Nahdlatul Ulama and the Struggle for Power within Islam and Politics in Indonesia

3. Kembali ke Khittah 1926 and the Discourse on Civil Society

Kembali ke Khittah 1926 and the Discourse on Civil Society 65 3 Kembali ke Khittah 1926 and the Discourse on Civil Society T he concept of a ‘return’ to NU’s original socio-religious rather than political orientation was expressed long before ‘Kembali ke Khittah 1926’ (Return to the Guidelines of 1926) became a rallying cry in the early 1980s. Most scholars cite Marijan’s (1992: 132) assertion that it was first heard in 1959 at NU’s 22nd National Congress (Muktamar), when KH Achyat Chalimi of Mojokerto argued that NU had become too involved in political affairs, thereby placing the organization and its members at risk. The concept did not gain much traction at the time because of the intensely political atmosphere of the late 1950s. However, by the mid 1970s a combination of external political developments and internal conflicts would provide the momentum necessary for the Khittah ’26 movement to change the course of NU’s history. I argue in this chapter that the salient issue is not whether Khittah ’26 was a move towards or away from politics, but rather whether it allowed 65 66 Nahdlatul Ulama and the Struggle for Power NU to develop a more oppositional stance towards the New Order regime. An examination of political and internal developments between 1984 and 1998, in five-year segments, allows us to evaluate that question. I also argue that, while often obscured by the political ramifications of Khittah ’26, the civil society discourse the movement engendered among NU intellectuals and activists was equally important. The latter part of the chapter examines this discourse in more detail, taking an especially close look at the activist agenda it inspired. Central to this movement was Abdurrahman Wahid (or Gus Dur as he is called in Indonesia), the son of NU leader and politician KH Wahid Hasyim, the grandson of NU founder KH Hasyim Asy’ari, and one of the most formidable thinkers and strategists in recent Indonesian history. The chapter concludes that the civil society movement of the late 1990s was strongly informed by NU’s political position, but that it eventually took on a life of its own, separate from the political exigencies of its architect, Abdurrahman Wahid. THE FACTORS LEADING TO KHITTAH ’26 Political Factors In 1973 President Soeharto fused the four existing Muslim parties (NU, Parmusi, PSII and Perti) into a new party, the United Development Party (PPP), and the five non-Muslim parties (PNI, Parkindo, Partai Katolik, IPKI and Murba) into the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). This effectively reduced the number of parties able to contest elections to just three: PPP, PDI and the government party, Golkar. NU’s chair (ketua umum), KH Idham Chalid, was rewarded for his cooperative stance during this process with the prestigious but somewhat uninfluential position of president of PPP.1 Conflict within PPP began to emerge in 1977 around two issues: the institution of P-4, a government-sponsored course on Pancasila, and the proposed addition of Kepercayaan2 (literally, ‘Belief’) as a state-sanctioned religion (Marijan 1992: 112). Tension over these issues was soon followed by conflict over PPP’s stance on the government-sponsored election laws of 1980 (RUU Pemilu 1980), which were seen as strongly disadvantageous to party autonomy.3 On all of these issues, NU took a much more hardline stance than the rest of PPP, to the point that its members walked out of the legislative voting sessions at which the P-4 program and the issue of Kepercayaan were debated (Machfoedz 1982: 258–61).4 Kembali ke Khittah 1926 and the Discourse on Civil Society 67 Conflict between NU and the rest of PPP escalated further when Jaelani Naro, the chair of PPP and the leader of Muslimin Indonesia (MI, formerly Parmusi), submitted his list of candidates for the upcoming 1982 election. For several months prior to this, NU and MI had been fighting about the number of candidates to be accorded each party in the next DPR.5 According to Machfoedz (1982: 276), the day before the party list was due to be submitted, Idham Chalid telephoned Naro and the two of them settled on a list of candidates that would not only not give NU the proportion of seats it had wanted, but placed its candidates far down on the list, thus making it less likely that they would be elected (see also Haidar 1998: 203–4). Reaction to this development...