The pesantren or Islamic boarding school is thought to be the oldest Islamic educational institution in Indonesia. Most of them are situated in the countryside and in particular attract students, santris, from peasant, fishermen and traders circles. In principle, these schools constitute a kind of religious community in which children and youngsters immerse themselves deeply in the study of Islam and learn to live as good Muslims. Outsiders often see the pesantren as an anachronism. The writer Naipaul (1981: 317), for example, describes it as a type of schooling appropriate to a time in which villagers seldom crossed local boundaries and the ‘pesantren preserved the harmony between community and school, village life and education.’ However, as an institution ‘to duplicate the village atmosphere, to teach villagers to be villagers’ (ibid.: 341), he considers these schools out of place in a modernizing world. Some Indonesians I met, both Muslims and non-Muslims, would agree with Naipaul, sometimes calling the pesantrens hotbeds of Islamic fanaticism. In saying this they often referred to those that spurred up violence in the country, protesting against processes of westernisation, or to those that sided with the Taliban in Afghanistan. These comments, however, give a distorted and a less than subtle picture of the Islamic boarding schools that ignores the fact that most pesantrens are peaceful places of study that try to adapt to the demands of the time. They also ignore the reality that the pesantren has become a competitor to be reckoned with to formal, mostly government run schools. I shall illustrate this on the basis of the history of the pesantren Al Amien, located in the village of Prenduan on the island of Madura, where I did fieldwork in the second half of the 1970s and to which I have returned several times.

The pesantren Al Amien (The Trustworthy) was officially founded in 1972, though it had long existed under a different name before then. Its predecessor dated from the end of the 19th century and was led by a kyai or Islamic teacher called Chotib. This man was the grandfather of the three kyais who made Al Amien a renowned centre of learning in East Java and beyond at the end of the 20th century.