6 - Conclusion

Summary

The fact that Nahdlatul Ulama is the largest mass-based Muslim organization in the world's largest Muslim nation is reason enough to study it. Add to that the fact that NU gave Indonesia its fourth president, that it has a strong and vibrant civil society movement and that it is committed to democracy and pluralism, and you have a fascinating case study of the interplay between the religious and the political in an Islamic society, the interweaving of personal political agendas and institutional rhetoric, and the internal and external rivalries of the two main streams of Islam in contemporary Indonesia.

In this book I have examined the political context in which NU's civil society movement emerged, and I have explored the political and religious motivations that informed the civil society discourse that resulted. My main conclusions are threefold.

1. 1 While articulated as distinct by NU thinkers, the religious and the political are deeply intertwined in NU as motivating forces.

2. 2 The civil society discourse and movement of the mid to late 1990s was strongly informed by NU's political interests, but eventually took on a life of its own separate from the political exigencies of its architect, Abdurrahman Wahid.

3. 3 The modernist–traditionalist conflict remains the central division within Indonesian Islam, and it is this, rather than NU's relationship with the state, that primarily explains NU's public and political behaviour.

In the rest of this chapter, I take up each of these themes in turn. I then briefly discuss developments in the past ten years, to give an indication of the state of NU's civil society activism at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.