Abdurrahman Wahid

Abdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009), known across Indonesia as Gus Dur, was a Muslim scholar and statesman who chaired Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest Muslim organisation, from 1984 to 1999, and then served as Indonesia's fourth president from 1999 to 2001. He was the eldest son of Wahid Hasyim, Indonesia's first minister of religious affairs, and the grandson of Hasyim Asy'ari, who founded Nahdlatul Ulama in 1926. His presidency made him the first elected head of state of the post-Suharto era; his public legacy is his defence of pluralism, of minority rights and of a tolerant, culturally rooted Islam. ^{1 2}

He was born Abdurrahman ad-Dakhil at Denanyar, Jombang, in East Java, on 7 September 1940. The English article records that he was born on the fourth day of Sha'ban, the eighth month of the Islamic calendar, in 1940 — 4 Sha'ban 1359 in the tabular calendar, the same day as 7 September 1940. Because "fourth day of the eighth month" was at some point mapped onto the Gregorian calendar, a variant birth date of 4 August 1940 also circulates, and Wikidata carries both values; the September date is the one the articles and the generality of sources give. ^{1 2}

His mother was Siti Sholehah, daughter of the Jombang scholar Bisri Syansuri. The family stood at the centre of East Java's pesantren world, and his childhood moved between Jombang and Jakarta as his father's ministerial career required. ¹

He was educated in pesantren, including Tambakberas at Jombang, and in 1964 went to Cairo, where he attended lectures at al-Azhar without completing a degree; he moved to Iraq and graduated from the University of Baghdad in 1970. Back in Java he taught at Pesantren Tambakberas — Muslim legal studies from 1974, and from 1975 the Kitab al-Hikam of Ibn Ata Allah, a classical text of Sufism — and became dean of the faculty of Islamic beliefs and practices at Hasyim Asyari University. Through the 1970s he also wrote for the magazines Tempo and Kompas and became a well-known social commentator. ¹

In 1984 he was elected chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, and he was re-elected at successive congresses, holding the chairmanship until 1999. As chairman he pressed for reform of pesantren education and argued that Islam in Indonesia should be indigenised — expressed through local culture rather than imported forms — positions that brought him into tension with more literalist currents and, at times, with the Suharto government. In 1998, after Suharto's fall, he founded the National Awakening Party (PKB). ^{1 3}

On 20 October 1999 the People's Consultative Assembly elected him president, ahead of Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose party had won the largest share of the parliamentary vote. His presidency defended the rights of minorities — he lifted the ban on Chinese cultural expression and declared Chinese New Year an optional holiday — and attempted rapid reform of the military and the bureaucracy, but it was marked by conflict with parliament and by erratic interventions. On 23 July 2001 the Assembly removed him from office and Megawati succeeded him. ¹

His personal devotional life was that of the Javanese Sufi tradition in which he was raised. Throughout his life, and still as president, he made pilgrimages to the tombs of saints and elders, seeking spiritual guidance there; the Jakarta Post described the practice in April 2001 as his "customary rite" and reported that he sought out ancient graves on the sidelines of official visits, and that his daughter Yeni recalled him weeping at the grave of a famous scholar in East Java. ⁴

The historian Theodore Friend, in an obituary essay written days after his death, characterised him as a "Sufi sage and mystic" out of office and wrote that his life and career contain abundant clues for anyone who would understand modern Sufism. The museum records his faith on the basis of this attested practice and characterisation; his chairmanship of Nahdlatul Ulama, an office, is not the basis of the record. ⁵

He died on 30 December 2009, during treatment at the Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in Jakarta, and was buried in the family cemetery at Tebuireng, Jombang, which has since become a major site of pilgrimage. ^{1 2}

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