ABSTRACT
The voluntary organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (Revival of Religious Scholars), is the most problematic of the Islamic associations to analyse in terms of Suharto’s corporatist strategies. The reasons for this are not only because of NU’s large, sprawling organisational structure and mass membership, much of which was based in rural Java and only loosely tied to the organisation, but also because NU had remained largely outside of state structures for much of Suharto’s New Order period, had resisted state interference in its internal affairs, and thus had remained a fairly independent but marginalised political and economic force. Nonetheless, Suharto did seek to capture, channel, and politically exclude the interests of NU, and marshall NU support behind his presidency at elections. The argument can be made that NU’s peripheral position in the political system indeed highlighted the success of Suharto’s strategy of corporatist exclusion, of shutting interests out of power and denying effective channels of participation to group, and especially Muslim group, interests. This chapter considers how Suharto’s corporatist strategy both exacerbated and created divisions in NU. An examination also is made of how Golkar and ICMI became organisational channels through which Suharto sought to consolidate more informal types of clientelistic co-optation of leaders of NU’s pesantren (Islamic boarding schools).
