Nahdlatul Ulama sebagai State-Embedded Islamic Civil Society: Relasi Agama, Negara, dan Kekuasaan di Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and the state by shifting attention from the normative question of whether a religious organization should be close to or distant from political power to the historical problem of how the modern state constitutes the categories, institutions, and boundaries of religion in public life. Drawing on a historical-conceptual approach and a critical review of scholarship on NU, Indonesian Islam, secularism, religious bureaucratization, and political patronage, the article develops the concept of state-embedded Islamic civil society. The concept refers to an Islamic civil-society organization that possesses internal sources of authority through pesantren, ulama, classical Islamic texts, bahtsul masail, and grassroots networks, while operating within legal, bureaucratic, electoral, and distributive fields constituted by the state. The article identifies six shifting modes of NU's embeddedness: colonial administration of Islam; religious mobilization and legitimation during the revolution; bureaucratization and party politics; New Order developmental discipline; civil-society reconstruction through the 1926 Khittah; and electoral-technocratic integration after Reformasi. It argues that NU-state relations are co-productive, ambivalent, unequal, and historically changing. The state constitutes NU through classification, recognition, regulation, and resource distribution, whereas NU shapes the state through religious legitimation, bureaucratic cadres, social networks, and normative knowledge. NU congresses are thus strategic arenas in which religious authority, bureaucracy, political parties, and markets compete to define the organization's direction. NU's autonomy does not require complete separation from the state, but rather the institutionalization of critical distance, transparency, conflict-of-interest controls, and organizational authority rooted in its constituency.