The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree: A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town, c.1910s-2010 (Second Enlarged Edition)

3. The Beginning of the Muhammadiyah: Court Religious Officials and the Urban Middle Class

51 3 THE BEGINNING OF THE MUHAMMADIYAH Court Religious Officials and the Urban Middle Class Let there be one group of you who call people to good, who urge them towards virtuous conduct and restrain them from evil deeds. Those are the ones who prosper. (Qur’an 3:104) ABDI DALEM SANTRI IN KAUMAN, YOGYAKARTA Serious cleavages were developing not only among the local religious officials in Kotagede but also in the court of the Yogyakarta Sultanate itself around the turn of the century. Some of the religious officials of the court, abdi dalem santri, became critical of the laxity of Islamic faith and practice among their fellow court officials. They urged the ruler and the priyayi to rectify their behaviour according to the standard of Islamic orthodoxy. Kyai Haji (K.H.) Ahmad Dahlan (1868–1923), the founder of Muhammadiyah, was one of these critical santri in the service of the Sultan of Yogyakarta.1 1. There are a number of well-known anecdotes transmitted among Muhammadiyah circles about Dahlan’s early attempts at the restoration of orthodoxy in defiance of the established religious authorities of the Sultanate. For those and other 52 The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree K.H. Ahmad Dahlan was one of the twelve ketib (khotib, Friday sermon giver) of the Great Mosque of Yogyakarta, receiving a meagre salary of seven guilders a month from the Sultan’s treasury. He lived in the Kauman district of Yogyakarta, gave religious lessons in his own home and engaged in the batik trade, in addition to his official duties in the Sultan’s Mosque. He travelled widely in Java for religious as well as commercial purposes. His education was solely religious, obtained from his own father Kyai Haji Abubakar, a ketib himself, and from various teachers (kyai/ulama) in several pondok pesantren in Java. He twice made the pilgrimage to Mecca for a total of several years. K.H. Ahmad Dahlan was not a scholar or a writer. He has left no books or articles.2 He was, however, obviously an excellent educator and organizer. According to an Indonesian biographer of Dahlan, he was a “manusia amaliah (man of action) rather than a manusia ilmiah (man of scholarship)” (Solichin 1962, p. 28). His religious lessons, given in his own house, attracted a number of Kauman youth. When the Budi Utomo, the organization of young priyayi of nationalist orientation, was established in 1908, he joined it with several of his pupils and associates.3 He was soon elected to its leadership board as a commissioner and as a religious advisor. He also joined the Sarekat Islam, a mass political organization broadly based on Islam, from the time of its foundation in Surakarta in 1911: in 1914, he assumed the position of religious advisor to the organization as well. stories on Dahlan’s life, see Sosrosoegondo (1938), Solichin (1962, 1963b, 1965), Junus (1962), and Amir (1962). Unless indicated otherwise the description in this chapter relies primarily on a summary of the Indonesian sources by Alfian (1969). Some of the Dutch contemporary documents which have recently been published seem to shed new light on the relationships among Dahlan, the court authorities, and the Dutch who intervened the relationships between the two, suggesting that they were more intricate than hitherto have been understood: for example, Rinkes reported in 1913 that Dahlan, after a clash of views with the court religious authorities over the issue of kiblat (the direction of prayer to Mecca), was sent to Mecca to study the subject at the expense of the Sultan who wanted at the same time to put him in a peaceful exile until the situation cooled off (van der Wal 1967, p. 193). 2. Schrieke in 1922 mentioned a brochure written by Kyai Haji Dahlan and translated into Dutch by R. Kamil with the title, “Het bindmiddle der menschen” (The agglutinant of people), which apparently attracted some attention from Dutch circles. Unfortunately, however, the brochure seems to have been lost since then (Kwantes 1975, p. 448). 3. For a standard description of the early history of the Budi Utomo, see Nagazumi (1972). The Beginning of the Muhammadiyah 53 The establishment of the Muhammadiyah took place in the midst of these events on 18 November 1912. There is no primary source of information referring to the reasons why Dahlan formed a new organization alongside the Budi Utomo and the Sarekat Islam, in both of...