The story behind Abdurrahman

This is the first of two articles on a lesser known side of President Abdurrahman Wahid by Indonesian expert R. William Liddle, professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

OHIO (JP): There is a missing ingredient in media descriptions of Indonesia's new president, Abdurrahman Wahid, familiarly called Gus Dur. We know that he is a Muslim cleric, the head since 1984 of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's and perhaps the world's largest organization of traditional Muslim religious scholars and teachers.

His near-blindness and physical frailness, the result of diabetes and two recent strokes, were painfully apparent to television viewers world-wide who watched the sessions of the People's Consultative Assembly when he was elected and sworn in as Indonesia's fourth president.

As a political tactician, he is reported to be both adept and mercurial. Adept, in the way he carved out and defended his position as the leading protagonist of democracy in the most repressive days of the Soeharto government. Mercurial, even erratic, for his emotional outbursts, his tendency to believe the most outrageous conspiracy theories, and his strategic zigzags that have occasionally comforted his enemies and confounded his friends.

We are also beginning to understand that this is a most unusual Muslim cleric. He is a religious pluralist who believes that religion is a matter of personal choice, and has consistently acted on that belief for decades.

During the Soeharto years he publicly defended the rights of non-Muslim minorities as well as Muslim organizations considered heretical by his co-religionists and by the state. He is a European-style social democrat committed both to representative democracy and to the use of state policy to reduce inequalities of opportunity and of condition.

Perhaps most surprising to secularized Indonesians, he has been an active member of the modern Jakarta intellectual elite, engaging the issues of the day through his writings and organizational activities. For several years in the 1980s he scandalized more conservative Muslims by serving as a juror at the national film festival, the equivalent of Hollywood's Academy Awards.

What is missing from this picture is a deeper understanding of the kind of leadership Gus Dur, health permitting, will give his country. I first met him in the mid-1970s, shortly after his return from study in the Middle East, when he was just beginning to establish himself in the group of Jakarta political intellectuals centered around Tempo, then as now Indonesia's leading weekly newsmagazine, and Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES), an applied social science research institution staffed by bright young urban Western-educated socialists and modernist Muslims.

Gus Dur was not exactly a stranger to Jakarta life. His father was an NU leader and independent Indonesia's first minister of religion, and the family had lived in the capital for some time. But his years as a student in rural Islamic boarding schools, his higher education in Baghdad and Cairo, and his NU affiliation made him suspect in the eyes of Jakarta intellectuals.

To both the secular socialists and the modernist Muslims, he represented the backwardness of a village Islam still chained to the teachings of medieval jurists and mired in the irrationality of both sufi and indigenous Indonesian mystical beliefs and practices.

In the 1950s, the time of Indonesia's first democratic experiment, national-level NU politicians -- including Gus Dur's father -- were mocked as hayseeds and either isolated from national office or confined to the ministry of religion.

As a young boy, Gus Dur directly observed the mistreatment of his NU elders, and shared their resentment. Many years later, in interviews with me and others, he often complained about the continuing arrogance of NU's enemies, especially the Muslim modernists.

NU had been founded in 1926 by traditional rural-based Muslim teachers and scholars concerned to stem the advances made by the urban, more Western-educated modernists, who preached direct interpretation of the Qur'an by contemporary believers.

NU's teachers and scholars wanted to preserve the classical Sunni tradition of interpretation within jurisprudential schools, which for centuries had formed the basis of Islamic education in Indonesia.

For a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s the modernists and traditionalists joined forces in a single political party, but in 1953 NU leaders split to form their own party. Since that time the two camps have remained separate and hostile, though forces for rapprochement have also been at work, especially in recent years.

Gus Dur's understanding of leadership is rooted in his NU background. In a casual conversation some years ago, I asked him what he liked to read. He answered that his favorite contemporary novel was Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. When I asked him why, he replied simply that it was a mirror.

The eponymous hero of My Name is Asher Lev is a young observant Jew growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s. His family life is steeped in religious tradition. Both of his parents are the descendants of several generations of rabbis and scholars. His father travels throughout the country and Europe helping to rescue Jews behind the Iron Curtain and establishing yeshivas "at the request of the Rebbe" who is the leader of their Hasidic sect. His father's great-great grandfather, who appears to Asher in disturbing dreams as his "mythic ancestor," transformed a despotic Russian nobleman's estates into a source of immense wealth.

He then spent the rest of his life traveling "to do good deeds and bring the Master of the Universe into the world," that is, to restore the balance he had upset by enabling the nobleman to brutalize his serfs. Asher's grandfather, for whom he is named, traveled throughout the Soviet Union as an emissary of the father of the present Rebbe.

He was murdered by a drunken peasant while on his way home from the Rebbe's synagogue on the night before Easter. Asher's mother, the descendant of "one of the saintliest of Hasidic leaders," is devastated at the beginning of the novel by the accidental death of her only brother, but recovers by dedicating her life to completing his work for the sect.

From an early age Asher understands that he has a unique gift. He is an artist destined for greatness. The demands of art- portrayed by Potok as an autonomous world of meaning with its own values and standards soon cause conflict with his parents, particularly his father, for whom becoming an artist is foolishness, "not for Torah," perhaps even temptation from the sitra achra, the Other Side.

The wise Rebbe, with a broader vision than Asher's father, intervenes, introducing Asher to Jacob Kahn, a great artist who revolutionized sculpture as Picasso revolutionized painting. The Rebbe says, "I pray to the Master of the Universe that the world will one day also hear of you as a Jew.... Jacob Kahn will make of you an artist. But only you will make of yourself a Jew." Kahn becomes his teacher and patron, eventually arranging a series of one-man shows at which he is acclaimed by the critics as a major new artist.

The conflict with his parents, however, intensifies. He is driven by the need to express his anguish and torment in his art. "For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other's throats."

He paints a metaphoric crucifixion scene (he chooses Christian symbolism because Judaism, he says, offers nothing comparable), his mother with her arms extended above the window of the family living room, her face split into two segments, his father and he standing below with an attache case and a palette respectively, demanding the impossible, that she choose between them.

His parents are deeply shocked by the painting. Even the Rebbe abandons him this time. "'Asher Lev,'" the Rebbe said softly. 'You have crossed a boundary. I cannot help you. You are alone now. I give you my blessings."

At the end of the novel he leaves Brooklyn for Paris, but he is still "Asher Lev, Hasid. Asher Lev, painter." He hears his mythic ancestor: "Come with me, my precious Asher. You and I will walk together now through the centuries, each of us for our separate deeds that unbalanced the world." He will be a great painter, but in doing so he will also continue to hurt the people he loves. There is no way out of the dilemma.