Abdullah Gymnastiar

Abdullah Gymnastiar (born Yan Gymnastiar), known as Aa Gym — "older brother Gym" — is an Indonesian preacher born in Bandung, West Java, on 29 January 1962. He founded the Daarut Tauhiid foundation and pesantren in Bandung in 1990 and built a mass audience through his "Manajemen Qolbu" (Heart Management) television programme and a gentle preaching style blending dawah with character-building, becoming one of the region's most-watched preachers in the early 2000s. ¹

Yan Gymnastiar was born in Bandung on 29 January 1962. In 1990 he set up the Daarut Tauhiid student pesantren in Bandung, formalised as a foundation in 1993 — an educational and dawah complex centred on character-building and self-management under the name "Manajemen Qolbu" (Heart Management). From 2001 his programme of that name ran on the RCTI television channel, taking his lectures to a mass television audience, and a media and business enterprise grew around the foundation, including publishing and radio. TIME profiled him in 2002 as a "Holy Man", and The Muslim 500 puts his sermon audience at more than 80 million viewers across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and beyond. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. In 2006 Gymnastiar campaigned against pornography, advocacy that fed into the anti-pornography law passed in December 2008. ¹

In December 2006 he announced his second marriage, to Alfarini Eridani, a widowed former model. The announcement provoked a wide backlash among his followers — many of them women — his popularity fell sharply and the foundation's businesses suffered, while he defended the marriage as religiously permitted. His first wife, Ninih Muthmainnah ("Teh Ninih"), was later divorced from him by a court ruling in June 2011; the two remarried in March 2012. ¹

His YouTube channel, @aagymofficial, has about 1.03 million subscribers and his Instagram account 7.4 million followers, by the platform counts recorded in the lane's harvest — dated platform figures, not facts verified by the museum. ¹

• English Wikipedia, "Abdullah Gymnastiar", as read on 4 November 2026. ¹