Mohammad Natsir

Mohammad Natsir (17 July 1908 – 1993) was an Indonesian Islamic scholar and politician, the country's fifth prime minister, and the author of forty-five books and hundreds of articles on Islam. ^{1 2}

He was born at Solok in West Sumatra to Mohammad Idris Sutan Saripado and Khadijah, studied at Dutch schools by day and the madrasa by night, and moved to Bandung for senior high school, where he studied Qur'anic interpretation, jurisprudence and dialectics more deeply, under Ahmad Hassan, leader of Persatuan Islam. ¹

His first articles appeared in 1929; he co-published 'Pembela Islam' ('Defenders of Islam') from 1929 to 1935, wrote for 'Pandji Islam', 'al-Manar' and others, and founded the 'Pendidikan Islam' school in 1930. Entering politics in the mid-1930s, he debated the relation of Islam and the state with Sukarno and joined the Indonesian Islamic Party in 1938. ¹

After independence he sat on the Central National Committee; on 3 April 1950 he proposed the 'Integral Motion' that reunited Indonesia after its division into seventeen states, and he was prime minister from 6 September 1950 to 27 April 1951, at the head of Masyumi. ¹

Under Guided Democracy he opposed the government and joined the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia; he was arrested and held in Malang from 1962 to 1964 and released by the New Order in July 1966. He then worked with Islamic bodies, among them the founding council of the Muslim World League and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, founded the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council, and signed the 'Petition of Fifty' on 5 May 1980, after which he was barred from travelling abroad. He said his politics were religiously motivated, citing a verse of Surat al-Dhariyat. ¹

He received the King Faisal Prize for Service to Islam in 1980, shared with Abu al-Hasan Ali Nadwi. ^{3 1} He held honorary doctorates from the Islamic University of Lebanon (1967) and two Malaysian universities (1991), and was named a National Hero of Indonesia on 10 November 2008. He died at home in Jakarta in 1993 — on 6 February according to the article's lead and Wikidata, on 14 March according to its death section. ^{1 2}

Wikidata listed articles on him in twenty-one Wikipedia editions on 7 November 2026. ²

• English Wikipedia article, revision of 4 October 2026. ¹

• Wikidata item Q2327343. ²

• King Faisal Prize laureate list, revision of 31 October 2026. ³