Nahdlatul Ulama’s Fox Elite Fox Dei in Contemporary Indonesia: An Aborted Baby of Deliberative Democracy?

As a major mass Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) has been influential both in culture and politics in Indonesia. In consonance with the decline of democratic politics across the globe, NU internal organization experiences the practice of deliberative democracy with elite deliberation or fox elite fox Dei as its procedure of electing its top leader/Spiritual Leader or Rais Am. Two practices were done at the two NU National Congresses (Muktamar) in 1984 and 2015. This procedure is called Ahlul Hall Wal Aqd (AHWA), as one of the legacies of Muslim civilization. The paper makes an account of this elite deliberation to explore how effective the practice was in developing better practices of democracy. The research is qualitative, along with the perspective of the theory of deliberative democracy. It is our result that the practice of fox elite fox Dei has not been satisfactory in terms of some defects in implementing the rule of the game. NU’s culture of deliberation under the methods of halaqah and Bah-tsul Masaail has been promising, but NU’s elites have not been prepared to harvest it to improve the application of the AHWA procedure.