International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 191

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
struggling an Islamic state, had justified the birth of the Republic of Indonesia so that they
participated actively in the national political system. On the other hand, the modernist
Muslims accepted this idea of a secular state because their representatives were in the
minority both in BPUPKI and PPKI. Accordingly, they persisted in their efforts of establishing
the idea of an Islamic state by supporting the political party of Masyumi until 1960. In this
regard, Wahid was convinced that the root of the NU exodus from Masyumi was due to this
different paradigm.
The modernist Muslims struggled to establish an Islamic state constitutionally
following the general election in 1955 which was intended to arrange a permanent
Constitution for Indonesia, given that the Indonesian Constitution of 1945 was a temporary
one. They did not attract enough supporters to support an Islamic state so that they
reduced their stand point by supporting the NU proposal of reinstalment of the Jakarta
Charter to the Constitution of 1945. The followers of the secular paradigm challenged this
NU proposal so that the Constituent Assembly failed to fulfil its task of formulating the
permanent Constitution of Indonesia. Accordingly, President Soekarno dissolved this
Constituent Assembly and the parliament and, then, issued a decree to reinstall the
Constitution of 1945 with the national ideology of Pancasila without the Jakarta Charter.
The traditionalist Muslims did not persist with their proposal and were willing to put aside
their ideas on the worldly affairs because they considered the concepts of not holding
absolute truths, although the concepts were related to Islam. In this regard, NU did not
pursue a clear-cut black and white attitude toward the social phenomena as Islamic or nonIslamic concepts (Haidar, 1998, p. 6). They had supported Soekarno’s decree to reinstall the
Constitution of 1945 without the Jakarta Charter because they found justification from the
principle of the Fiqh paradigm that a decision for public affairs should be supported by the
majority voice of the people (Abdurrahman Wahid, 2007b, p. 300), not from the texts of alQur’an and hadiths. However, they supported the autocratic Soekarno regime with the
intention of countering the influence of PKI both in the government and Parliament.
Conversely, the modernist Muslims did not want to join with the Soekarno regime as well as
the appointed members of Parliament. They considered that the dissolution of the
Parliament by Soekarno was contradiction to Islamic law as Parliament is the manifestation
of the people’s voice, so that Soekarno had robbed the voice of the people
Wahid argues that NU’s proposal and its support for Masyumi’s proposal of an
Islamic state was likely fulfilling a compulsory task (jalb al-masalih) in worldly affairs, but NU
carried out these tasks based on its capabilities in regard to some constraining factors. And
NU discarded its concepts if they caused negative impacts which harmed NU itself or
Indonesians in general: to cause political instability generally which would hinder the
establishment of the religious order. From the above discussion, we understand that the
traditionalist and modernist Muslims developed different approaches to the issue of Islam
and the state, although both supported the Jakarta Charter in 1945 and 1959. The
191 | P a g e