Chapter 11
The modjokuto area was opened up to settlement around the middle of the nineteenth century. It was originally populated, in the main, from four regions of Java: the so-called Mataram area of Central Java, which includes the court idngdoms of Djokjakarta and Surakarta; the Brantas river valley running north of Modjokuto to Surabaja (Kertosono, Modjoagung, Modjokerto, and Krian); the Kediri plain, spreading out fanwise south of that city to Blitar, Tulungagung, and Trenggalek; and the north coast of Java—Gresik, Rem-bang, Kudus, Demak, and the Java Sea islands of Bawean and Madura. Migration patterns are, as always, a matter of statistics, but most of Modjo-kuto’s earliest prijajis (as well as many of its abangans) seem to have come originally from Mataram; a large part of its abangan population from the next two areas, the Brantas and Kediri plains; and the bulk of the older santri population, with one notable exception, originally from the north coast regions.
The first wave of migration from the north coast area consisted of peasants, in part uprooted by the social disorganization, economic distress, and governmental repression following upon the Java War of 1825-1830 and upon the imposition of the forced-crop “Cultivation System” (Cultuurstelsel) by the colonial government in 1830. A party of twenty or so families from the Kudus and Demak countryside settled in a village in the district to the immediate north of Modjokuto in about 1860, and a decade or so later moved on en masse, one half of them founding a village in the northeast section of the Modjokuto subdistrict, the other half opening another just to the northwest of the town. (These two villages are still renowned in the Modjokuto area for being about 100 per cent santri, for providing an unusual number of prominent Moslem political leaders, and for containing the most fertile and best irrigated land for miles around.) Other rural migrants from Kudus and Demak, some relatives and some not, followed and settled both among these pioneers and at various other points within the subdistrict—usually, but not always, somewhat segregated from the abangan settlers who were drifting in at the same time.
There was, then, about 1900, among the peasantry living on the land around the town of Modjokuto (which itself was little more than a government outpost plus about a half-dozen Chinese stores and a small privately-run market, a solid core of displaced north coasters who, having come from an area in which the Islamic aspects of the Javanese religious syncretism had from the beginning been taken rather more seriously than elsewhere, were to form the body of both the Islamic reform movement and the conservative reaction to it when these developed in Modjokuto.
But this is only half the story. About 1910 there began to come into the town of Modjokuto itself, also from the north coast, a group of itinerant Javanese traders in cigarettes, cheap cloth, dried fish, leather goods, and small hardware, men not from the countryside but from the urban trade centers such as Kudus, Gresik, and Lamongan. They were representatives of a petty merchandising tradition stretching back to the sixteenth century when Indian and Malay traders, sailing eastward out of Malacca, first propagated Islam in these northern cities. In the beginning, the attachment of these wandering traders to Modjokuto was minimal; their homes were still to the north. On the road they aped the business methods, the style of life, and the religious customs of the Arabs, who provided them the model for their fly-by-night marginal trading and next to whom they lived, closeted ghettolike in the crowded all-santri barrios which surround the mosque in any Javanese city or town and which are everywhere referred to as the kauman. “We dressed in rags, ate one meal a day of rice and corn with no trimmings, and walked for miles peddling our stuff,” one old santri trader reminisced. “We weren’t liked much,” he added wryly, “but we all got rich.”
As time passed and transportation improved, more and more of these peripatetic traders settled permanently in Modjokuto and made only periodic trips to the northern commercial centers where they had been born. They formed tight little in-groups, residentially segregated as to place of origin, so that neighborhoods in Modjokuto still bear names such as Kudus neighborhood, Gresik neighborhood, and Madura neighborhood; Bawean people, the richest group, lived in the Kauman with the Arabs. In large part their trade was likewise specialized according to place of origin: Kudus men sold cigarettes, Gresik men fish, Bawean men cloth, Madurese small hardware. Stimulated by the boom, crushed by the depression, this group of small businessmen and their descendants were the second element which went into the making of an ummat in Modjokuto.
The third element, much smaller in numbers but of perhaps even more crucial significance, consisted of a single bilaterally extended family—what Modjokuto people call “the penghulu family.” Penghulu was the title given before the war by the Dutch government to the highest-ranking mosque official—a somewhat marginal officer in the colonial bureaucracy—at the regency, district, or subdistrict level, who was responsible for the administration of marriage and divorce regulations and for giving advice to those who requested it on other aspects of the Moslem law, such as inheritance.* As in the case of
* Since the war this strictly religious part of the bureaucracy has been expanded, and the man fulfilling the pengltulu's functions at the subdistrict level is now called the naib.
village headships, high regional administrative posts, and the like, the job of penghulu tended after a time to become semihereditary in an informal sort of way and, in addition, the penghulu families within a single regency tended to intermarry. In Modjokuto the job of penghulu and nearly all the mosque posts under his jurisdiction, of which there were usually five or six, were in the hands of a single family from the time such offices were first established in the town; and this family was related by marriage to the penghulu families of practically every other town in the regency, the informal head of this vague ldn-group being the chief penghulu in the regency capital.
Although this family too can trace its ultimate origins back to Demak, its proximate origins so far as Modjokuto is concerned lie in Modjoagung, a town in the Brantas valley, from whence around the turn of the century one Muhammad Cholifah was moved into Modjokuto by the Dutch and installed as its penghulu. He and his descendants monopolized all the government religious posts thereafter, until the postwar period, when political party considerations led to their displacement. Rich (they owned the entire eastern half of the kauman; Hadji Hanawi, the richest of the traveling traders, a Bawean native, owned the western half), rather well educated (the last Modjokuto penghulu in this line was the only non-prijaji Javanese ever to be allowed to attend the elementary school for Dutch children that existed in Modjokuto during the colonial period), and politically powerful throughout the whole region, this family was the top of the social heap within the Modjokuto ummat in the years before the war, and as such it provided one of the main arenas within which the modernist-conservative battle was fought out.
These three groups-—the santri peasants living in the villages, the petty traders settling into the town, and the penghulu family, a kind of santri aristocracy if that is not a contradiction in terms—were the fixed points around which the Modjokuto ummat crystallized. It was, in large part, a bourgeois ummat because the peasant santris tended to be richer than their abangan opposite numbers; because the penghulu family, although exalted, could never quite manage, being santris after all, full prijaji status; and because, of course, the traders represented the best effort of the Javanese to wrest at least a portion of the interurban distributive trade from the hands of tire Chinese, an effort still largely unsuccessful. In one sense, it has been the slow growing together of this incipient yeomanry on the one hand and this em-byronic middle class on the other, in great part under the leadership of the penghulu group, which has provided the content of the reform and counterreform movements in Modjokuto Islam. It has been the social differences between these groups which have caused the conflicts, and it has been their religious commonalities which have resolved them, insofar as they have been resolved at all.
on the rural side, the crucial institutions of Islam were the pilgrimage and the school. A man worked hard, saved his money and, if a dishonest ticket broker didn’t swindle him out of it, went to Mecca. In Mecca he studied with a teacher if he was serious, and took in the sights if he was not; but in either case, when he returned he was considered a scholar and a world traveler, and as often as not he set up a Koran school, called a pondok (sometimes also called pesantrèn from the original meaning of santri—“religious student”), in which the students, young men from six to twenty-five years of age, spent part of every day chanting the Koran and part of it working in the hadji’s* fields to support themselves. In the early part of this century there were at one time nearly a dozen such pondoks of respectable size around Modjokuto, to several of which were attached cloth-dyeing factories or industries producing cigarettes by hand in which the students also worked. The economic advantages of a religious ethic emphasizing thrift, hard work, and individual effort, plus a form of education which tended to make for a more rational organization of labor than did the traditional exchange-work customs of the abangans, have made the term hadji synonymous with “rich man” in the Modjokuto area.
In any case, there grew up around Modjokuto a number of these religious schools, still largely concerned with a simple chanting of the Koran, to the meaning of which they had no access, each school separate and independent, a land of small religion of its own under its own teacher and as often as not antagonistic to all other schools in the area. But by 1915 the influence of developments on the national scene began to be felt in the town of Modjokuto, where a group of traders, schoolteachers, and, at first, government officials, all led by a generally unconventional and fiery Jcijaji** whose pondok lay just outside of town, opened a local chapter of Sarekat Islam, the mass Islamic party which had been founded in Central Java just three years before.
This kijaji, who was also a hadji—and so was called Kijaji Hadji Nazir— was destined to play the leading role at each stage in the developments that followed, to be the leading proponent of and apologist for Islamic modernism, and to be identified with it as no other person in Modjokuto. He was respected and idolized by those who agreed with him, hated and despised by those who did not. It is interesting, then, to note that the description of his character I received from all who knew him, whether they liked him or not, was as atypical in terms of Javanese values as it is possible to be.
I asked him (a vaguely modernist santri youth, now studying under Nazir’s son) whether he remembered Kijaji Nazir, and he said yes, he certainly did, and that Nazir was a very hard (keras) character—sort of like Hadji Zakir (one of Nazir’s chief followers, an old trader still living in Modjokuto), only of course with much more brains. Nazir had the courage to argue with anyone, anywhere, even with people more clever than he, bigger and more famous kijajis known all over Java. He didn’t care; he just plowed right into them.
If Nazir was angry he would just show it, even on a train with people around or in public. (All this was said with depreciation by Umar, the informant, my impression being that the general opinion was that Nazir was not very “polite”
* Hadji is the title given to a returned pilgrim. Thus a man named Abdul will be called Hadji Abdul after he comes back from Mecca. Actually, he will often change his name entirely and be called, say, Hadji Hasjim.
** A teacher in a pondok and any Islamic scholar in general is called a kijaji. The kijajis in Indonesia are roughly comparable to the Mid-Eastern ‘ulatna.
or “genteel”; he not only told his betters off, but he did it directly and showed his feelings in public—all basic sins for the Javanese.) He fought with other local leaders almost all the time and was very outspoken—particularly with the kijaji in Tebuireng (the leader of the conservative movement for all of Java, and probably the most famous and respected kijaji on the island), and in general people didn’t like him. He also worked terribly hard and was very punctual. If one was late to a class he would get very angry. If it was raining and he had a scheduled appointment or class, he would come plowing through the rain just as usual, no matter how far; and if one stayed home because of the rain his wrath knew no bounds. (For just about every other Javanese, not only is punctuality not a virtue but the idea of keeping an appointment when it is raining would appear absurd; the only man who ever kept an appointment with me when it was raining during the whole time I was in Java was Hadji Zakir, Nazir’s follower.) He always had to speak his mind directly; and it is said that the heart attack that killed him was caused by the fact that in the Japanese time he was not able to speak out and he bottled it all up inside him and it ruptured his heart.
Nazir, bom in Modjokuto in 1886, was a direct descendant of the first wave of Kudus immigrants and the son of an old-time kajaji who ran a pondok near the town with over a hundred students. His outline autobiography, written for some official purpose during the Japanese occupation, states that he began to chant the Koran regularly at home when he was seven and that by the time he was eleven he was living, studying, and working in a pondok some fifty miles away.* At the age of thirteen he was in Mecca—his first of two pilgrimages—with his older brother, where, according to the autobiography, he studied with six different kijajis from as many different regions of Java (Djepara, Banjumas, Djombang, Kediri, Kudus, and Patjitan) and, “pressured by an indomitable will,” he also got training in the Latin alphabet, mathematics, and “general studies,” all of which were no part of the traditional Moslem education of that time.
After four years in Mecca he was back in Java, where he traveled to study at pondoks in Madura, Kediri, Sidohardjo, and Surakarta, until eleven years later he entered the “people’s movement” Sarekat Islam (SI). His history after this consists of the story of one organization after another, one governing board after another, one national conference after another.
In 1921 he was in the thick of the Si-Red vs. Si-White struggle within the party, then grown to two million on the national scene (and a claimed three thousand in Modjokuto), in which the Communists only narrowly failed in their effort to take over the party and managed to cripple it in the attempt. In 1924 he set up an organization to protect hadjis against swindle by dishonest ticket brokers and the like, for which purpose he went to Mecca a second time in 1926 just after the Wahhabi Ibn Saud ejected Sharif Husein. In 1933 he left the party because of a personal difference with the leadership and joined another, but in a few years he Was back again. And so it went until,
* As abangans with dukims, so santris with pondoks seem to prefer distant ones to nearer ones, the reason given in this latter case being that it strengthens the self-reliance of the boy to be away from home, and that it is less distracting and easier to concentrate when one studies at a distance from one’s relatives.
during the first two years of the Japanese occupation, he seemed to “rest” for the first time in his life—although he admits that he went every Friday to the Modjokuto mosque “to give advice to those who pray there and to encourage them to work ever harder for their ideals.” But, as the Japanese policy of favoring the santri group against the rest of the population became more evident, he accepted a job in the puppet government, at which point the autobiography ends.
After a year or so he died—perhaps, as my informant suggested, because he was not allowed to express his mind freely. In his intense organizational activity, in his interest in “general studies,” in his social consciousness and his concern at the same time for fundamental religious learning, in his eventual deception and manipulation by the Japanese, and in his death in 1944 just as the new free Indonesia was about to come into being, Nazir and his career typify in almost every detail the course and character of the modernist reformation, such as it was, in Javanese Islam.
Along with Nazir in the original Sarekat Islam were Modjokuto’s richest prijaji landholder (he was also a government meat inspector), a few railroad workers, about a half-dozen tradesmen from the town, one or two other unimportant kijajis, and a few government schoolteachers. At this time SI, as the only really mass political party in Java, drew members from among the socially conscious and nationalistically inclined in all groups. Communist labor agitators, aristocratic political idealists, and middle-class realists out to forge political weapons with which to curb Chinese competition rubbed elbows in the same movement.
This harmony ended in the 1921 struggle in which the Communist element, having prepared the ground by capturing several labor unions and by attacking Si’s leader, H. O. S. Tjokroaminoto, as dishonest, attempted to turn SI into a thoroughgoing Marxist organization. In practically every chapter of the party there occurred a split between the “White,” or anti-Communist, faction and the “Red,” a pro-Communist, faction. In Modjokuto, too, this occurred, where Nazir led the White group and a railroad employee named Karman (now a Communist Party chief in the next town north of Modjokuto) led the Reds. After a tremendous struggle, leading at times to fistfights on the floor of the convention, H. Agus Salim, later to be the first foreign minister of the Republic of Indonesia and at that time one of Indonesia’s leading modernist, succeeded in pushing through a resolution expelling the Communist group from the central organization of the party. But the damage was done. The government employees and teachers, ever timid in the face of anything involving genuine militancy, fled the movement; and many of the no-nonsense traders, convinced that the party was wasting their valuable time by involving them in a network of purposeless intrigue, quit in disgust. Karman, the Communist leader, attempted to wrest control of the branch from Nazir, offering one of the latter’s lieutenants a sizable bribe to desert him, but he failed. When it was all over, SI in Modjokuto was down to a hard core of thirty members.
But the core was hard now, at any rate. It was pure santri, and it had added the vigorous anti-Communism which continues to animate much of Islamic politics today. The faithful few managed to raise among themselves 1,000 rupiahs (which would be about 10,000 today) with which to buy a plot of land in the Modjokuto kauman just to the rear of the mosque, on which they erected the first modern-style religious school, a madrasah, in the Modjokuto area. A madrasah, in contrast to a pondok, is a school in which part of the time is spent in religious studies and part in general studies. It represents an attempt to modernize the traditional Moslem educational system, to combine the best of two worlds—that of the government schools, which were organized and which taught along Western lines, and that of the Koran-chanting pondoks. This compromise, seemingly so moderate, aroused a storm of protest from the old-fashioned religious scholars in the area, who forbade their followers to have anything to do with this infidel institution. Aside from children of SI members, only children of a few of the more flexible urban santris and all of the Arab children attended; and the school soon got the name it still bears in the minds of most townspeople—“the Arab school.”
Nazir’s popularity with the conservative faction was not enhanced when shortly after he founded his school he began the first Moslem boy scout movement in the area, instituted evening courses in Islam in the Modjokuto mosque for women, and began to demand that the Friday sermon in the mosque (chotbah), then but an extended Arabic chant on the part of the prayer leader, be translated into Javanese. But the action that sealed his damnation in kolot eyes was his institution of circulating religious propaganda meetings in the villages around Modjokuto, in which he and his followers preached an internal mission to the peasant umrnat and took as their guide one of the most controversial authors in the history of modem Islam, the Egyptian reformer Muhammed Abduh.
Abduh, who died in 1905, taught at Al-Azhar, the great orthodox Moslem university in Cairo, and although, as Gibb has said, “in relation to the traditional orthodox structure he was no innovator,”!l: he attempted to renovate the structure somewhat by insisting that corrupting influences and practices, such as saint-worship and the cult of holy men, be purified from Islam; that Moslem education be reformed to allow the teaching of modem sciences, geography, and the history and religion of Europe; and that greater attention be given to the holy books of Islam, the Koran and the Hadith, and less to the secondary elaborations erected on top of them. A true puritan, he preached modernization and increased adherence to fundamentals at one and the same time, demanding an Islam that was at once more like that Muhammad preached and practiced and more adequate to the conditions of modem life. Neither the strictness of his doctrine nor the seeming radicalism of it was attractive to those committed to a less aggressive Islam.
He (a santri taxi driver) went, after he got out of the SI madrasah in the kauman, to Nazir’s pondok (which the latter had taken over from his father), which he said had seventy people there (mostly from West Java, he being one of the very few from around here') chanting both morning and late afternoon.
It had both “general studies” and religion. He said Abduh was used but that he thought him too strict, too much Hell involved. The least little thing and one
* H. A. R. Gibb, op. cit., p. 176.
went to Hell. He said that Abduh was very controversial and most people thought him too strict. He said that the old books one usually read in pondoks were not so hard. One sin did not send one to Hell, and they were more patient with people whose Islam was not yet complete and pure. For example, Abduh had just a small number of dedicated and very “pure” followers, very strong religious believers, and would have nothing to do with people whose Islam was not perfect but excluded them from the fold, while the earlier classical authors took people step by step and were quite willing to have “impure” and “imperfect” followers. He said there was much violent opposition to Nazir in those days. All the kijajis in the area were after him, and it got pretty hot and heavy for a while.
But the political aspects of Nazir’s party interfered with the religious, particularly after the Dutch, frightened by Communist outbreaks in West Java and Sumatra in 1926, began to put pressure on all non-cooperating political parties and officially forbade government officials to belong to them. (In Modjokuto, Karman, the Si-Red leader, and some of his followers were arrested and exiled to New Guinea.) In such a context even attendance at one of Nazir’s meetings seemed to most people to be perilously close to sedition, and as a result he was isolated.
In 1931 a branch of Muhammadijah, the Islamic social-welfare organization also centered in Djokjakarta, was founded in Modjokuto. Dedicated not only to the preaching of Abduh’s doctrines but also to the practicing of them, this society was, however, concerned entirely with religious problems to the exclusion of political ones, and it pledged cooperation with the colonial government. The combination of political conservatism with religious radicalism appealed to the more educated among the government-employed penghulu family and to the Arabs, for whom Indonesian nationalism had no appeal in any case; and so it was a coalition of members of these two groups, plus a local school inspector and a recently arrived santri merchant, which began Muhammadijah in Modjokuto. Although Nazir, restrained by his loyalty to Sarekat Islam and political non-cooperation, never joined Muhammadijah, he supported it informally, and many of his relatives and followers were prime movers in it from the beginning.
Muhammadijah built another modern-type school with only one third rather than one half of the time devoted to religious studies, and these taught in Javanese rather than Arabic. They began their own Boy Scouts, erected an orphanage, started a soccer team, set up a woman’s auxiliary as well as one for young girls, and introduced evening prayer meetings at which sermons on social and religious matters were given, sometimes by lecturers imported from their large city chapters in Djokjakarta, Solo, and Surabaja. They distributed books carrying the modernist message; initiated such reforms as holding mass prayer meetings in the public square rather than in the mosque on Rijaja (the end-of-Fast holiday) and on the Prophet’s birthday; and they not only translated the Friday sermon but the Koran as well.
Even more annoying to the rigidly orthodox, they argued for a more flexible use of all four lawbooks in deciding cases rather than a reliance on the Shafi‘ite alone. They criticized the giving of slametans as wasteful extravagance better applied to good works; attacked abangan ritual around death, arguing that Islam allowed only three practices at a funeral: washing, wrapping, and burying the corpse; and declared certain traditional santri practices, such as chanting a spell before doing one’s prayers to “calm” the heart, to be heterodox. They announced that those still engaged in what they in their unholy ignorance called Islamic mystical practices were certain to end in Hell, and argued that the pondolc system of education with its reliance on secondary interpretations and its blind chanting of non-under-stood verses was a medieval anachronism. In sum, they said, “We must go back to the Koran and the Hadith; these are the ‘Light of the Prophecy.’ ”
He (an Indonesian-born Arab, the first secretary and one of the prime movers in Muhammadijah in its earliest days) said there were five people who began Muhammadijah here in town: Mudjito, the school inspector; Rachmat Mus-salam, another Arab, now no longer in Modjokuto; Hadji Ustaz, the store-owner; Achmad Muchlas from the penghulu family, later to be penghulu himself; and Hadji Kasim, another trader. When they first started, the opposition to the organization was intense, particularly from the kijajis. The kolot Moslems thought Muhammadijah was a new religion which was not really Islam but a false doctrine. He said that after he and the other Muhammadijah people went around speaking in the various villages trying to convince the people, the tension lessened, but it still exists. He said the main content in the sermons was the social application of Islam: the teachings of the Koran and the Hadith relative to village cooperation, morality in village life, and the like, in contrast to the kolot chanting and the reservation of reading of the Koran only for very old men who couldn’t understand it anyway. What they were trying to do was to bring the Koran down to earth.
Thus the battle shifted onto entirely religious ground; but, as the transcript from my notes shows, the evasion of political problems, did nothing to soften the reaction of the conservatives. In fact, by concentrating its fire upon just those aspects of santri practice which seemed most crucially to define orthodoxy to the kijajis and their followers (Muhammadijah paid little attention to abangans directly; their reform was directed internally to the ummat itself), the reliance of the Shafitite law and the old-fashioned Koranic school, Muhammadijah exacerbated the conflict tremendously. Tension rose to the point where conservative Moslems would not go to the same mosque with the Muhammadijah members, where even opening a book by Abduh was held to be a mortal sin which would lead to blindness, and where an informant of mine who had founded the only village branch of Muhammadijah in the Modjokuto area (it soon failed; the organization was and is an almost wholly urban phenomenon in Modjokuto) found that none of his old-line friends would speak a word to him for over two years and would cross to the other side of the road when they saw him coming. The conservatives also organized, forming a local chapter of Nahdatul Ulama (abbreviated NU), the Indonesiawide organization of conservative religious scholars and their followers which had its central headquarters about thirty miles from Modjokuto in what was, under the late Kajaji Hasjim Ashary, perhaps the most famous (as well as one of the largest, having several thousand students at one time) pondok in all Java.
NU actually got started in Modjokuto in 1926, a few years before Mu-hammadijah appeared. Stimulated both by the nearness of the central headquarters and by Nazir’s vigorous modernist missionizing, the organization, dedicated to “awakening” rural religious teachers to the threat posed to their way of life by Islamic reformism, drew its original leaders from the leading kijajis in the area plus a few town tradesmen who left Nazir’s SI because of its modernist turn. Its combination of political adaptablity with religious conservatism, thus avoiding both horns of Nazir’s dilemma, had an immediate appeal; and the organization grew to about 15,000 people (a rough estimate by its prewar leader) by 1940, while Muhammadijah remained very small, never having a membership much over forty people. Despite the discrepancy in numbers, however, the two organizations were about an even match, Muhammadijah maldng up for what it lacked in size by a much tighter organization and a far more aggressive spirit. The intensity of the argument grew, splitting both the urban and rural communities (although the latter was predominantly conservative) and leading finally to a serious split within the pengliulu family itself and a succession crisis in the government religious bureaucracy.
The second naib (i.e., pengliulu) of Modjokuto, the one who held office the longest and who is regarded as the family’s most important recent ancestor, was a polygynist with three wives. By the second he had only one child, but by the first and third he had five apiece. As the first wife was about a generation older than the third, the children of the first were, in general, also a generation or a half-generation older than the children of the third. When this man died in 1919, he was succeeded in office, according to the unwritten rule, by his eldest living son (i.e., a child of his first wife). Since this son, whose name was Kasman, was, like all the other male members in the senior wing of the family, a convinced conservative, he used his office to advance the conservative cause, in which effort he was strenuously opposed by the younger wing of the family, the children of the third wife, all of them modernists and members of Muhammadijah. Kasman not only favored the conservative party in every way in which he was able but he also slowly managed to remove the Muhammadijah members of the family— evidently through intra-family maneuvering, the details of which it is impossible to reconstruct—from the religious office staff. Thus developed a war of generations within the pengliulu family, an ideological split between half-brothers, that at times grew extremely heated.
Bisri (a son of one of the old naib’s sons by the younger wife) said that when his father (now dead) was a young man he was very active in organizations. His spirit was very strong. He was a pioneer of Muhammadijah, and every day he had fights with Kasman about this. At that time Kasman, his half-brother, was naib in Modjokuto and senior member of the family, and was opposed by the younger half-brothers and -sisters, including Bisri’s father. Once Bisri’s father arranged for a chotbah (sermon) in the mosque to be translated into Javanese after it had been presented in Arabic, although he knew Kasman was very much opposed to this. When Kasman found out about it, he and Bisri’s father had a great fight about it, and Bisri’s father left home and went to a pondok to live.
Upon the death of Kasman this struggle came to a head when the modernist wing of the family succeeded in convincing the chief penghulu in the regency—to whom, as I have said, the Modjokuto family was related by marriage—to appoint (i.e., recommend to the regent for appointment) as tiaib, not the son of Kasman as would be the normal practice, but instead one of his younger half-brothers, the intellectual leader of the modernist wing and a Muhammadijah founder, using as a transparent excuse the fact that Kas-man’s son was somewhat ailing. The outcry at this was tremendous; and it not only brought the split within the penghulu family out into the open (the new naib’s own mother, an unbeliever in newfangled ways, did not approve of his taking the job) but also divided almost the whole ummat, particularly within the town, into two camps. Letters were written to the Indonesian press, petitions were carried to the regency capital, accusations were hurled in both directions, and threats of various Idnds were made—but the new naib remained in office. With his installation the high-water mark of the modèren-kolot conflict was reached, the permanency of Muhammadijah on the local scene was assured, and, since some of the more unbending reactionaries were beginning to age and die, a process of reconciliation began.
The process of reconciliation consisted, on the conservative side, of their slow acceptance of modernist innovations in organization (of which the very founding of Nahdatul Ulama in 1925 had been the first example) and, on the modernist side, of the abandonment of any intensive attempt to force reform interpretations of religious detail upon the ummat. NU began to build schools with at least half of the curriculum secular (or to give a few non-religious classes within the pondoks); to hold prayer meetings of their own; to set up women’s auxiliaries, start boy scouts, and the like.
In this sense the modernists won. But in another, perhaps more fundamental sense, they did not, for they lost or gave up their zeal for Islamic reform just at the point—so it seems to an outsider—when it was beginning to come to some interesting conclusions. Abduh was pushed aside as too radical for everyday use, serious attempts to rethink Islamic problems were abandoned as unlikely to lead to solutions which could gain acceptance in any case, and discussion of details of religious belief and practice was avoided as leading only to useless arguments. “Never discuss different interpretations of Islam,” the leader of the modernist political party in Modjokuto told a group of Islamic youth at a meeting I attended in 1954. “It only leads to broken friendships.”
The reasons for this compromise were many. The depression hurt the budding middle class of santri businessmen, who were modernism’s main support and source of élan, perhaps as much as any other group, wiping out many, driving others to the larger cities, and talcing much of the heart and all of the optimism out of the rest. In the countryside, the kijajis and their peasant followers began to come more into contact with the modern world as new means of communication and transportation multiplied, while at the same time some of their younger sons moved into town to be traders and some of their daughters married into the urban santri group, bringing the two groups closer together. (There has been, however, only one marriage between an NU and a Muhammadijah person in the town of Modjokuto; and that occurred during the revolution, people saying that anything could happen then but that it probably wouldn’t be permitted now by the families involved.) Also, as the situation stabilized, the greater intensity of the Muhammadijah being matched by the greater numbers of NU, a kind of natural social balance was reached in which compromise more or less occurred of itself.
Other reasons for the rapprochement might include the fact that an atmosphere of intense controversy is foreign and acutely uncomfortable to the Javanese, who tend to prefer adjustment to argument and indirection to open conflict, and the fact that Islamic scholars in the Moslem universities of the Middle East failed to take the next intellectual and doctrinal steps beyond Abduh’s pioneering effort, leaving Indonesian modernists with a late-nineteenth-century reform doctrine that seemed irrelevant in a world full of labor unions, large plantations, and falling commodity prices. But perhaps the greatest impetus for the new compromise was the re-entrance of politics onto the scene. As the possibilities for a successful nationalist movement became more apparent, the quest for national self-determination began to occupy the minds and engulf the hearts of the Indonesian elite, leaving precious little time for reflection upon the ultimate contexts of human behavior.