Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

Chapter 6Nahdlatul Ulama: Between Incorporationand IndependenceINTRODUCTIONThe voluntary organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (Revival of Religious Scholars), isthe most problematic of the Islamic associations to analyse in terms of Suharto’scorporatist strategies. The reasons for this are not only because of NU’s large,sprawling organisational structure and mass membership, much of which wasbased in rural Java and only loosely tied to the organisation, but also because NUhad remained largely outside of state structures for much of Suharto’s NewOrder period, had resisted state interference in its internal affairs, and thus hadremained a fairly independent but marginalised political and economic force.Nonetheless, Suharto did seek to capture, channel, and politically exclude theinterests of NU, and marshall NU support behind his presidency at elections. Theargument can be made that NU’s peripheral position in the political systemindeed highlighted the success of Suharto’s strategy of corporatist exclusion, ofshutting interests out of power and denying effective channels of participation togroup, and especially Muslim group, interests. This chapter considers howSuharto’s corporatist strategy both exacerbated and created divisions in NU. Anexamination also is made of how Golkar and ICMI became organisationalchannels through which Suharto sought to consolidate more informal types ofclientelistic co-optation of leaders of NU’s pesantren (Islamic boarding schools).Much of the study concerns Abdurrahman’s chairmanship of NU (1984–1999), because he was representative of, and influenced different trends in, theorganisation and had a major voice in national politics. He was an outspokencritic of Suharto, vocal advocate of democracy, and an opponent of Habibie andICMI. He was later to become Indonesia’s fourth president and the first to bedemocratically elected. He strongly disagreed with the state-Islamicaccommodation through ICMI. He claimed that the accommodation, amongother things, was an unacceptable attempt to build formal links between the stateand Islamic politics. He defended NU’s independence from state encroachments.Significant segments of the NU membership (including many leaders of thepesantren) also were determined to remain independent from state frameworks.His leadership of NU, nonetheless, was often controversial and contested. There