The name “Nahdlatul Ulama” was consciously chosen by the founding fathers of this organization. They chose the name “Nahdlatul Ulama” and not, for example, Nahdlatul Muslimin (Renaissance of Muslims) or Nahdlatul Ummah (Renaissance of the Islamic Community) in order to show how important and special the position of ulama was in the Nahdlatul Ulama. If other organizations relied, for their basic strength, on laborers, farmers, officers, and the like, the NU confidently determined that its main supporters and its central strength were the ulama. The position of ulama' as the pillars of the NU was based on two logical considerations. Firstly, the NU as a

religious organization should derive its basic power from figures whose morality, religiousity and religious knowledge were guaranteed and these figures were the ulama. Secondly, the ulama had authority among their santris and among their former santris who had spread out into many different areas. The ulamâ also had direct influences among their community and their influences would be able to reach many rural areas.

These influences made it possible for the NU to penetrate and maintain roots in rural Islam, especially in Javanese rural areas where a large percentage of the population of Indonesia lived. In other words, the NU, with its thousands of kyais and ulama, gained its main supporters from the rural areas. At the village level, the kyais not only functioned as religious and spiritual leaders, but later, also as political leaders, precisely as Clifford Geertz has observed. In the NU, the titles of kyai and ulama are not used arbitrarily; they indicate special qualities, such as fearing and obeying God, understanding and carrying out the message of the Prophet, being sensitive to the interests of the Muslim community, having good knowledge of religion, and devoting

their knowledge to the God's purpose. It is not surprising if the ulama of the NU always quote a Hadith which runs, "The Ulama are the inheritors of the prophets" a message which inspires them to do their duties. From this point of view, the NU placed them in the highest position to supervise and control its movements and activities.

The growth of the NU cannot be separated from the role of the kyais and ulama, who had a far-reaching influence among the Muslim community. In a short time, the NU was accepted by Muslims both in Java and beyond. By 1930, the NU had six branches in West Java, twenty-one branches in Central Java, and eighteen branches in East

Java. In the same year, a new branch was founded in Banjar, Martapura (Kalimantan) and it became the first branch of the NU beyond Java. A local organization called the Hidayah Islamiyah (Islamic Guidance) in Kalimantan merged with the NU in 1936. In its National Congress in Malang, East Java, held in 1937, seventy-one branches participated. When the Dutch were defeated by the Japanese in 1942, the NU had one hundred and twenty branches dispersed in many parts of Indonesia.

The main stronghold of the NU was Java, where thounsands from the pesantrens joined it. The reason the pesantrens joined the NU may be traced to the teachings of the NU and to the background of its founding fathers. The religious ideology of the NU was basically the same as the “value system” which had been rooted in the pesantrens tradition for hundreds of years. Therefore, when the NU was founded and it declared its ideology to be that of ahlussunnah waljama'ah, the pesantrens readily joined it because of a strong religious tie which

linked both. As a result, generally speaking, the NU and the pesantrens were interrelated, or even almost identical: the majority of the pesantrens belonged to the NU and the NU was deeply rooted in the tradition of the pesantrens.