and, until recently at any rate, among certain depressed ethnic groups in our cities, political parties for the Javanese santri are not merely loose conglomer
ates of people with similar voting habits. Rather, they are social, fraternal, recreational, and religious organizations within which kinship, economic, and ideological ties coalesce to press a community of people into the support of a single set of social values which are not just concerned with the proper exercise of political power but condition behavior in many different areas of life. To join a Moslem political party is to commit oneself to one or another of the variant interpretations of Islamic social doctrine.
Insofar as the preceding paragraphs are contradictory, their resolution is this: In addition to the fact that the “public reputations” of the two parties, one for conservatism, the other for modernism, tend to bring the conservatives into one and the modernists into the other, other social considerations tend to bring about the reverse. In general, in both parties, the young, the educated, the urban, and the weakly religious tend to be more modem. The coalescence of kinship, economic, and ideological ties in either party is inexact, distorted both by accident—so that the modern-minded son of a kolot kijaji may end up an NU leader out of opportunity rather than out of conviction—and by design—so that a modernist may enter NU simply because he thinks he can get a more powerful position there due to the lack of educated leaders. Even geography makes a difference. Certain villages tend to be mainly Masjumi, others mainly NU; and the modern-minded man in an NU village will have to decide for himself whether ideological or neighborhood ties shall predominate.
What this means is that a man who is old, rural, uneducated, and deeply pious is very likely to be strongly kolot and very likely to be in NU; a man who is young, urban, and educated (he may or may not be deeply religious) is quite probably in Masjumi; but the loyalties of people in whom these at
tributes are mixed, such as old, uneducated urbanites, are less easy to predict.
When we consider that there are also pressures—such as kinship ties, geo
graphical considerations, and desire for personal power—which may act to make an individual go against the grain, we see that things are not so clearly marked off as the simple fact that even the most backward santri peasant knows NU to be “conservative” and Masjumi “progressive” and that he con
siders himself an adherent of one or the other would lead one to believe.
Patterns of Internal Organization of the
Santri
Community » 163 «»164« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A and so each party has a dual problem; to balance things off among the elite so that a consensus can be found as to just how “conservative” the conserva
tive party is going to be and how “modernist” the modernist; and, second, to attract and hold the masses to their leadership in these terms.
In Modjokuto the leadership conflict is cast in different terms for each party. In NU the conflict is between the younger, more educated, urbanized leaders the party needs in order to operate effectively in the political arena, men whose modernism is often nearly as strong as that of the leaders in Masjumi, and the older, rural kijajis, who are more likely to wish to keep NU on its traditionally kolot course. The governing board of NU in Modjokuto consists of two groups. There are three or four old-line hobt men of about sixty years of age whose main task is to communicate both with the rank and file and with the countryside kijajis who are their spiritual preceptors and to convince both of these that the party has not fallen into sinful hands. And there are three or four young men whose job is to chart the party’s course in the local political struggle, to give it some semblance of effective organization, and to transmit orders from the central leadership.
Thus while the local leader of the party can say that NU is a very, very conservative party indeed and that its main motto is “Be careful,” and can argue that Muhammadijah is much too incautious in religious matters, the secretary of the organization, a young man, can deliver a speech to me that would not sound out of place in the depths of Muhammadijah councils.
He started talking about Islamic education. He said he thought the main reason for the moral crisis now raging in Indonesia was the tremendous in
adequacies and the primitiveness of religious education in Indonesia in the Dutch time. He said that the kijajis would just chant the Koran and the students just memorize the words. This sounded fine, he said, but none of them know what was in the Koran or what Islam was all about; they weren’t really Moslems. The old method of education also led to indifference to re
ligion or later to anti-religious feelings on the part of students when they realized they had been wasting their time. He said the situation was improved some now, but still pretty bad.
As the following of NU is predominantly hobt, if not always as outspoken about it as the kijajis, the younger leaders seem constantly engaged in an effort to drag an unwilling party along the road to greater modernity.
I went to an NU meeting last night. There were about thirty people present, most of them older men, many of them quite old. Muksim (an old NU leader, one of the founders of NU in Modjokuto) ran the thing. He started the meeting off with an Arabic sentence and went on about the value of Islam, particularly stressing its importance for men about his age, saying “When you die, die Islam.” The first speaker (a somewhat younger leader) launched into an attack on the lassitude of NU people. He said that if NU wants an Islamic state they must turn out for the meetings and learn about general things, not just religion, and that they must develop their organization. He said that Moslems in Indonesia comprise 90 per cent of the population* but don’t
* I.e., confessed Moslems; santris always claim everyone but Christians, Balinese, and outright pagans as Moslems, though many of those they so claim are in fact bitterly anti-inn tri.
have nearly their proper power because they just sit back and don’t come to the meetings. (A number of people slept through this speech, and a few slept through almost all of them.) At any rate, his speech turned out to be a plea for the ummat to become more active; and he especially decried the showing at the meeting. . . . Muksim then called in Rais, the secretary of NU, who came in from outside the door where he had been waiting. He spoke fifteen minutes, his speech being entirely an exhortation for the rank and file to be more active in NU. He kept saying over and over again that both the leaders and “those who are led” have to participate. He said that they should go out and urge their friends to come, that only 30 people coming when NU was so large was an unhappy state of affairs, and that NU had social re
sponsibilities to meet and couldn’t just pay attention to religion. Muksim then talked a while about the comforts of religion to the aged and made his point about dying Islam again. . . . In general NU people (this was the first meeting I attended) here seem much older than Muhammadijah people, and interest in directly religious questions is somewhat more evident. (Two strictly religious speeches are omitted from the above account.) Most of the younger NU people were not there. Others like Rais just came in, made a speech, and left. Some people wore traditional dress; one man had a full beard; and three or four were very old indeed, using canes to walk. Muksim seems more in touch with people than the rest, and I suppose that is why he was in charge.
The older audience and the religious emphasis of that meeting are partly attributable to the fact that it was a meeting for religious propaganda rather than business. But the almost desperate tone with which the younger leaders tried to get the NU rank and file to leave off kolot concerns and take a some
what more modern attitude was typical.
Within the Masjumi leadership the issue is somewhat different. In the first place, all but one of the major Masjumi leaders in Modjokuto are Muhammadijah members and thus strict modernists, and the seventh, the son of H. Nazir, the modernist pioneer, is generally sympathetic to modernism.
The issue is not so much between modernism and conservatism as between what one might call a “secularist” approach to modernism and a “pious” ap
proach. By definition, no santri can be a secularist; and I have already em
phasized the fact that modernists are concerned with a “pure” Islam. Never
theless, people come at modernism from two angles.
First, there is the deeply pious Moslem whose feelings for the traditions of Islam are as deep as those of any conservative but who, being well-educated, has a painful awareness of the inadequacy of Islam in its full medieval form for modem life. The interest of this sort of man (for example, Nazir’s son, learned in several languages, his scholarship in the Koran and Hadith re
nowned throughout the whole area among modernists and conservatives alike) in modernism is in producing an Islam of which he will not have to feel ashamed in any particular when faced with other modernized creeds such as Christianity, but which will still be Islam and will still fulfill his strong re
ligious needs. The second type of man to whom modernism appeals is one whose main interests are in the secular world but who also feels a need for some religjous context for his behavior. He wants a religion which will not Patterns of Internal Organization of the
Santri
Community » 165 «»166« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A continually hamper his activity in modem secular life, which will leave him free to pursue his interests there, but which will still allow him to be a good Moslem and allow him to justify his life in terms of the Koran. The present chairman of Muhammadijah in Modjokuto is such a man. He is more in
terested in political activity and social work than in religious learning, but he is most certainly not a secularist.
As both Unitarians and Lutherans find a place in Christian reform, so both these types tend to get attracted to Islamic reform; and it is the contrast be
tween the two which one sees in Masjumi-Muhammadijah councils.
We talked about Usman (Nazir’s son). He (the informant was a young Muhammadijah man) said Usman is the most intellectual of the speakers on religious subjects around here; he always get his material out of books like a true scholar. Pak Mul, who does most of the Muhammadijah talking on religious topics, is more down to earth and just takes his examples from every
day life. When I asked him who the Muhammadijah people look to for leadership, he said, “Ali (Chairman of Masjumi; Vice Chairman of Mu
hammadijah) and Mul do most of the talking on religious subjects along with Hadji Muchtar, who works in the naib’s office, Dullah (a Muham
madijah leader), H. Ustaz (one of the founders of Muhammadijah and one of its main sources of financial support in Modjokuto), and Iskak (Chairman of Muhammadijah) don’t know very much about religion and you rarely hear them talk about it.”
The kind of conflict that typically occurs in such a situation is exemplified in the following report, written by another member of our research team, of a Muhammadijah school committee meeting, in which roughly the same people participated as are mentioned in the above note and lined up in respect to a problem just about as one would predict:
They discussed the separation of the various school classes into boys and girls, deciding finally not to do so but to continue with the present co-educational classes. The argument for separation was all religious, Iskak said, while the arguments against it and the difficulties were all practical. Opposed to the separation were Dullah, H. Ustaz, and Iskak; the supporters were led by H.
Muchtar and Mul. One of the practical difficulties was that, since there were more boys than girls, there would be an imbalance. Also, said Iskak, there would be an educational danger, for there would be less competition and thus less good results educationally. He said that it is better for the boys to have the girls present so that they will have to behave above a certain minimum, whereas if they were alone they would be more difficult to handle— an argument on the ideological rather than the practical level which tends to deny the original rationale for separation. Then they discussed whether the religious injunction was absolute or only advisory and decided that it was absolute but only insofar as it was possible of realization.
Also, because of this dual appeal of modernism, Muhammadijah draws for its membership not only upon those who have grown up in a santri back
ground which they now feel needs to be adjusted to changed conditions but also upon those people who grow up in a non-santri environment and decide upon becoming adults that a reformed Islam is attractive to them. There is a
tendency on the part of both these lands of people, moreover, to want to disassociate themselves from traditional village santris.
I went in the evening to see Rachmad (head of the Muhammadijah high school). I asked him whether his parents had been santris and he said no.
He never knew about Islam until he went to work for Muhammadijah. He was born and educated in Djember and went to a place near there where the Muhammadijah school was in bad shape, with only a handful of students and no teachers left, and he was asked whether he wanted to teach there.
He thought that he would teach only for the experience, but he got more and more involved in it until finally he became a member of Muhammadijah and a santri. He was rather uncomfortable with this last term; he said that he wasn’t a santri like regular village santris. He then explained: “With Muham
madijah people you can not tell they are santris just by looking at them as you can other santris. For example, I look just like anyone else, any other teacher. And Zuhari (a young Kudus-descended religious teacher in the Muhammadijah high school; from a strong santri background and rather learned in religion for a young man but quite modernist), for example, is very learned in religion, but you would never know it to look at him. He looks just like a modern young man.”
In short, among the NU leadership the conflict is between the need to appease a kolot following and still meet the demands a modern political party must meet in order to compete effectively; among the Muhammadijah- Masjumi leadership the conflict is between the desire to modernize Islam and the necessity to make sure that this does not lead to secularism. So, in a sense, the problems in the two elites are parallel: how to interpret Islam so that it can at the same time be both religiously satisfying and socially adequate. The difference lies in the fact that the danger in the first is that social adequacy will be sacrificed to religious satisfaction and the party will lose its political effectiveness, and in the second the danger is that religious validity may be sacrificed to social efficiency, depriving the party of its basis of mass support.
It is in this sense that NU may be called “conservative” and Masjumi-Muham- madijah “modern.”
Patterns of Internal Organization of the