Ramadan between NU and Muhammadiyah: Pluralism and Islamic Education in Public Schools

During Ramadan, the differences between Indonesian Islam's two major factions—NU and Muhammadiyah—become particularly noticeable. 

Sunset (maghrib) prayers at an Indonesian mosque, awaiting the new moon of Ramadan, 2014. (Unknown source.)

Ramadan: the holiest of Islamic months, when Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, when sins are forgiven, and when, in Indonesia, it becomes especially evident whether a particular Muslim belongs to NU or Muhammadiyah. Has she already marked her calendar with the date when Ramadan begins two weeks beforehand? Then she must be Muhammadiyah. Does that mosque hold 20 raka‘at of tarawih?[1] Then it’s clearly NU. Indonesians frequently make these simple categorizations, but relatively rarely are these differences seen as problematic. Most Indonesian Muslims display a significant degree of pluralist tolerance within this Islamic mainstream of NU and Muhammadiyah.

            NU and Muhammadiyah are not easily compared to religious organizations elsewhere. In their role most intimate to the lives of average Muslims, they might best be described as being denominations[2] of Sunni Islam, differentiating Muslims based on belief and practice. But they also function simultaneously as mass movements with registered members organized in branches forwarding specific visions for social change, as bureaucratic civil society organizations that provide most of the country’s non-public education and healthcare, and as quasi-political entities behind informally affiliated political parties, whose parliamentary positioning grants them each special prerogatives in government.[3]

Here, I’m not primarily interested in the high-level social and political dynamics between the two organizations. Instead, I’ll explain how their roles as Sunni “denominations” color the everyday lives of Indonesian Muslims, most notably during Ramadan.

Moon Sighting vs. Astronomical Calculation

            One important difference between NU and Muhammadiyah comes up far before anyone has even started fasting, when they’re still trying to figure out when they’ll start fasting. Since the Islamic calendar is lunar, Ramadan’s position on the Gregorian calendar moves backwards by about 10 or 11 days every year. But because lunar months can vary in legnth, Muslims have historically been unable to say exactly how many days away Ramadan is at any given time. Instead they have relied on sighting the new moon; so the beginning of Ramadan is traditionally announced on the first night of Ramadan itself.

Moon sighting, or imkanur rukyah. (Unknown source.)

NU (short for Nahdlatul Ulama, or “Revival of the Religious Scholars”)[4] is a self-identified “traditionalist” Islamic organization, generally meaning they prefer to follow the opinions of traditional madhahib (legal schools, sing. madhhab), usually the Shafi‘i school in particular. As a result of their conscious loyalty to Islamic tradition, they will only begin to celebrate Ramadan once the new moon has been sighted, though they do make cautious predictions beforehand. Most “NU people” (orang NU, sometimes called Nahdliyin) begin celebrating Ramadan when it is announced by the government—in which the Ministry of Religion happens to be controlled by NU, and therefore uses the moon sighting method.  

Muhammadiyah, on the other hand, bases their version of the Islamic lunar calendar on astronomical calculation, and is therefore able to announce the dates when both Ramadan and Idul Fitri (or Eid al-Fitr, the post-Ramadan holiday, also commonly called Lebaran in Indonesia) will be celebrated months ahead of time. Unlike the “traditionalist” NU, Muhammadiyah is considered (and generally considers itself) as both a “reformist” and “modernist” organization, both labels clearly distancing itself from the “tradition” of NU. As a reform-minded organization, its members seek to correct perceived errors in popular Islamic practice: bid‘ah (religious innovation), tahayul (superstitious about bad luck and omens), and khurafat (superstitions about magic and ghosts). This preaching has been seen as an affront to many in NU circles, and has led some to see Muhammadiyah as puritan and crypto-Salafi.

As a modernist organization, Muhammadiyah teaches that ijtihad (independent reasoning, i.e. deviance from the position of a traditional madhhab) is permissible by qualified scholars, especially in adapting to and taking advantage of modern technology. As a result, Muhammadiyah is able to cast aside moon sighting in favor of astronomical calculations when determining the start of Ramadan.

To generalize, NU is typically said to follow Shafi‘i fiqh (jurisprudence), Ash‘ari kalam  (theology, sometimes referred to simply as tauhid), and the Sufism of al-Ghazali, making it firmly grounded in the tradition stemming from the foundational scholarship of the 3^rd-5^th Islamic centuries. Muhammadiyah, on the other hand, was born in the spirit of the global Islamic reform movement started in Egypt by the progressive modernist scholar Muhammad Abduh and then carried on by the increasingly proto-Salafi Rashid Rida, and within Muhammadiyah today one can find both of these tendencies.

To make another enormous generalization, we might say that NU most closely represents the beliefs and practices of most Javanese (and many other Indonesian) Muslims who have not converted to a Muhammadiyah or other perspective. This is absolutely not to say that the contemporary teachings of NU reflect popular Islamic practice from before the rise of Muhammadiyah in 1912, nor do they reflect even the teachings of NU itself upon its founding in 1927. NU has evolved and participated in the mainstreaming of many ideas that were once considered modernist—like having boys and girls taught in the same classrooms. But except in cases where Muhammadiyah visibly dominates the religious sphere (like Yogyakarta, where I live), an NU style of Islam (relatively traditional, but thoroughly affected by and immersed in the modern world) tends to be the norm, and those who practice NU styles of worship may not even see themselves as "being NU."

Despite the differences in method between NU and Muhammadiyah, this year both started Ramadan on the same date: the night of the 26^th, with fasting starting on the 27^th (in the Islamic calendar, a day begins at sunset, not midnight). But this is not always the case, and it's still yet to be determined whether both groups will celebrate Idul Fitri on the same date as well. Since 1990, Muhammadiyah has declared a different date for Idul Fitri than the government and NU six times, in 1992, 1993, 1994, 2005, 2006, and 2011.

So it’s been six years since there was a difference in Idul Fitri among Indonesian Muslims (although Idul Adha, the other major Islamic holiday, was celebrated on different days in 2015). But why might this be important for Indonesians? First off, Idul Fitri is an especially social holiday: most Indonesians return to their hometowns (mudik) to celebrate. Families that are mixed NU and Muhammadiyah may have to choose whether they will all observe the same day or whether half the family will feast while the other half fasts. There are extra tensions caught up in this debate, as it is haram (forbidden) to fast on any of the three days of Idul Adha.

Mudik: when Indonesians go back to their home towns for Idul Fitri in what's likely the the largest regular mass-human migration ever. (Unknown source.)

Indonesians also typically visit family and friends over these three days, exchange food, and ask each other for forgiveness for anything they may have done over the last year. These visits—called silaturahim, or occasionally halal-bi-halal if it’s an organized event—could be uncomfortable if you show up unannounced (as is usually the case) at the house of someone who’s still fasting.

Despite these differences and the subsequent potential for problems, Indonesians are generally tolerant and understanding towards those who celebrate on different days. In 2006, when Idul Fitri was celebrated on different days, the head of NU for Central Java issued the following statement:

“As for which to follow, it’s up to each person’s individual belief. If you join [in praying and feasting to celebrate Idul Fitri] on Monday, then on that day it is haram [for you] to fast. If you join on Tuesday, then that means it is mandatory [for you] to fast as part of Ramadan. What’s most important, I believe, is how to foster attitudes of understanding and tolerance (toleransi) within the framework of ittifaq fil ikhtilaf (Arabic: unity in diversity), staying one in difference.” 

            I live in Yogyakarta, the center of Muhammadiyah’s influence, which makes these differences especially prominent. As a result, most of my friends are quite accustomed to these differences and share similar sentiments to those above. But I have heard rumors about some NU-dominant areas in rural East Java and on the island of Madura where Muhammadiyah “seems like a whole different religion.”

Evening Tarawih prayers in Medan during Ramadan 2014. (Unknown source.)

Tarawih Prayers: 8 Raka‘at or 20?

Aside from fasting, one of the iconic (though not mandatory) parts of Ramadan is the addition of tarawih prayers at night, in which an imam leads the congregation in a relatively long set of ritual prayers (salat or salah) after the normal night prayers and a short sermon. But there is a difference of opinion between NU and Muhammadiyah about how many raka‘at there are in one night of tarawih.

A raka‘a is the name for the cumulative set of motions and recitations making up one part of a salat, consisting of standing, bowing, standing again, prostrating, sitting on one’s knees, prostrating again, (possibly sitting again,) and then standing again. In normal mandatory prayers a Muslim will complete 2 to 4 raka‘at, depending on the time of day.

During Ramadan, NU people will do 20 raka‘at of tarawih, followed by 3 raka‘at of witr (another non-mandatory night salat). Muhammadiyah, on the other hand, advocates only 8 raka‘at, with witr as well. These differences stem from a dispute over the reports (hadith, Ind: hadits) on the practices of the Prophet and the early community of Islam, with both versions resting on reports beginning from ‘Aisha, one of the wives of the Prophet.

While one might assume that Muhammadiyah’s system would be quicker than NU’s, this is not always the case. Some Muhammadiyah mosques using 8 raka‘at can finish more than an hour later than NU ones using 20, depending on the length of the surat (chapters of the Qur’an) chosen to recite during the standing portion of each raka‘a. Many imams at NU mosques will choose all surat from juz’ amm—the final 30^th of the Qur’an, in which surat are much shorter (some can be recited in 5 seconds) than those elsewhere (some of which would take hours)—or split up longer surat, and recite them quickly. Meanwhile, many imams in Muhammadiyah mosques will select far longer surat (if they happen to have memorized them) and recite them in a more drawn-out, deliberate fashion. But variety is really the only constant here, and there are plenty of Muhammadiyah mosques that finish quickly (like the one in my neighborhood, for example) and some NU mosques that take a very long time.

An Indonesian cartoon I stole from an article that seems to have stolen it from an unknown book. 

Since each individual mosque will usually choose which system to use, individuals going to a mosque for prayers will consider the affiliation of that mosque in a way that is rarely ever necessary throughout the rest of the year. For prayers aside from tarawih, there is little difference between NU and Muhammadiyah affiliated mosques.[5] Aside from the use of the qunut prayer, other practices differentiate typical NU and Muhammadiyah prayer styles, but none of these differences are imposed on the individual worshiper, who is free to raise his hands whenever he wants and utter whatever praises he chooses, even if different from what the imam does.

As a result, Ramadan is a time of abnormal segregation of most NU people from Muhammadiyah mosques, as they would have to stop after 8 raka‘at in these mosques. College students affiliated with NU, who often attend different large mosques every night to take advantage of the free food usually offered at sunset, will generally consider what system is used in deciding which mosque to attend, though it is certainly not of determinate importance to everyone.

While NU people won’t get what they’re looking for at Muhammadiyah mosques, the reverse is not the case; Muhammadiyah people can attend an NU-style mosque and simply leave after the 8^th raka‘a. At the campus mosque of the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University in Yogyakarta, there are always 20 raka‘at held, but a majority of the congregation tends to leave after the 8^th.

Everyday Pluralism

I'd like to not portray Indonesian society as one where all Muslims are card-carrying NU or Muhammadiyah members. Most are loosely affiliated with one or the other according to preference, and implicitly linked with one or the other through their particular style of worship, but religious identity among Indonesian Muslims tends to be more fluid than rigid. Geertz describes conflicts in mosques in rural Java between modernists and traditionalists during his fieldwork in the 1950s. Many of these tensions certainly still exist, but they have become mundane and insignificant for many Indonesian Muslims.

Any particular NU-affiliated college student in Yogyakarta might be perfectly happy to go with their Muhammadiyah friends to a Muhammadiyah mosque, especially if there’s free food involved. There are stories of hardline NU people who will get up and leave in the middle of salat if there’s no time allotted for a qunut (see earlier footnote [5]), but this is relegated to rumor exactly because attitudes like this are so rare. Ramadan is so extraordinary because of just how visible NU-Muhammadiyah differences are as compared to the rest of the year. Many people actually find out the religious affiliations of their friends when Ramadan rolls around and they’re talking about what mosque to go to later that night, or when they’ll celebrate Idul Adha.

I recently interviewed one of the directors (takmir) of a small mosque in urban Yogyakarta. He is personally affiliated with NU, having come from a family of traditionalist Muslims and having graduated from Pesantren Tebuireng, the Jombang boarding school once run by the founder of NU itself. But he sent his two children to Muhammadiyah elementary and middle schools, and the mosque he manages uses only 8 raka‘a. He explained that he is simply adapting to the Muhammadiyah-dominant environment of urban Yogyakarta, and that he has no issues with the differences in practice, explaining that NU and Muhammadiyah “are both equally part of ahl al-sunnah w’al-jama‘ah[6] and both equally moderate… Difference is already so normal for us.” 

Most writings about NU and Muhammadiyah focus on the national politics and relations between the parties, in which differences tend to be clear and lines not so blurry. But on the ground among average Muslims, these differences are not so defined.

The logos of NU (left) and Muhammadiyah (right).

I think of these easy relations between NU and Muhammadiyah people as “everyday pluralism.” But it occurs to me that there’s an interesting set of criteria used when thinking about what counts as pluralism. If a tall person admits that short people deserve rights too, or even if a Redskins fan lets a Chargers fan shop in their hardware store, no one is going to praise them as pluralists. No—we only pull this label out when there’s a history or possibility of conflict or intolerance. In light of Philly-NYC sports animosity, my father, a Giants and Mets fan, might rightly be called a pluralist for marrying an Eagles and Phillies fan and agreeing to let her raise their son that way too. When we recall that Sunni and Shi‘i families in Sana‘a or Baghdad once lived in the same neighborhoods without thinking twice about the sect of their neighbors, we look back on this as a pluralism lost.

But when bygones become bygones, it starts to seem silly to speak of pluralism. It was once of major importance that a US presidential candidate was Catholic, but now it would seem silly to refer to the election of any Christian minority (even a Mormon!) to the office as being notably pluralist.

So then are NU-Muhammadiyah relations worthy of being called “pluralist” according to this nuanced popular usage of the term? There is certainly a history of fierce disagreement between the two groups, and they are still in competition in contemporary Indonesia. But these issues rarely emerge or are even considered important for the average Muslims I know living in Yogyakarta (whereas they might be more important though less prominent in some areas of East Java). But it is in light of these past and potential tensions between the two groups—and of the intolerance and discrimination shown towards other minority Muslim groups, like Shi‘a and Ahmadis—that this widespread acceptance of difference becomes significant.

The Role of Islamic Education in Public Schools

So why have differences between NU and Muhammadiyah becomes so unimportant for most Muslims who live among these differences? I believe that one major factor is mandatory Islamic education classes at Indonesian public schools. In Indonesia, religious education has been provided for all school students since the first curriculum was created after independence, and it soon became mandatory for each student to receive instruction in their own religion (limited to those recognized by the state, currently being Islam, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). Under the current national curriculums used, Islamic education classes take up 2.25-3 hours per week in elementary school and 1.5-2.25 hours per week in secondary school.

Many have worried that these classes may foster divisions between students of different religions,[7] but little has been written about how these classes affect relations among Muslims themselves. I have spent most of the last year doing research on Islamic education in public high schools in the city of Yogyakarta, interviewing teachers and observing their classrooms, and I believe that these classes contribute greatly to the prominent attitude of pluralism between NU and Muhammadiyah in contemporary Indonesia.

The 3rd grade Islamic education textbook
under the 2006 Curriculum.

Since the curriculum for this Islamic education is written by the government and is provided in public general schools (attended by 51% of all Indonesian high school students), it is theoretically expected to be neutral and free of bias in favor of either NU and Muhammadiyah. While there are certainly teachers who show partiality to their own beliefs within the classroom, the overwhelming result is that NU and Muhammadiyah students are all taught together while differences are glossed over as being largely insignificant. A majority of Muslim students I talk to at public high schools are unaware of whether some of their friends happens to be NU or Muhammadiyah.

When I speak with Islamic education teachers at public high schools about how they navigate the NU-Muhammadiyah divide in the classroom, they consistently speak to an ideal of pluralism (although most don’t use this term, as it has a bad connotation among most religious Indonesians). One teacher, who grew up in an NU family and later empraced Muhammadiyah (a common trajectory), explained:

“When I’m in class, I never talk about NU or Muhammadiyah. We are simply Muslims. Our sources of reference are the same: the Qur’an and the hadith. In all things, if there’s a different practice, go ahead and check, is there dalil [scriptural evidence] for it or not? There’s no need to talk about whether [a particular practice] is NU or not. But is there dalil or not?”

Another teacher affiliated with NU recalled that she tells her students,

“Whoever wants to use this [practice], go ahead. Those who want to use this [other practice], feel free. What’s important is that we carry out [the worship], because all of them have dalil. Those who use this one shouldn’t make fun of those who use that one, and those guys shouldn’t make fun of these guys, because all of it has dalil.”

            There's a recurring strong legitimating emphasis on the availability of dalil, or scriptural evidence, supporting a particular practice. Teachers I interview, whether NU or Muhammadiyah, consistently reinforce that both traditions are based on solid dalil, specifying that this means either verses of the Qur’an or trustworthy reports about the Prophet’s sayings or actions.[8] This pluralism based on methodological legitimacy does not often extend past NU and Muhammadiyah, however; groups like Shi‘a and Ahmadis are widely (though not universally) labeled as deviant (sesat, menyimpang).

Students practice ngaji (reading the Qur'an
at a public high school in rural Yogyakarta.

At private schools run by or affiliated with NU and Muhammadiyah, however, students are unlikely to be taught that both groups’ approaches are equally valid. On the contrary, students are taught explicitly to be an NU- or Muhammadiyah- style Muslim. They take specific classes called “Muhammadiyah-ness” (KeMuhammadiyahan) and “NU-ness” (KeNUan) and classes about the histories of the organizations.

While private Islamic schools may draw religious identity lines around student’s specific denomination, students and teachers in public schools are encouraged to see Islam itself as their basic identity. This system, as expressed by Suhadi et al (2013), illuminates inter-religious differences and possibly contributes to the alienation of Christian students in public schools, but it simultaneously minimizes and trivializes intra-religious differences among (most) Muslims (other than certain minority groups). The processes at work during state-sponsored religious education in Indonesia seem to have played a significant role in the prominent pluralist attitudes among NU and Muhammadiyah Muslims that are so visible during Ramadan.  

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[1] All my Arabic transcriptions here follow conventional Indonesian spellings, rather than conventional English or international ones, with notes on the equivalent whenever this might cause confusion for those accustomed to the latter.

[2] I think “denomination” serves us somewhat well, as these groups are more comparable to the many denominations within Protestant Christianity than they are to anything I’m aware of in Islamic history. These are not simply differences based on madhhab (traditional legal schools); while NU is largely Shafi‘i and Muhammadiyah officially doesn’t follow a madhhab, many NU-affiliated figures and organizations follow other madhahib, and much of Muhammadiyah’s teachings are still in line with traditional Shafi‘i positions. Like denominations, however, they differ based on methodology, social and historical ideology, and symbolic and identity politics.  They also have official membership (though not all followers are members) and central councils that determine official doctrine and practice, alike to denominations but unlike any non-state entities I’m aware of in Islamic history. 

[3] NU and Muhammadiyah play these roles in different ways. Muhammadiyah has far more hospitals than NU does. Muhammadiyah is a more centralized organization, whereas NU might be better described as an association of individual scholars/teachers (kyai) with a mass popular following.

[4] Note: the Arabic letter ض is occasionally rendered into Indonesia with the digraph “dl.”

[5] The one exception is that NU people use a qunut (extra supplementary prayer, or doa) for dawn (fajr, called subuh in Indonsia) prayers, and may not want to attend Muhammadiyah mosques that do not allow the requisite time to complete this. But this affects far less people that differences over tarawih, as far less people go to a mosque for regular dawn prayers than those who attend tarawih. At the mosque in my neighborhood, as few as 7 or 8 people might attend a normal group prayer outside of Ramadan, whereas the mosque is filled to capacity with at least 100 on Ramadan nights.

[6] Literally: “the people of the Tradition [of the Prophet] and of the majority.” This term is often used to signify Sunni Islam as a whole, but is also sometimes used exclusively by NU people to talk about their own tradition. They would see aswaja, as they abbreviate the term, as being limited to those Muslims who follow one of the four Sunni legal schools.

[7] See: Suhadi, Muhammad Yusuf, Marthen Tahun, Budi Asyhari, Sudarto. “The Politics of Religious Education: The 2013 Curriculum, and the Public Space of the School.” (Yogyakarta: CRCS, 2013).

[8] What is lost in this, and in history, however, is the fact that NU traditionally does not limit its acceptable dalil to Qur’an and hadith, but includes the opinions of legal scholars recorded in kitab kuning (yellow texts), even if the proscription is not found in any verse or report. But, as mentioned above, traditionalism in Indonesia has absorbed many attributes of modernism, including the insistence on finding dalil for oneself in the scriptures rather than relying on the guidance of the great scholars of the past.