Hasyim Asy'ari

Hasyim Asy'ari was an Indonesian ulama and National Hero, and the founder in 1926 of Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest Islamic organisation. He was born Muhammad Hasyim in Gedang, Jombang Regency, East Java, and died on 25 July 1947. The English article itself gives two birth dates — 14 February 1871 and 10 April 1875; Wikidata gives the first and the Arabic article the second. The museum records the discrepancy rather than resolving it on one source, and records the year 1871 as the one Wikidata and the article's first date share. ^{1 2 3}

He was born Muhammad Hasyim, the third child of Kyai Asy'ari and Halimah, into a family deeply involved in running pesantrens (Islamic boarding schools): his grandfather Kyai Usman founded the Gedang Pesantren and his great-grandfather founded the Tambakberas Pesantren. The article traces his ancestry to Sultan Hadiwijaya of Pajang, and further to Brawijaya VI, the last king of Majapahit. ¹

He was educated by Ahmad Khatib al-Minangkabawi, an imam at the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, who was also the teacher of Ahmad Dahlan, founder of Muhammadiyah — so the founders of Indonesia's two largest Islamic organisations shared one teacher in Mecca. ¹

At the age of twenty he married Khadijah, daughter of the leader of Pesantren Siwalan Panji. A year later they went to Mecca; after seven months his wife died, and his son Abdullah died two months after her. ¹

In 1899 he founded Pesantren Tebuireng, which became the largest pesantren in Java in the early twentieth century, with four thousand students in 1947, and a centre for the reform of traditional Islamic teaching. ^{1 2}

On 31 January 1926 he and several traditional Islamic leaders founded Nahdlatul Ulama ("Awakening of the Ulama") as the organisation of Indonesia's traditionalist scholars and pesantren networks. During the Japanese occupation he was arrested, and several months later released and became Head of Religious Affairs. ^{1 2}

He died suddenly on 25 July 1947 of hypertension, after hearing news that Dutch troops were winning a battle in Malang. ¹

He married seven times, all of his wives daughters of ulama; the article names Khadijah, Nafisah, Nafiqah and Masrurah. His son Wahid Hasyim was one of the formulators of the Jakarta Charter and later Minister of Religious Affairs, and his grandson Abdurrahman Wahid became President of Indonesia. He is the namesake of Hasyim Asy'ari University and of the Indonesian Islamic Museum K.H. Hasyim Asy'ari, both at the Tebuireng pesantren in Jombang. ¹

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.