Masyumi Party

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Masyumi Party once stood as the largest political party in all of Indonesia. In 1950, it held 49 seats in the newly formed legislature, representing a coalition of Muslim organizations that had survived colonial rule, Japanese occupation, and a revolution. Then, a decade later, it was gone, banned by the very president who had once asked one of its leaders to form his government. The story of Masyumi asks a question that still echoes through Indonesian politics: what happens when a religious party stakes its identity on principles that the state eventually decides it cannot tolerate? The answers lie in the party's tangled origins, its fractious alliances, and the chain of decisions that led three of its most senior figures to join a rebellion in the Sumatran city of Padang.

• 2. Roots in Colonial Java

  ›

  In 1909, batik traders in Java formed the Islamic Trading Association to protect their livelihoods against competition from ethnic Chinese merchants. Within three years, that narrow commercial body had transformed into the Sarekat Islam, the Islamic Union, led by the Western-educated Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto. Tjokroaminoto reshaped an organization built to protect market stalls into one that spoke against injustice and poverty across the Dutch East Indies. By 1918, the Sarekat Islam claimed 450,000 members, a number that made colonial authorities uneasy and rival ideologues eager. Communist organizers found an opening inside the organization, but so did the reformist Muhammadiyah movement, which held a strongly anti-communist position. Muhammadiyah merged into the Sarekat Islam in 1920, setting up a tension between two very different visions of what an Islamic political movement should be. Tjokroaminoto forced the matter in 1923 at the Sarekat Islam Congress, expelling the communists and forming a new body, the Islamic Union Party, with a firm policy of refusing to collaborate with Dutch authority. The party changed its name again in 1929, becoming the Indonesian Islamic Union Party, or PSII. Then Tjokroaminoto died in 1937, and the splits that had been papered over by his leadership cracked open in earnest.

• 3. Japanese Occupation and Masyumi's Birth

  ›

  In September 1937, the reformist Muhammadiyah and the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama set aside their differences long enough to create the Supreme Islamic Council of Indonesia, known as MIAI, an umbrella body for Islamic organizations. When Japanese forces invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1942, they banned the PSII but left the MIAI standing, apparently viewing it as easier to manage. That calculation proved wrong. Former PSII members flooded into the MIAI so thoroughly that the Japanese dissolved it the following year. In November 1943, the Japanese authorities created a replacement organization, the Council of Indonesian Muslim Associations, calling it Masyumi, with the explicit aim of controlling Islam in Indonesia. The organization again included Muhammadiyah and the Nahdlatul Ulama. Muslims resented the arrangement deeply; the requirement that members bow toward the Imperial Palace in Tokyo rather than toward Mecca was a particular source of anger. Even so, the organization took root. It built a nationwide network and became highly politicized, laying an institutional skeleton that Indonesian Muslims would later claim for their own purposes. When independence came on the 17th of August 1945, Muslim leaders moved quickly, forming a new organization under the Masyumi name that was explicitly post-colonial and represented both conservative and modernist factions. There was serious debate about keeping the name at all, given its association with the Japanese, but the founders chose to keep it, judging that the organization's nationwide reach outweighed the taint.

• 4. The Coalition and Its Fractures

  ›

  Mohammad Natsir, Mohammad Roem, Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, Jusuf Wibisono, and Abu Hanafi were the main leaders of the post-independence Masyumi. The party's founding membership included figures from the wartime Masyumi such as Hasyim Asy'ari and his son Wahid Hasyim, alongside organizations like the PSII and non-political Islamic bodies. Two of its members held cabinet posts as early as November 1945, and 35 were appointed to the Central Indonesian National Committee. The party consistently pushed for an Islamic state and maintained a hard anti-communist line. Yet from the start, two factions pulled in different directions. Natsir's group drew from younger veterans of the National Revolution and from Indonesians outside Java. The rival faction, headed by Soekiman Wirjosandjojo, was rooted in ethnic Javanese membership and held closer ties to the Nahdlatul Ulama and to President Sukarno. The PSII broke away entirely in April 1947, citing disagreements with the leadership, and particularly with Natsir. The deepest institutional wound came from the Nahdlatul Ulama. In 1952, at its own congress, the NU voted to become an independent political party, a decision driven in part by a dispute over the cabinet's refusal to reappoint Wahid Hasyim as religious affairs minister. Losing the NU stripped Masyumi of its claim to speak for all Indonesian Muslims and changed the arithmetic of any future election.

• 5. Elections and the CIA

  ›

  Elections had originally been scheduled for 1946, but multiple parties delayed the vote out of fear that Masyumi would win outright. An election law was finally passed in April 1953, setting parliament elections for September 1955 and a Constitutional Assembly election for December of the same year. Masyumi came second in the parliamentary contest, winning 7,903,886 votes, a share of 20.9 percent of the popular vote, which translated to 57 seats. The party drew its strongest support from modernist Islamic regions such as West Sumatra, Jakarta, and Aceh. Although roughly 51.3 percent of Masyumi's total vote came from Java, the party dominated outside the island, leading among one in three Indonesians who lived beyond Java's borders. Rahmah el Yunusiyah, an educational activist and one of Indonesia's first female legislators, won election from West Sumatra on the Masyumi ticket. The CIA contributed a million US dollars to the party's election efforts, a detail that sits uncomfortably alongside Masyumi's stated commitment to Indonesian sovereignty. The party controlled its own newspaper, Abadi, which gave it a platform independent of government media.

• 6. Rebellion and the Ban

  ›

  In November 1957, three of Masyumi's most prominent leaders, Natsir, Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, and Burhanuddin Harahap, traveled to Padang, the Sumatran city that had become the base of the PRRI rebellion, and joined the rebels. The party refused to condemn their actions, a silence that proved costly. President Sukarno moved deliberately. In 1960, he passed a law authorizing the banning of any party whose ideology conflicted with the state's or whose members had taken up arms against it. He used that law to present Masyumi with a choice: dissolve itself or be dissolved by force. The PRRI rebellion collapsed, and in January 1962, Natsir, Sjafruddin, and other senior Masyumi figures were jailed. The party that had once held the largest share of seats in Indonesia's legislature was erased from the political map, not by an election but by a presidential decree.

• 7. Afterlife of a Banned Party

  ›

  Masyumi members formed the Crescent Star Family after the banning, campaigning for Islamic shariah law and teachings. An attempt to reconstitute the party after Sukarno's fall failed; the government permitted the creation of a successor, the Muslim Party of Indonesia, known as Parmusi, in 1968, but refused to allow any former Masyumi members to lead it. In 1967, Natsir and close associates including Mohammad Roem set up the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council, the DDII, operating from the former Masyumi headquarters. The DDII served as a refuge for former supporters and campaigned against what it described as the Christianization of Indonesia. After Suharto's fall in 1998, another attempt to revive the Masyumi name was made, but it went nowhere as a unified revival. What emerged instead were the Crescent Star Party, which contested elections in 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014, and two smaller parties also bearing the Masyumi name, which together captured less than 0.4 percent of the 1999 vote. In November 2020, a group of Islamic activists declared the formation of a party called Masyumi Reborn, the latest attempt to claim an inheritance that has proved impossible to consolidate.