ABSTRACT
A number of studies on civil society in Indonesia such as those done by Hefner (2000) and Nakamura et al. (2001) have concluded that Muslim or Islamic-based civil societies and their leaders played a major and crucial role not only in the ‘better ordering’ of Indonesian Muslim society at large, but also in the eventual fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. Many leaders of Muslim or Islamic-based civil society organisations, the most prominent among whom were Abdurrahman Wahid – also well-known as ‘Gus Dur’ – (then the national leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama/NU), Mohamad Amien Rais (then the national chief leader of Muhammadiyah), and Nurcholish Madjid (the former national leader of the Association of University Muslim Student Associations/HMI), were the most outspoken critics of the Suharto regime and took the leading role in the increased prominence of civil society’s opposition to the authoritarian rule in Indonesia since the 1990s.
