Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

106 NAHDLATUL ULAMA: BETWEEN INCORPORATION AND INDEPENDENCEwere pressures within the organisation for him to reconcile with Suharto. Otherelements discussed in this chapter were unimpressed with, or openly opposed to,Abdurrahman’s leadership.Suharto’s strategies concerning NU were complicated by the changing politicalcontext of the 1990s. This was a period of intensifying intra-elite conflict andgrowing succession crisis, and Abdurrahman was among those who competedfor political advantage before an anticipated post-Suharto era. Suharto in turnwas trying to preserve his power and ensure his own unanimous endorsement aspresident. Consequently, Suharto sought to replace the NU chairman with a morecompliant, pro-regime figure. He recruited ICMI, Golkar, and other stateinterests into his campaign to topple Abdurrahman. The analysis, therefore, looksat how NU was caught up in power struggles, as well as considers howcorporatist organisations became embroiled in the power struggles.THE NAHDLATUL ULAMANU was an organisation of immense diversity, complexity and size, claiming amembership of over 30 million people, located mainly in rural Java. Theorganisation had a heterogeneous membership in terms of social origins, politicalaffiliation, and religious outlook. Its membership included politicians,businessmen, NGO activists, youth and women’s groups, liberal ulama,conservative ulama and a mass rural following of townsfolk, peasant farmers,and santri (devout Muslim students). Much of NU’s membership was onlyloosely affiliated with the organisation, holding emotional attachments ratherthan membership cards. Arguably, NU was more easily able to eludegovernment authority and frameworks—because of the organisation’s looseaffiliation and amorphous nature—than the centralised and bureaucraticstructures of Islamic modernist organisations and the political parties. As McVeynotes, ‘adopting modern organisational forms means confronting the modernstate on its own grounds’. 1However, NU did not completely neglect modern organisation and establishedits own general schools (madrasah), orphanages, social and education institutes,dakwah and mosque bodies, women’s and youth associations, with adecentralised branch structure that, nonetheless, was subject to many of theedicts and decisions of NU’s Central Board in Jakarta. The organisationalaffiliates had a degree of autonomy from NU. For example, women’s affiliates,Muslimat, Fatayat and IPPNU (Association of Daughters of NU) could conducttheir own programs and affairs but in a manner consonant with the basic outlinesof NU. 2 Through corporatist organisations, the Muslimat and Fatayat establishedlinks and working relations (in areas of education, health, welfare, ruraldevelopment and family planning) with government departments independentlyof NU’s central board. 3NU’s relative decentralisation largely derived from the personalistic andinformal networks and authority of individual kiai and ulama. The main social