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NU's new leader marks era of ‘reorientation’
Yahya Cholil Staquf won the chairmanship of Nahdlatul Ulama, partly due to a growing affinity among younger members of the group to his reform-minded approach.
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Indonesia's largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, has elected reform-minded Islamic scholar Yahya Cholil Staquf to lead it for the next five-year period. Yahya is a former presidential spokesperson and, more recently, a member of the Presidential Advisory Board (Wantimpres). (Antara/Wahyu Putro A.)
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ahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest grassroots Muslim organization, has elected as its chairman an Islamic scholar hailed for having a reformist mindset, marking a potential “political reorientation” for the group.
Yahya Cholil Staquf was confirmed on Friday to have defeated two-term incumbent Said Aqil Siradj and three other candidates in a tightly contested race at NU's 34th muktamar (national congress) held in Lampung province.
Better known as Gus Yahya, he served in government as spokesperson to the late president and longtime NU leader Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid. He is also the brother of Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas.
His triumph as NU’s new general chairman comes at a time of growing unease within the organization about its place in national politics, and amid growing conservatism and religious extremism among the nation’s Muslim majority.
Experts and scholars have said that both Yahya and Said come from the post-traditionalist school within NU and that there was not much in the way of ideological or political differences between them.
However, there is a growing number of younger NU students, activists and clerics who feel an affinity to Yahya’s reform-minded approach, said Ahmad Suaedy, an Islamic scholar and the dean of the Islam Nusantara faculty at the Indonesia Nahdlatul Ulama University.
“Yahya often expresses his reflections on the global situation and what NU can do to create change,” Ahmad told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.
