GUS Dur, this “heavyweight champion” from Jombang, East Java, was not an easy figure to make sense of. In his own hometown, there is a group of people who used Arabic wordplay to insult him: he does not khittah (go back to basics) but khintah, which means stomach. In other words, he does not invite to the truth, but only to the material world.

Still, it is difficult to find someone in East Java with a genealogy like Gus Dur. From his father�