position of “guardian of Pancasila” and the secular order, which triggered wide protest among secular and religious intellectuals and motivated a group of civil society and retired political leaders to publish a slew of petitions and to call for free and direct presidential elections. It is in this climate that NU’s 1984 Muktamar (General Meeting) took place, which changed the course of the organization.

It was the NU activist Ahmad Siddiq who must largely be credited with the far-reaching decisions that would be taken at the 1984 Muktamar. Siddiq had served in the country’s first elected Parliament from 1955 to 1957 as well as in the first New Order legislature from 1971 to 1979. His career displayed some political ambiguity because in the 1960s he had emerged as a fervent anti-Communist, a position hard to reconcile with his later advocacy of tolerance and balance in theological matters.32 Despite his anti-Communist zeal, Siddiq became one of the most outspoken advocates of moderation and flexibility in politics in the late 1970s.

When the MPR tabled a bill in 1983 that would force all organizations to accept Pancasila as their sole foundation (asas tunggal), it was Ahmad Siddiq who worked out the theological treatise to convince NU members of the reconcilability of Pancasila and Islam. In doing so, he drew heavily on quietist principles in traditional fiqh, such as tawassuf (moderation, the middle way), itidal (equity), and tawazun (balance). With reference to these principles, Siddiq argued that confrontation with political rulers—that is, the New Order—should be avoided (except in cases where Islam faces a dire threat, such as communism) and that NU members ought therefore consider withdrawing NU from the political arena.

In this theological treatise, Siddiq drew heavily on his work Khitthah Nahdliyah (NU’s Line of Action), published in 1980, in which he had reexamined the original motivations for the founding of the organization and the sociopolitical orientations that flowed out of this foundation. During the 1984 Muktamar, he first convinced a group of younger intellectual leaders³³ and then, in a joint effort with Abdurrahman Wahid and others, the majority of NU delegates to return to the 1926 NU khittah (constitution). The return to 1926 implied that NU would withdraw from official party politics and direct its efforts again at the societal level to social work, education, and dawa (propagation of Islam).

The 1984 decision enabled NU to end a period of increased confrontation with the regime and to evade the possibility of further political cooptation that put NU’s legitimacy at risk in the eyes of its members. Signifying the overwhelming support that Ahmad Siddiq and Abdurrahman Wahid were able to secure in their radical effort to change the course of NU’s engagement with the state, both were elected to leadership positions at the end of the Muktamar: Ahmad Siddiq was elected president (rais aam, head of the organization’s syuriyah council),34 and Abdurrahman Wahid the organization’s (managerial) chairman.³⁵ After 1984, NU launched a wide range of community-development and empowerment programs, and a new spirit of intellectual and cultural openness took hold within the organization.

As the grandson of NU founders Hasyim Ashyari and Bisri Syansuri and the son of NU leader Wahid Hasyim (Indonesia’s first minister of religious affairs in 1945 and holding that position again in 1949–1952), Abdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009) came from one of the most prominent NU dynasties. When his father suddenly passed away in a car accident that Wahid witnessed at the age of thirteen, Wahid went to stay with preeminent Muhammadiyah leader and modernist Kyai Junaid for three years while attending junior high school. He then studied in a number of leading NU pesantren around Jombang in East Java before leaving for Cairo’s al-Azhar University in 1964. Perceiving al-Azhar’s rigid teachings and methods of memorization as uninspiring, Wahid left it two years later to register at the University of Baghdad, where he studied European philosophy, social theory, and Arab literature before returning to Indonesia in 1971 at the age of thirty-one.

After his exposure to Islamic modernism and foreign educational institutions, Wahid made it a special mission upon his return to advocate the modernization and “dynamization” (dinamisasi) of the NU pesantren system. Feeling that the pedagogical methods and the limited curriculum centered upon a kyai’s (Islamic scholar’s) legal opinions were a poor basis to educate and advance the social mobility of the traditionalist youth, Wahid argued for a new model of the kyai–student relationship and an expansion of the curriculum.

Wahid would typically make his case with a narrative reference to personal experiences and encounters he had made in his youth and early adult life rather than argue the benefits and drawbacks of a question directly. Instead, he pled by inference, illustration, and analogy. Recalling a dialogue he had entertained with Kyai Ali Ma’shum in Yogyakarta during his studies, Wahid wrote in a 1980 article in Tempo magazine: “Along with the classical religious texts, santri [students] are encouraged [in Kyai Ali Ma’shum’s pesantren] to read modern Middle Eastern literature. … Together with deepening their knowledge of Islamic law through studies in classical fiqh texts, they are directed to also make a careful comparative study of the legal traditions followed in the West and East. [Someone asked the kyai:] ‘Why do you order them to study Abduh’s books, aren’t you afraid that they might wander away from NU?’ Kyai Ali replies, laughing in his inimitable fashion, ‘Wide reading will result in a mature NU.”36

Although Wahid did not argue a case explicitly by telling this little story, he nevertheless showed his readers why complementing the classical fiqh education with other subjects and textual sources from other regions of the world might be important for that education.

The need for reform of the NU pesantren system was felt not least due to the growing popularity of both state and Muhammadiyah schools, which offered either a predominantly secular education or an education with mixed curricula, but nearly always one involving training in the natural and social sciences as well as elements of vocational training and the arts. “The most important prerequisite for a wide-ranging and profound process of dynamization is the wholesale reformation of teaching material for religious learning. … Mature traditionalism is far better than superficial pseudomodernism.” ³⁷ A major vehicle for Wahid’s ideas regarding the reform of the pesantren system was the Association for the Development of Pesantren and Society, established in 1983. Its expressed goals included providing intellectual support for ideational renewal in the pesantren world. And it published a quarterly journal that examined and disseminated the latest theological and social developments in the country’s pesantren and offered a forum to examine and discuss further strategies for reform.

Departing from the approach taken by his grandfather Asyari, who had insisted that taqlid, or the unquestioning acceptance and adoption of doctrines laid down by the leaders of the madhabs (religious school of law or fiqh), was necessary, Wahid aimed to show that even in the local Islamic tradition a pure application of fiqh principles had never been the case: ulama always used a dose of reason when formulating legal opinions and recommendations, and jurisprudence was not a passive application of law, but, especially before the codification of sharia in the nineteenth century, an act of interpretation. 38 Thus, in an effort to correct an image of the Islamic legal tradition as being rigid and based solely on textual exegesis rather than acknowledging that religious commentary would also always involve the author’s individual rationality, Wahid wrote another article published in Tempo magazine in 1980 in which he reviewed the position of a senior kyai with regard to gender relations. Wahid asked at the outset of the article how one could comprehend the decision by Kyai Sobari of the Javanese NU not to oppose the introduction of coeducational schools when he otherwise rigidly insisted on the modesty of gender relations and entertained a fierce opposition to the government-sponsored family-planning program. Wahid tried to show that the tension between these two seemingly contradictory stances by Kyai Sobari could be understood when acknowledging Sobari’s personal investment of rationality in the formation of his legal opinions. “Few places could be safer for the controlled interaction between boys and girls than the classroom,” Wahid explained. Coeducation was therefore conceived not as a threat to, but as a vehicle toward establishing modest gender relations. By applying this line of reasoning, Sobari, according to Wahid, exposed his independent use of reason and thereby allowed flexibility in his legal verdicts. “The flexible approach of this unique ‘old fashioned’ [because of his otherwise conservative views] kyai is most interesting,” Wahid wrote, “because it has a number of implications. What is clear is that it is not right for us to regard these ‘old-fashioned’ kyai as forming opinions without any rational basis, being only able to pass on the content of classical fiqh literature without expanding upon it in any way.”³⁹

In 1975, Wahid wrote a remarkable article that appeared in Prisma magazine (mentioned earlier as an important vehicle of Madjid’s thought) in which he argued the necessity of “making Islamic law conducive to development.” “In order to become relevant, Islamic law has to develop for itself a dynamic character. In doing this, it needs to formulate itself as supporter of the development of national law in this realm of development.[ … ]This self-development requires a vision that extends well beyond the circle of Islamic legal experts themselves. In other words, it requires taking a multidimensional approach to life, and not simply remaining bound to normative formulations long since settled, that are, in fact, virtually at the point of becoming fossils.”⁴⁰

Wahid went on to plead for a greater accommodation of reason in Islamic jurisprudence and an increased sensitivity toward the needs of humanity when applying religious law. “Through this sensitivity, Islamic law will constantly make the adjustments required, without sacrificing its transcendental values as fixed by God who must be praised. Through this sensitivity, Islamic law will continue to contribute to the development of the nation; that is to say, it will create dynamic principles for life based on an awareness of the necessity for men and women to labor within the limits of their ability as mere creatures.”41 The spirit of the law, the hakikat (the inner truth), needed to take precedence over the letter of the law. He maintained this position even during the Reformasi era amidst renewed calls for the expansion of sharia in Indonesia’s legal system.

In many of Wahid’s activities, he increasingly began to focus on the need for democracy for Indonesia. In 1990, he created a broad interfaith group, including Christians, called the Forum Demokrasi (Democratic Forum). The forum’s declared goals were “to increase communication between groups of supporters of the democratization process,” to loosen existing political arrangements to ensure “that the nation matures politically,” and to “build links between a range of efforts in the struggle for democratization.”⁴²

Wahid’s views on Pancasila diverged sharply from those of Nurcholish Madjid. For Wahid, Pancasila provided the quintessential possibility of accommodating religious difference without the need to exclude religion altogether from the public sphere. Pancasila allowed for the religious identification of the state without specifying which religion and thereby provided crucial guarantees to religious minority groups. Madjid, by contrast, although not against Pancasila in substantive terms, did not regard it as a suitable basis of the state because he considered it unnecessary: its teachings were already present in (his interpretation of) Islam and therefore did not need to be stated in a separate doctrine. What Madjid saw as a redundant ideology given (his unusual all-embracing, suprareligious) notion of Islam, Wahid viewed as a politically suitable ideology to guarantee peaceful religious coexistence.

This disagreement is indicative of the two leaders’ different approaches to religion. Throughout his career, Abdurrahman Wahid was first and foremost a “manager” of a large Islamic community that he, together with others of his generation, such as Ahmad Siddiq, stirred to accept democratic values for the sake, I would argue, of maintaining interreligious and intercommunal peace as a fundamentally Islamic value.⁴³ Madjid, by contrast, theologically modernized Indonesian Islam for the sake of the continuing importance of Islamic life and practice—notwithstanding its political ramifications.

Where Madjid embraced democracy primarily on procedural grounds, Wahid did so for both procedural and substantive reasons. Before and during his presidency (1999–2001), Wahid stressed repeatedly that no political system should be based on sectarian politics, an argument aimed mostly at Muslim modernists who for long had publicly favored a religious quota system and power-sharing devices in the spirit of a religious consociational model. Wahid by contrast argued that instead of being concerned with institutional arrangements, Islam ought to be predominantly concerned with culture, including political culture.44 Whereas Muhammadiyah chairman Amien Rais and Nurcholish Madjid embraced democracy as the best method by which to ensure adequate representation of specifically Muslim interests, Wahid saw an intrinsic value in democracy, which he believed coincided with and granted space to the fundamental values of Islam: peace, equality, justice, and dignity. “While religion has an important role as a social and moral force, the political arena should be the realm of political parties. This will allow Islam to function as a force for morality and for the control of authority, and to avoid being entrapped in the ambiguity of power struggles. The relations between the state and religion in the Islamic world will continue to be confronted with many challenges. We should navigate between the two to avoid being entrapped in an absolute secularism or fundamentalism. We should indeed use religious teachings to guide government’s actions.”⁴⁵

Like Madjid, Wahid profited from the networks sustained by Dawam Rahardjo and other graduates of IAIN, in particular the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information, established in 1971 with funding from the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation. As mentioned earlier, the institute published Prisma, in which many of Wahid’s commentaries as well as articles by Nurcholish Madjid, Fachry Ali, and Dawam Rahardjo appeared. It was one of Prisma’s greatest virtues that it featured articles from diverse ideological backgrounds and often included educational essays that would facilitate understanding of complex Islamic discourses even for the layman and a sense of why the theoretical questions under review were of real-world relevance.