Haji Misbach

Haji Misbach (born Achmad, later Mohammad Misbach; c. 1876 – 24 May 1926) was a preacher and activist of Surakarta, a leader of the left wing of Sarekat Islam who became famous across Java for arguing that Islam and communism are compatible — his opponents and admirers alike called him the "Red Haji". Exiled by the Dutch to Manokwari in New Guinea, he died there in 1926. No Arabic or Urdu Wikipedia article exists for him; this page is written from the English and Indonesian articles and his Wikidata item. ^{1 2 3}

He was born about 1876 in Kauman, the santri quarter of Surakarta, the son of a wealthy batik trader; his parents served as religious officials of the Surakarta court. He received a traditional pesantren education and eight months in a government school, entered the batik trade and prospered with his own workshop. On marriage he took the name Darmodiprono; after performing the Hajj he renamed himself Haji Mohammad Misbach. ^{1 2}

Misbach joined Sarekat Islam at its founding in 1912 and rose with Surakarta's reformist "young group". In 1915 he co-founded the left-wing Islamic monthly Medan Moeslimin, in 1917 the daily Islam Bergerak, and opened a Hotel Islam, a bookstore and a religious school. In 1918, when a Surakarta newspaper published a piece the city's Muslims judged an insult to the Prophet ﷺ, he helped build the defence movement — the Tentara Kandjeng Nabi Muhammad and his own tabligh association, Sidik Amanat Tableg Vatonah — whose rallies drew crowds said to reach twenty thousand. Shiraishi, as the Indonesian article quotes him, called Misbach a pious, orthodox Muslim whose preaching made Islam "move": against waste, luxury and exploitation. He was a close ally in those years of Muhammadiyah, of its founder Ahmad Dahlan and of Haji Fachrodin. ^{1 2}

From 1919 his anti-capitalist cartoons and peasant organising brought repeated arrests: jailed in 1919, imprisoned at Pekalongan from 1920 to 1922, arrested again in 1923. In 1922 he left Muhammadiyah, judging it and Sarekat Islam too cooperative with the colonial government; when Sarekat Islam split in 1923 he followed its left into the Communist Party (PKI), founded its Surakarta section, and at the party's March 1923 congress argued the relevance of Islam to communism from the Qur'an — a case he set out in his serialised "Islamism and Communism", written in exile. His communism was a political commitment held alongside his preaching, and both articles present him as a Muslim activist to the end. ^{1 2}

Blamed for strikes and sabotage around Surakarta, he was arrested in July 1924 and exiled to Manokwari in Dutch New Guinea with his wife and three children. There he founded a small Sarekat Rakyat branch, kept writing, contracted malaria, and died on 24 May 1926; he was buried in the Fanindi cemetery beside his wife. His school of Islam is nowhere named in the sources, and his record leaves it unknown. ^{2 1}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.