Abdurrahman Wahid

Abdurrahman Wahid was born on September 7, 1940, in Jombang, a town in East Java long associated with Islamic scholarship ^[1]. His official birth date was later recorded as August 4, a discrepancy that arose because his birth was registered by the Islamic calendar, but September 7 is the Gregorian date historians accept ^[2]. He came from the most prominent clerical family in Indonesian Islam. His grandfather, Hasyim Asy'ari, founded Nahdlatul Ulama in 1926, and his father, Wahid Hasyim, served as Indonesia's first Minister of Religious Affairs after independence ^[1].

The family name carried weight, and so did tragedy. In 1953 the twelve-year-old Wahid was riding in a car with his father when it crashed in West Java; Wahid Hasyim died of his injuries the following day ^[2]. The loss pushed the boy toward books. He read voraciously and eclectically, absorbing Marx, European novels, and American baseball statistics alongside classical Islamic texts, a habit that later gave his speeches their unpredictable range ^[3].

His education followed the traditional pesantren path with modern detours. He studied at Islamic boarding schools in Yogyakarta and Magelang, then won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1964. Bored by rote instruction there, he spent more time in cafes and libraries than in class, and moved on to the University of Baghdad, where he studied Arabic literature until 1970 ^[3]. He returned to Indonesia in 1971 after a period in Europe, never having completed a formal degree, yet better read than most of his credentialed contemporaries ^[2].

Back in Java, Wahid built a reputation as a writer before he built one as a cleric. Through the 1970s he taught at pesantren in Jombang and contributed essays and columns to publications such as Tempo and Kompas, earning a living as a journalist and commentator on religion, culture, and politics ^[3]. His prose was witty and irreverent, and it made him a bridge between the traditionalist Muslim world of rural Java and the urban intellectuals of Jakarta ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Abdurrahman Wahid in the 1980s would have received a simple answer: the rising force inside Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). At the organization's 1984 congress in Situbondo he was elected chairman of its executive board ^[1]. He steered NU out of formal party politics, returning it to its 1926 charter as a social and educational body. The move, framed as a withdrawal, actually protected NU's tens of millions of members from the Suharto government's manipulation of political Islam and gave Wahid a national platform independent of the regime ^[4].

That independence hardened into opposition. In 1991 he helped found the Democracy Forum, a small circle of intellectuals critical of authoritarian rule, and he pointedly declined to join the government-sponsored Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals chaired by B. J. Habibie ^[4]. Suharto's circle tried repeatedly to unseat him from the NU leadership and failed. By the mid 1990s Wahid, widely known by the affectionate Javanese honorific Gus Dur, was one of the very few public figures who could criticize the president and survive politically ^[3].

Suharto's resignation in May 1998 opened the door. Wahid founded the National Awakening Party (PKB) in July 1998 as NU's political vehicle, and in the June 1999 elections, Indonesia's first free vote in over four decades, the party took roughly an eighth of the ballots ^[5]. That modest share proved enough. On October 20, 1999, the People's Consultative Assembly chose Wahid as president over Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose party had actually won the popular vote; Megawati became his vice president the next day ^[5].

Any fair list of Abdurrahman Wahid achievements starts with what he did in his first months. He dissolved the Ministry of Information, long the censorship arm of the New Order, and the feared Ministry of Social Affairs ^[5]. He lifted the 1967 restrictions on Chinese Indonesian religious and cultural expression, allowing public celebration of the Lunar New Year for the first time in a generation, and in 2000 he recognized Confucianism as a legitimate religion in Indonesia ^[6]. He removed General Wiranto from the cabinet, an early assertion of civilian control over a military accustomed to ruling, and opened negotiations with separatists in Aceh and Papua rather than simply sending troops ^[5].

Governance, however, was not his gift. His administration was improvised, his cabinet reshuffles frequent, and his public remarks often contradictory from one day to the next. Two financial scandals in 2000, known in the Indonesian press as Buloggate and Bruneigate, gave his enemies in parliament an opening, even though he was never convicted of any wrongdoing in either affair ^[5]. When the assembly moved toward impeachment in July 2001, Wahid attempted to declare a state of emergency and dissolve the legislature. The military and police refused to enforce the decree. On July 23, 2001, the People's Consultative Assembly removed him from office and installed Megawati as president ^[1].

In 1968 Wahid married Sinta Nuriyah, a former student of his from Jombang; because he was still abroad, the wedding was conducted with his grandfather standing in as proxy, and the couple held their formal celebration in 1971 after his return ^[2]. They had four daughters. The eldest, Alissa Wahid, and the second, Yenny Wahid, later became prominent public figures in their own right, carrying on his pluralist activism ^[7]. Sinta Nuriyah, who used a wheelchair after a 1993 car accident, became a noted campaigner for women's rights within Islam.

His health was a constant undercurrent of his public life. A first stroke in 1998 left him nearly blind, and aides read documents aloud to him throughout his presidency ^[3]. He suffered from diabetes and kidney disease, and colleagues marveled that he kept a punishing travel schedule anyway.

Among the memorable Abdurrahman Wahid facts is his humor, which was not incidental but central to his style. He famously joked that Indonesia had produced three mad presidents, counting himself, and his catchphrase, usually rendered as "gitu aja kok repot" (roughly, why make such a fuss over that), became a national idiom for unflappability ^[3]. He loved football, Janis Joplin, Beethoven, and Indian films, and he could quote classical Arabic poetry and Javanese proverbs in the same breath ^[2].

Removal from the palace did not remove him from public life. Wahid remained a dominant, sometimes disruptive, presence in the National Awakening Party, feuding openly with rivals over its leadership through the mid 2000s ^[5]. He attempted to run for president again in 2004, but the election commission disqualified him on medical grounds, chiefly his failing eyesight, a decision he protested as discriminatory toward people with disabilities ^[3].

His energies shifted toward interfaith work. Through The Wahid Institute, founded in 2004 in Jakarta with his daughter Yenny, he promoted moderate Islam, minority rights, and dialogue among religions ^[7]. He spoke against the persecution of the Ahmadiyya community and defended Christian congregations facing church closures, positions that cost him support among conservatives and cemented his standing among liberals and minorities ^[6].

His body gave out before his voice did. After years of strokes, dialysis, and dental surgery complications, Abdurrahman Wahid died on December 30, 2009, at Dr. Cipto Mangunkusumo National General Hospital in Jakarta, at the age of 69 ^[1]. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono declared a week of national mourning and led the state funeral at the family pesantren complex in Jombang, where Wahid was buried beside his father and grandfather ^[8]. Tens of thousands of mourners came, and the grave quickly became, and remains, a pilgrimage site drawing millions of visitors ^[7].

Any Abdurrahman Wahid biography has to reconcile two verdicts: a failed presidency and a triumphant life. His 21 months in office were chaotic by almost any administrative measure, yet the decisions made in that chaos, civilian control of the military, a free press unshackled from the Information Ministry, legal dignity for Chinese Indonesians, shaped the democratic Indonesia that followed ^[5]. Later governments kept his reforms; in 2004 his old rival Megawati made the Lunar New Year a national public holiday, completing the opening he began ^[6].

His larger legacy is intellectual. Wahid argued for decades that Islam and democracy were compatible, that the Indonesian state should belong equally to all faiths, and that religious tradition could absorb local culture rather than erase it, a concept he called the indigenization of Islam ^[4]. Chinese Indonesian community organizations honored him as a protector, and some conferred on him the title Father of Chinese Indonesians ^[6].

In 2023 the Indonesian government named him a National Hero of Indonesia, joining his father and grandfather, making the Wahid family a rare three-generation line of national heroes ^[8]. Streets, schools, and NU institutions carry his name, and his epitaph, requested in his own words, reads simply that here rests a humanist. For a man who governed briefly and imperfectly, Gus Dur left an unusually durable answer to the question of what Indonesia could be ^[7].