Agus Salim

Agus Salim (8 October 1884 – 4 November 1954), born Masjhoedoelhaq Salim, was an Indonesian journalist, diplomat and statesman: a leader of Sarekat Islam, a member of the Volksraad, and Indonesia's foreign minister in 1947–1949, in which office he won recognition for the young republic from the Arab states. Indonesians called him "the Grand Old Man". ^{1 2 3}

He was born at Koto Gadang, near Bukittinggi in West Sumatra, the son of Sultan Mohammad Salim, a colonial prosecutor and chief judge of the indigenous court at Tanjung Pinang. Educated at the European primary school and the Hogere Burgerschool in Batavia, he graduated with the highest score in the Dutch East Indies; a government scholarship to study medicine in the Netherlands, and Kartini's offer to defer her own scholarship to him, both came to nothing. In 1905 the colonial scholar C. Snouck Hurgronje arranged for him to work as interpreter and secretary at the Dutch consulate in Jeddah, handling Hajj affairs — a posting the English article describes as partly meant to distance him from the radical teaching of his relative Ahmad Khatib al-Minangkabawi, the Shafi'i imam of the Meccan sanctuary; the Indonesian article says he studied under his uncle there. He returned to the Indies in 1911 and turned to journalism, editing the Sarekat Islam-aligned Neratja and later founding papers of his own, among them Fadjar Asia with Tjokroaminoto. ^{1 2}

Salim became a prominent leader of Sarekat Islam and Tjokroaminoto's right-hand man, standing on the movement's reformist side against its increasingly leftist faction, which broke away to found the Communist Party. After the split he co-founded the Islamic Union Party (PSI, later PSII) and, after Tjokroaminoto's death in 1934, became its intellectual leader. In the Volksraad, which he entered in 1921 and left in 1924 in frustration at its powerlessness, he insisted on speaking Malay — the first member to do so. At the 1927 Jong Islamieten Bond convention he tore down the curtain dividing men's and women's seating and spoke against the seclusion of women. The articles also record the left's recurring accusations that he had once reported on the movement to the colonial authorities; he answered that everyone profited from the government in some way, and a historian cited by the English article concedes only that he was asked to investigate Sarekat Islam from within — and chose instead to join it. ^{1 2}

In March 1945 Salim sat on the BPUPK investigating committee and in June on the Committee of Nine that produced the Jakarta Charter, mediating between the secular nationalists and the bloc that sought an Islamic basis for the state. Appointed deputy foreign minister in March 1946 and foreign minister in July 1947, he led the missions that gained diplomatic recognition from Egypt and nearly all the Arab League states, represented Indonesia before the UN Security Council, and negotiated aboard USS Renville. Captured when the Dutch seized Yogyakarta in December 1948, he was exiled to Berastagi and Parapat with Sukarno and Sjahrir, then resumed office and took part in the Round Table Conference at The Hague in 1949. ^{1 2}

In retirement he wrote on religion, publishing in 1953 a book on how tawhid, divine decree (takdir) and trust in God (tawakal) should be understood, and lectured for six months at Cornell University. His school of Islam is not recorded in the articles: the English and Indonesian texts name none. The Arabic stub adds one reading of its own — that he favoured Mu'tazilite rationalism in his engagement with kalam — and because that reading rests on that single source it is preserved in his record's faith note, flagged, rather than recorded as his school. He died in Jakarta on 4 November 1954 and was buried in the Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery; he was declared a National Hero in 1961. ^{1 4 2}

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