Abdurrahman Wahid

Abdurrahman Wahid: The Blind Cleric Who Tried to Remake Indonesia

He could recite the entire Quran from memory and reportedly carried two thousand phone numbers in his head, yet as president he could not read his own prepared speeches and needed aides to describe the body language of the officials sitting across from him. Abdurrahman Wahid — known across Indonesia simply as Gus Dur — governed the world's largest Muslim-majority nation for twenty-one improbable months, nearly blind, frequently asleep at official functions, and utterly convinced that Islam and pluralism were not opposites but the same idea.

Born Into a Dynasty of Islamic Scholars

Born September 7, 1940, in Denanyar, East Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, Wahid was the grandson of one of the founders of Nahdlatul Ulama, the traditionalist Islamic organization that would grow into the largest Muslim organization on earth, and the son of Wahid Hasyim, an independence-movement hero who served as Indonesia's minister of religious affairs. He grew up inside an unusually progressive pesantren, an Islamic boarding school near Jombang where his father folded social science and English instruction in alongside Arabic and religious study, and by his own later admission spent much of his adolescence skipping class for the cinema and the library rather than the mosque study hall — an early sign of the restless, syncretic mind that would define him.

An Education Across Three Continents

Wahid's formal religious education carried him to Al-Azhar University in Cairo from 1964 to 1966 and then to Baghdad University, from which he graduated in 1970, with a further stint of study in Canada. Unlike contemporaries who returned from such study with advanced Islamic degrees and rigid textualist credentials, Wahid came back without one, having absorbed instead a comparative, wide-ranging intellectual style that mixed traditional Islamic jurisprudence with international literature, film, and secular political philosophy — an eclecticism that would mark every later phase of his career.

Leading the World's Largest Muslim Organization

After teaching at Indonesian universities and Islamic boarding schools through the 1970s, Wahid was elected chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama in 1984, a position he held until 1999 while the organization's membership swelled toward forty million. NU's traditionalist, largely rural, peasant-rooted character came with what scholars describe as an unusual ease of accommodation with local culture and a preference for syncretism over rigid textual literalism, and Wahid pushed that tendency further than almost any of his predecessors, becoming an outspoken advocate of secular democratic government even while leading a mass religious organization. In 1997 he traveled to Jerusalem to accept the Rabin Award, a striking gesture of interfaith outreach that put him publicly at odds with harder-line currents in Indonesian and broader Muslim politics, and he consistently pushed back against blanket demonization of Jewish people even as he criticized specific Israeli policies.

An Improbable Presidency

Indonesia's June 1999 elections were its first genuinely free vote in forty-four years, and Wahid's own party, the PKB, won only around eleven to thirteen percent of the popular vote — far behind Megawati Sukarnoputri's party. Yet in October 1999 the People's Consultative Assembly elected him president by 373 votes to Megawati's 313, a result of parliamentary coalition-building rather than popular mandate, with Megawati installed as his vice president as consolation. As president, Wahid moved quickly to dismantle the residue of the Suharto dictatorship: he expanded free speech and press freedom, pushed for military accountability, dismissed General Wiranto over allegations of crimes against humanity in East Timor, opened negotiations with separatists in Aceh, formally apologized for the East Timor atrocities, and renamed Irian Jaya to West Papua as a gesture toward its indigenous population.

Blindness, Chaos, and Diplomacy by Instinct

His governance style baffled allies and opponents alike. Nearly blind and battling diabetes, high blood pressure, and circulatory disease — one stroke had already put him in a coma requiring brain surgery before he took office — Wahid required aides to guide him through his own residence and could not read documents placed in front of him. He compensated with an extraordinary travel schedule, visiting roughly fifty countries and taking some thirty trips abroad in his first ten months alone, while making impulsive public statements on subjects from Israel to Acehnese independence that left his own government scrambling to explain them. Corruption scandals touching his aides and family, including allegations involving his personal masseur, further eroded his authority, while sectarian violence in Ambon, Kalimantan, and Lombok escalated on his watch — violence many analysts believed was deliberately stoked by rival political and military factions to destabilize him.

Removed in Twenty-One Months

Wahid's presidency ended on July 23, 2001, when Indonesia's national assembly voted unanimously, 591 to 0, to dismiss him for incompetence, abuse of power, and corruption, after he issued an unconstitutional emergency decree attempting to suspend parliament. The military's refusal to enforce that decree effectively sealed his fate; he initially refused to leave the presidential palace before departing for medical treatment in the United States. Analysts at the time warned that the manner of his removal, which bypassed the constitution's formal impeachment process, set a troubling precedent for Indonesia's young democracy even as few disputed that his government had become unworkable.

Why Abdurrahman Is Called a Genius

The case for Wahid's genius rests less on any single doctrine than on an unusual cognitive and spiritual range: a man who could recite the Quran in full, hold thousands of personal contacts in memory, move fluently between Cairo seminary training and Cairo cinema-going, and translate a conservative religious base into a platform for secular pluralism, interfaith dialogue, and minority rights in the world's largest Muslim nation. Indonesian commentators and his successor as president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, credited him explicitly as the "father of multiculturalism and pluralism," and the Wahid Institute his family established after his death continues to invoke his intellectual legacy in promoting moderate Islam. The honest counter-case is equally clear: his presidency was, by nearly every administrative measure, a failure — chaotic, undisciplined, marked by scandal and impulsive statecraft that alienated the very coalition that had elected him, and cut short after less than two years by a unanimous vote of no confidence. His genius, if the term holds, was that of a religious and moral thinker with a rare gift for interfaith reconciliation, not that of a governing executive; the same eclectic, undisciplined mind that produced his pluralist vision also produced a presidency nobody, including many of his own supporters, considered well run.

Legacy

Wahid died on December 30, 2009, in Jakarta at age sixty-nine during surgery to remove a blood clot from his heart. His daughter Yenny Wahid now directs the Wahid Institute, founded in 2004 to carry forward his advocacy of tolerant, pluralistic Islam, and his name remains attached in Indonesian public memory less to the specifics of his brief, turbulent government than to the singular image of a nearly blind cleric who insisted, against the currents of his own era, that Islamic faith and religious pluralism could be the same project.