BATTLING OVER THE BUREAUCRACY

Abstract

On 10 October 1963, a group of Muslim college students staged a protest at the State Islamic Institute (IAIN) in Yogyakarta. Rejecting efforts by Nahdlatul Ulama to transform the IAIN system into a traditionalist fiefdom, the students declared that they would no longer accept the existing IAIN administration. Within weeks, the IAIN protests spread to Jakarta and garnered the attention of the national media, the Minister of Religious Affairs, and Sukarno himself. By examining this largely forgotten episode in Indonesian Islamic history, this article argues that intra-Muslim conflict continued unabated in the wake of Masyumi's dissolution and the rise of the Partai Komunis Indonesia. In fact, Sukarno's Guided Democracy merely provided a new political framework through which Muslim traditionalists and modernists alike articulated their interests and pursued political influence vis-à-vis one another. During the 10 October incident, both Nahdlatul Ulama administrators and modernist protestors deployed Sukarnoist rhetoric and appealed to the authority of the President and his revolutionary nationalism in order to stake their respective claims on bureaucratic power. In this sense, the incident was not a modernist uprising against Sukarno's state but an intra-Muslim contest over who should have access to and control of the sprawling religious bureaucracy.