Over the past few days, santri (Islamic boarding school students) across the country have held parades and celebrations in honor of National Santri Day on Tuesday.

In Blitar, East Java, thousands of santri held a march on Saturday while carrying posters bearing slogans “Let’s become santri!” and “Proud to be a santri!”

In Malang, meanwhile, santri celebrated with a flash mob forming a picture of former president BJ Habibie on Monday.

This year, only the fourth ever observation of National Santri Day, santri and pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) have an additional reason to celebrate: the recent passing of the Pesantren Law.

The law represents another win for Islamic mass organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which operates most of the country’s pesantren and was a staunch supporter of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s reelection bid.

The establishment of National Santri Day itself was the result of a promise to NU in Jokowi’s first presidential campaign in 2014 and was meant to commemorate the declaration of the Jihad Resolution by Muslim cleric and NU founder Muhammad Hasyim Asy’ari on Oct. 22, 1945. In the declaration, Hasyim urged Muslims in the country to fight against Dutch forces to uphold the nation’s independence.

Official results from the General Elections Commission (KPU) show that Jokowi’s 2019 election win was largely fueled by overwhelming wins in Central and East Java, which are considered NU strongholds, and NU has not been shy in collecting on the favor.

NU clerics have openly said that they expect a number of ministerial positions in Jokowi’s upcoming Cabinet to go to NU members and NU’s unofficial political arm, the National Awakening Party (PKB), had been among the most adamant to get the Pesantren Law passed before the end of the House of Representatives’ 2014-2019 term.

The law — first proposed by the Islam-based United Development Party (PPP), another party with strong NU ties, in 2013 — puts pesantren education on par with general formal education and provides accreditation and government funding sourced from the education endowment fund.

In August, then-vice president-elect Ma’ruf Amin, a former rais aam (supreme leader) of NU who is also head of the Indonesia Ulema Council (MUI), sent a letter to the President to urge, among other things, the passing of the Pesantren Law before the end of September.

The House did just that, unanimously passing the law on Sept. 24, in a swift manner that was in contrast to its usually protracted deliberations.

NU-affiliated officials were quick to declare the law as highly beneficial. PPP member and Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, for example, said the law would help support the function of pesantren in educating the nation.

MUI executive Erfandi even described the law as “a constitutional jihad”.

Abdul Ghaffar Rozin, the head of NU’s Rabithah Ma’ahid Islamiyah (RMI), which oversees its pesantren, said that the law helped empower pesantren, whose influence he said went beyond education.

“In the past few years pesantren have been considered only to have an educational function,” he told The Jakarta Post on Monday. “But the Pesantren Law recognizes that the pesantren also have at least two other functions: as a dakwah [proselytization] institution and as a community empowerment institution.”

Rozin added that for decades pesantren graduates who were experts in Quranic interpretation and Islamic law were often not given the same opportunities for teaching positions as other less-qualified people, just because they did not have a formal degree.

“So many pesantren graduates, especially in rural areas, find it hard to find work, even though they are skilled in deep interpretation of Islamic texts, unlike the superficial textual interpretation that has resulted in a lot of misunderstanding in recent times,” Rozin said. “The law provides recognition for these graduates.”

Other Islamic organizations have been less enthusiastic about the law. Muhammadiyah, the country’s second-largest Islamic mass organization after NU, had even sent a letter of objection to the House during deliberations over the law, particularly focusing on the definition of pesantren as institutions that base their curricula on Kitab Kuning (Yellow Book), or classical Islamic textbooks written in Arabic. Most NU pesantren, which are more traditional, use the books, while the more modern Muhammadiyah pesantren do not.

While in the end, the definition was tweaked to Muhammadiyah’s satisfaction, Azis Anwar Fachrudin, a researcher at the Center for Religious and Crosscultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University, said that the law was still clearly geared more toward NU-run pesantren.

“For example the law stipulates that pesantren heads should be pesantren-educated kiai [teachers], which is usually the case for NU pesantren. Muhammadiyah pesantren, on the other hand, might be headed by an administrator. They might also employ teachers who are not pesantren-educated,” he told the Post.

Rozin acknowledged that the law was beneficial for NU, but said that it also benefited other Islamic organizations.

“In any case NU pesantren make up 23,300 of the total 29,000 pesantren in Indonesia,” he said. “I think that it is reasonable that the law accommodates the 5.2 million santri that are currently in NU pesantren.”

Asip Hasani in Blitar and Aman Rochman in Malang contributed to this story.

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