International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 198

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
accommodating the culture (‘adah) into Islamic norms. Wahid was able to formulate a
theology of democracy because he studied modern sciences and philosophy alongside his
mastery of Islamic civilization.
Religious communities to play the role of civil society
As early as 1973, Wahid was critical of the Soeharto autocratic regime which did not try to
create the mechanism of checks and balance within the society as the precondition for the
development of democracy. Wahid’s criticism of President Soeharto was not in the form of
challenging the legitimacy of the regime, but expressed by advocating pesantren to play a
role in civil society. This was likely Wahid’s counter discourse to President Soeharto’s
understanding of modernization, namely the project of development. This move was to
divert the marginalization of the pesantrens, considered inaccurately by the regime as the
bastion of political Islam. It was not surprising that the pesantrens’ followers had been the
supporters of the NU party, but they recognized Islam and the state as different identities
because they were the supporters of the Fiqh paradigm. Indeed, President Soeharto did not
feel comfortable with any independent socio-political forces, such as the NU party (Subianto,
2008, p. 170).
The state was the prime mover of modernization, but the Western countries ignored
this reality as the Soeharto regime committed to combat the influence of communism and
Islamism. By modernization, Soeharto tried to centralize the power, not create strong civil
society, and, then, was successful in co-opting political parties and some elements of civil
society. Wahid tried to protect pesantrens from the cooptation of the regime so that he
tried to empower pesantren communities in order to have awareness about their rights. By
so doing, pesantrens were not only playing a supplementary role to the regime, but also a
complementary role: participating actively in the course of modernization. He did not want
pesantren just to be used by the government to legitimize the development programs, but
rather held they should play a complementary role: pesantrens should be involved in the
formulation of the goals of the developmental programs, their methods, and their targets
(Abdurrahman Wahid, 1981, pp. 5-9).
In line with a true socio-cultural approach, Wahid’s adoption of a structural approach
was not to change the political structure of the state, but just political culture. In other
words, this structural approach simply aimed to empower societies for having the role of
civil society within the context of the Pancasila political system. In this regard, he does not
agree with Marxists’ revolutionary methods to change the national political system, because
he believes that this revolutionary method violates humanism, respecting the life of the
individual. Wahid calls these structural changes by means of evolutionary methods a
simultaneous freedom which happens when all people develop following their own desires.
By these methods, people should find comrades or allies in the prevailing structure in order
to avoid the formation of a new tyranny in the name of people. Wahid believes that a true
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