Sarekat Islam

Sarekat Islam (Islamic Association, also rendered Syarikat Islam) was an Indonesian socio-political organization founded in 1911 as Sarekat Dagang Islam by the batik trader Samanhudi, with assistance from the journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo, and renamed Sarekat Islam in 1912. It began as a cooperative of Muslim Javanese batik traders formed to compete with Chinese-Indonesian traders who dominated the batik trade. From that commercial start it rapidly evolved into a nationalist political organization that demanded self-governance against the Dutch colonial regime and won wide popular support, becoming especially active during the 1910s and early 1920s; by 1916 it claimed eighty branches with a combined membership of around a million. In 1921 the organization split between its moderate Islamist wing and a communist faction, the latter forming Sarekat Islam Merah, which went on to merge into the Communist Party of Indonesia. The original organization reformed as the Islamic Association Party in 1923 and later as the Indonesian Islamic Union Party (PSII) in 1929, its influence diminished by colonial suppression after 1919; PSII fared poorly in Indonesia's 1955 elections and ceased to exist as an independent party in 1973, when it was forced to merge into the United Development Party.