The 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Abdurrahman Wahid

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 1993, Manila, Philippines

Founded in 1926, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the Council of Islamic Scholars, is today Indonesia's largest private organization. Its 30 million members are rooted in a vast network of pesantren, or Muslim schools, spread throughout Indonesia but concentrated heavily in East and Central Java. For centuries, scholars at these schools defined and preserved Java's distinctive Muslim culture, and passed it on. When colonized by the Dutch and opened to new winds from the West, NU's pesantren rejected the "modern" ideas embraced by many fellow Muslims and became bastions of tradition. And so, by and large, they remained until the early years of independence, when NU emerged briefly as a national political force.

By 1984, however, the year ABDURRAHMAN WAHID became chairman, Nahdlatul Ulama was locked in a no-win confrontation with Indonesia's authoritarian New Order government. Bound to their rural villages, few of its members filled the ranks of Indonesia's growing bureaucracy, its prospering business classes, or its powerful officer corps. WAHID immediately withdrew the organization from electoral politics and redirected NU to its original purposes, which were social and religious.

Born in East Java in 1940, WAHID received his formal education in Indonesia, Egypt, and Iraq and became a Muslim scholar in his own right. As the grandson of NU's founding chairman, he is steeped in the Nahdlatul Ulama tradition. But his approach as chairman has been anything but traditional. To improve education, working conditions, nutrition, and health in NU villages, for example, he has initiated new pesantren-based community development projects. To give farmers and small businesses access to credit, he has launched a rural banking system. Now he envisions a great web of small-scale agro-industries, retail stores, rural banks, and mutual-help projects, raising NU's villagers from poverty and economic dependency. "Islam," he reminds skeptics, "is a liberating religion."

"I am convinced," says WAHID, "that the Indonesian silent majority is pluralistic in attitude and tolerant of diversity." He therefore opposes the idea of using government to enforce the Islamic law code, or Shari'ah, and other manifestations of an Islamic state. He prefers, instead, a secular state in which the law applies equally to everyone and in which the values embodied in the Shari'ah become the standards by which Muslims choose to live. In an ultra-diverse nation, he believes, religious politics are dangerous and mitigate against the achievement of democracy. And he is convinced democracy is the best hope for Indonesia.

While WAHID supports government programs that benefit the people and pledges loyalty to Indonesia's national ideology and the Constitution, he also speaks critically about the indefinite postponement of individual rights in the country, such as freedom of speech. In 1991 he courted official displeasure by agreeing to lead the Democracy Forum, a grouping of Muslim and Christian intellectuals convened to "discuss and reflect on the parameters of democracy" and to explore possible frameworks wherein the country's citizens can be more effectively enfranchised. He hopes, thereby, to enlarge incrementally "the constituency for democracy" among Indonesians.

Multi-lingual WAHID is a gregarious, cosmopolitan man, equally at home in the village mosque,before the press in Jakarta, or addressing international meetings. Known for his humor, deft maneuvering, and outspoken views, he is sometimes at odds with the conservatives among NU's vast membership. But in an old organization where many people want to put on the brakes, he says, someone has got to step on the gas.

In electing ABDURRAHMAN WAHID to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes his guiding Southeast Asia's largest Muslim organization as a force for religious tolerance, fair economic development, and democracy in Indonesia.