Yet the roots go even deeper—long before Islam arrived.
During the eras of Sriwijaya, Mataram, and Majapahit, there were already religious learning centres known by various names: mandala, padepokan, pecantrikan. Different labels, same essence. These were places of spiritual and intellectual formation.
They had teachers—resis, priests, brahmins. They taught theology, literature, language, and social knowledge. Students lived alongside their teachers, forming tight-knit communities. There were no salaries. Instead, students contributed through service, helping sustain daily life. It was an education system grounded not just in knowledge, but in relationship.
Through these institutions, Buddhism and Hinduism spread across the archipelago. When Muslim scholars arrived, they didn’t start from scratch. They observed. They adapted. They followed a familiar pattern—embedding Islamic teachings within an already understood educational framework.
That’s where pesantren were born: from the soil of pecantrikan, shaped by new faith but rooted in older forms.
Pesantren: Holding Ground, Fighting Back
In his seminal work Bilik-bilik Pesantren, Nurcholish Madjid draws an intriguing parallel. Many of the world’s leading universities—University of Bologna, University of Oxford, Harvard University, Yale University—began as religious institutions. Over time, they evolved into global centres of knowledge.
Pesantren, he argued, could have followed a similar trajectory.
But history had other plans.
Colonialism intervened. Beginning in the 17th century, Dutch rule reshaped the landscape. Modern, Western-style schools were introduced, often in urban centres, designed to serve colonial administration. Pesantren were sidelined—dismissed as backward, even dangerous.
They adapted the only way they could. They moved inland, away from surveillance. They became sanctuaries—preserving culture, faith, and identity. And eventually, they became something more: centres of resistance.
Not just intellectual resistance, but political. Many independence fighters emerged from pesantren. Many paid the price. Arrested. Executed. Their schools burned. Yet they endured.
Pesantren didn’t just survive history—they helped shape it.
Layers of Transformation
The traces of colonialism, it turns out, did not simply vanish once the colonizers left this land behind. In the early years of independence, through the Old Order and well into the New Order, many people still looked at the pesantren through a colonial lens. It was treated with condescension, viewed with a kind of inherited cynicism. Old-fashioned. Traditional. Backward. The label kaum sarungan—literally, “the sarong-wearing crowd”—was not an innocent description but a sneer, a way of suggesting that people from the pesantren world were too rooted in tradition to move forward, too resistant to modernity. The sarong became the symbol of that stigma. Even the campaign against the so-called “disease” of TBC—takhayul, bid‘ah, and khurafat—was, in truth, aimed largely at the pesantren milieu.
At its peak, almost throughout the New Order era, the pesantren remained a marginalized community—pushed to the edges, treated as second-class, and still regarded with suspicion much as it had been under colonial rule. While modern educational institutions were pampered with budgets, facilities, and development programs, pesantren were left to fend for themselves, to survive on their own strength. That long neglect shaped them. It made them deeply self-reliant, fiercely independent, and instinctively wary of the centers of power. Very few pesantren accepted government assistance. Many, in fact, chose to turn it down.