Uwes Abu Bakar who took the leadership of MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar in 1939 in introducing new religious ideas to MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar. From this historical perspective, I would like now to elaborate the roles of K.H. MathlaвЂ™ul AnwarвЂ™s withdrawal from SI was not because of its purely political dissatisfaction with the latter rather due to its disagreement with the growing dominance of the вЂњmodernistвЂќ religious thought promoted by Muhammadiyah leaders within SIвЂ™s leadership circles. For instance, form 1915 up to 1928, it joined Syarekat Islam (Islamic League or SI), the only ever largest Muslim political group in the political history of Indonesia and established in 1912, and from 1928 up to 1952, joined NU. In politics, MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar did not clearly formulate specific political points of view since it took policies to associate with other organizations in driving its political aspiration. In matters of Islamic law, it solely referred to the SyafiвЂ™ite school of thought (one of the four major Islamic schools of law in addition to Hanafite, Maliki, and Hanbalite) and did not tolerate to the idea of talfiq, exercising different ideas of schools of Islamic law in certain religious practices, and often condemned the religious ideas advocated by reformist groups, mainly Muhammadiyah, as false doctrines, particularly in matters related to an independent religious exercise, ijtihad. However, unlike most of Javanese kiyais who in a variety of grades and ways showed their tolerance to syncretistic attitudes of peopleвЂ™s religiosity, MathlaвЂ™ul AnwarвЂ™s kiyais strongly rejected all kinds of heretical traditions and regarded them as the inherited products of Hinduism and Buddhism. In matters of theology, it associated itself with Ahlussunnah Wal Jamaah (followers of the teachings of the prophet and a part of the majority of Muslims, or well-known as a Sunni faction) of the AshвЂ™ariyah stream (one of the Sunni theological schools in Islam besides MuвЂ™tazilah, Qodariyah, Murjiah, and Jabariyah).

ДЄs a religious group, MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar established its own system of religious thought that was in the early decades very much similar to that of NU.

MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar operated this kind of education system until 1950 when it replaced its nine-graded system with a new reformed system of schooling introduced by the newly independent government of Republic of Indonesia. One teacher would supervise one class and give teachings based on the curriculum that had been designed for each of those nine classes. Students would spend nine years of study before graduating from the madrasah of MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar. Since the beginning, MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar took serious works to improve the standard of Islamic educational system through introducing a modern graded system in which there were nine classes ranging from A, B, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII and each of these classes took one year. MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar was established in 1916 by several Bantenese kiyais, an Indonesian term used to attribute religious teachers, including K.H. MathlaвЂ™ul Anwar is one of the largest Muslim associations in Indonesia along with Nahdlatul Ulama or NU (mostly seen as the most prominent representative of the вЂњtraditionalistвЂќ Muslim groups established by several pesantren-leading religious teachers in 1926) and Muhammadiyah (the largest group of the modernist or reformist Muslims established in 1912).

Buku islam mazhab hmi