From Personal Recruitment to Institutionalized Cadre Formation: Ikatan Pelajar Persis and the Making of the ROFI (Ar-Rasikhuna fil ‘Ilmi) System in West Java, 2010–2024

Abstract

This article reconstructs how Ikatan Pelajar Persis (IPP), the student organization of the reformist association Persatuan Islam (Persis), turned the recruitment of young cadres from a matter of personal networks into a tiered, institutionalized system known as ROFI (Ar-Rasikhuna fil ‘Ilmi) in West Java between 2010 and 2024. Studies of Indonesian Islamic student organizations have concentrated on other movements, and the scholarship on Persis has privileged its founders, ulama, and pesantren; the cadre formation of Persis students has not been examined historically. Using heuristics, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography, the study draws on statutes, cadre manuals, work reports, dated visual documents, and ten oral-history interviews conducted in November and December 2025. It shows that IPP emerged from a long genealogy of student bodies, from Rijalul Ghad and Ummahatul Ghad (1943) to the congress in Garut that declared IPP on 23 September 2010. ROFI then developed in three phases: experimental formulation based on personal recruitment (2010–2014), formalization through a division of labour between central and district leaderships (2015–2021), and institutionalization after IPP became an autonomous body of Persis on 25 September 2022, culminating in the 2024 sequence of Ta’aruf, ROFI I–III, and Training for Trainers. Read through Parsons’s functional framework and tested against oral and documentary evidence, the article argues that ROFI became the main mechanism through which Persis reproduces its intellectual and organizational identity among students, while persistent gaps between design and practice reveal the agency of local actors and the fragility of organizational memory.