Becoming Better Muslims

Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia

David Kloos

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400887835
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

How do ordinary Muslims deal with and influence the increasingly pervasive Islamic norms set by institutions of the state and religion? Becoming Better Muslims offers an innovative account of the dynamic interactions between individual Muslims, religious authorities, and the state in Aceh, Indonesia. Relying on extensive historical and ethnographic research, David Kloos offers a detailed analysis of religious life in Aceh and an investigation into today's personal processes of ethical formation.Aceh is known for its history of rebellion and its recent implementation of Islamic law. Debunking the stereotypical image of the Acehnese as inherently pious or fanatical, Kloos shows how Acehnese Muslims reflect consciously on their faith and often frame their religious lives in terms of gradual ethical improvement. Revealing that most Muslims view their lives through the prism of uncertainty, doubt, and imperfection, he argues that these senses of failure contribute strongly to how individuals try to become better Muslims. He also demonstrates that while religious authorities have encroached on believers and local communities, constraining them in their beliefs and practices, the same process has enabled ordinary Muslims to reflect on moral choices and dilemmas, and to shape the ways religious norms are enforced.Arguing that Islamic norms are carried out through daily negotiations and contestations rather than blind conformity, Becoming Better Muslims examines how ordinary people develop and exercise their religious agency.

1

History and the Imagining of Pious Aceh

Here, everything speaks of struggle, resistance, hatred.
Everything, except for the people.

—DR. J. TIJSSEN (1933)

This chapter discusses the history of Aceh until the end of the Dutch presence in 1942, with a special focus on the late colonial period. I concentrate on the question of how Aceh came to be imagined, in the course of this history, as a particularly “pious” place. To a large extent, this is a question of authority: What groups, institutions, and individuals were able, in consecutive periods of time, to lay claim to the “correct” interpretation of Islam, and how was this connected to the construction of Aceh as a meaningful social, cultural, and political space? Although Islam was a constitutive force in the political and ideological foundations of the sultanate state, I argue in this chapter that ultimately the image of pious Aceh was a product of the colonial encounter, understood here as a shared cultural project, in which, despite the unequal relationship of power, both colonizers and colonized had stakes (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1988; Cooper and Stoler 1997).

The chapter starts by placing Aceh in its broader historical context of maritime Southeast Asia and competing imperial powers. In the sixteenth century, the Sultanate of Aceh—strategically located at the entrance of the Strait of Malacca—developed into one of the most powerful kingdoms of the eastern Muslim world. Political and religious authority were closely intertwined and concentrated at the royal court. The sultan (or sultana) acted both as a symbol of moral virtue and as a patron of religious scholars. The latter often hailed from abroad. They were cosmopolitan figures, who engaged in religious and doctrinal debates that transcended oceans and world regions. Important changes took place, however, in the eighteenth century. In the wake of the increasing maritime dominance of European powers and the gradual integration of the Acehnese interior in the globalizing economy, new and competing sources of political and religious authority emerged in coastal towns and rural areas. A new class of locally based religious teachers appeared, with moral and intellectual horizons that diverged considerably from those of the scholarly elite who resided at the court. As a result of this shift, local communities became increasingly prominent as sites of religious debate and contestation.

In the nineteenth century, the sultanate benefited from a resurgent trade with British Malaya. As a result, it was able to regain some of its prestige. The trading routes around northern Sumatra became the subject of fierce rivalries and complex diplomatic relations among the Acehnese, the British, and the other major power in the region, the Dutch. This lasted until 1873, when the Dutch colonial government in Batavia, after signing a treaty with the British, acted on its imperialist ambitions and decided to incorporate Aceh—the last indigenous kingdom in the western archipelago—into the Netherlands Indies. When the sultan refused to respond to an ultimatum, a military expedition invaded the shores near Banda Aceh, marking the beginning of a long and brutal war of conquest.

The Dutch-Acehnese war initially drove state and religious authorities further apart. As local chiefs were co-opted and absorbed into the colonial order as symbolic “heads” or indirect rulers, the colonial army was forced to direct itself against a radical faction of ulama, who perceived the struggle as a “holy war” and had taken over the leadership of Acehnese resistance. However, as large-scale violence subsided in the early twentieth century, both the Dutch stance toward Islam and Acehnese Muslims’ stances toward the colonial project became more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Dutch government saw Aceh’s religious leaders as their fiercest adversaries. On the other hand, the fact that the Acehnese resistance had come to be cast in Islamic terms forced the government to think in terms of managing religious sensibilities. As Harry Benda (1958) and Michael Laffan (2011) have argued, contrary to the common image of Dutch colonialism as being rather neutral toward religion, agents of the colonial state were deeply implicated in the making and legitimization of Islamic discourse and, ultimately, in the definition of Islamic orthodoxy.

The final decades of Dutch colonial rule were a period of rapid social change. In 1918, a civil governor was installed at the head of what had become Aceh “province.” As the violence decreased, and the colonial government worked to integrate the region into the administrative and economic structures of the Netherlands Indies, ordinary Acehnese acted on emerging opportunities. The number of Acehnese children going to colonial and indigenous schools rose. New technologies were embraced, and affluent youngsters in urban centers adopted new, “modern” lifestyles. A range of both political and nonpolitical associations emerged, which expressed an abundance of ideological affiliations and ideas about the future, thus transforming and reinvigorating the public sphere.

This pluriformity of society has been driven from memory, however, by the activities of one group. Founded in 1939 by reformist ulama from Aceh Besar and the North Coast, PUSA (Persatuan Ulama-Ulama Seluruh Aceh, All Aceh Association of Ulama) advocated a revitalized and purified interpretation of Islam, freed from corruptions and deviations. This interpretation, put forth by the so-called young generation (kaum muda), prescribed modern education, brotherhood, and individual moral development through pious practice rather than the hierarchical models of religious knowledge and authority associated with the old generation (kaum tua). What distinguished PUSA from other, kindred organizations (such as Muhammadiyah) was its regionalist focus, its role in the expulsion of the Dutch in the early 1940s, and its ultimate transformation, during the Japanese occupation and the subsequent Revolution, into a factor of political and military significance.

The PUSA model of Islamic scripturalism combined with an Acehnese ethnic self-awareness is often presented as the main (or even single) indigenous expression of modernity in Aceh (see, e.g., Aspinall 2009; Morris 1983; Piekaar 1949; Reid 1979; Siegel 1969; Sulaiman 1985). This chapter takes issue with this tendency to reduce the colonial experience to a continuous, uninterrupted history of Islamic activism and resistance. For many Acehnese, the recovery from the war was charged with the promises of change and progress, including (but not limited to) ideas about religious revitalization. However, as I argue toward the end of the chapter, a combination of factors, including the memory of the war, protracted colonial and anticolonial violence, and the deeply repressive nature of the late colonial state, also limited the space for debate and alternative images, thus reproducing and strengthening the imagining of pious Aceh.

Reconfigurations of Authority

Between the tenth and the thirteenth century CE, rising demands on both ends of the Indian Ocean and the decline of land-based trading routes following the collapse of the Pax Mongolica caused a sharp increase in Asian maritime trade (Chaudhuri 1990). In the wake of this trading boom, the rulers of several coastal polities (negeri) lining the Strait of Malacca adopted Islam as the religion of state. The oldest archaeological and textual evidence of such a conversion stems from thirteenth-century Pasai, a kingdom located near present-day Lhokseumawe (Guillot and Kalus 2008). This trend continued eastward. From Sumatra, along the North Coast of Java, and all the way to the southern Philippines, indigenous rulers converted to Islam, both because of the economic advantages it offered them in a trading system dominated by Muslims and because of the legitimacy that Islamic legal traditions were able to bestow on them and on their courts (Reid 1993, 140–73).

Not much is known about the early history of Aceh. Legend has it that “Aceh” was the name of a Hindu princess who got lost and was eventually found in Sumatra by her brother, upon which she became queen of that land (G. P. Tolson, cited in Djajadiningrat 1911, 145–46). The Acehnese language suggests Chamic influences, locating the origins of the Acehnese-speaking people in southern Vietnam (Sidwell 2005). The first evidence of Islamic influences is found in the form of several twelfth-century tombstones discovered in Lamreh (near present-day Banda Aceh) (Montana 1997). A richer picture emerges with the appearance of court chronicles—the fifteenth-century Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (Story of the kings of Pasai), and the seventeenth-century Hikayat Aceh (Story of Aceh) and Bustan al-Salatin (The garden of kings) (Djajadiningrat 1911; Iskandar 2011)—and the reports of European traders. According to the Bustan al-Salatin, Nur al-Din al-Raniri’s history of the Acehnese sultanate, the first ruler of Aceh to convert to Islam was Ali Mughayat Syah (r. 1515–30) (Nuru’d-din ar-Raniri 1966, 31), who was known in Portuguese sources as Raja Ibrahim (Djajadiningrat 1911, 144–53).

After the conquest of Malacca by the Portuguese in 1511, Indian and Chinese Muslim merchants redirected their routes to other ports in and around the Strait. Reinvigorating places such as Johor, Patani, Banten, Brunei, and a string of ports on the North Coast of Sumatra, these contacts strengthened local rulers’ attachment to Islam (Laffan 2011, 10; Prakash 1998, 34; Reid 2006b, 106). It was in this context that the Portuguese apothecary and diplomat Tomé Pires (1967 [1515]) wrote about the rise of the “kingdom of Achin.” He also wrote that Pidie and Pasai, located to the east of Aceh, were more powerful, populous, and prosperous. Their main source of wealth was the pepper trade. However, in the 1520s these ports were conquered and absorbed—one by one—by Aceh under Ali Mughayat Syah. The incorporation of Pasai in 1524 was particularly significant. This kingdom had converted to Islam and integrated Islamic elements into its administrative system centuries before Aceh. By appropriating the fame of Pasai, the rulers of Aceh were able to legitimize their position more forcefully than before on the basis of an Islamic understanding of kingship, fashioned in turn after the great Islamic empires to the west (the Mughals, the Savafids, and the Ottomans) (Andaya 2008, 114).

In the sixteenth century, Aceh developed into a wealthy and powerful kingdom. Illustrative of its military strength, Malacca was besieged in 1568, and several naval battles were fought against the Portuguese, Aceh’s main rival in the Indian Ocean trade (Subrahmanyam 2012, 133–37; 2009; cf. Borschberg 2010). In the 1560s, Sultan Alauddin Riayat Syah al-Kahar (r. 1537–68) established diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire. Presenting himself as a vassal of the caliph, he was able to obtain a modest amount of military assistance (Reid 2006b, 56–57). While this increased the authority of Aceh as an Islamic kingdom (Peacock and Teh Gallop 2015, 2), other transoceanic connections were forged by itinerant scholars, traders, and pilgrims. The Acehnese court actively attracted ulama from the Middle East and South Asia to teach and study subjects such as Islamic law, jurisprudence, and mysticism. Sufi orders or “brotherhoods” (tariqa) facilitated the dissemination of religious knowledge across the Indian Ocean (Azra 2004; Ho 2006; Kraus 2010, 203; Laffan 2011). As a consequence, Aceh became a center of scholarly inquiry and, at times, fierce debates about Islamic doctrines.¹ Under the rule of the legendary sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–36), Aceh became the political and cultural leader of the Malay world, both superior in terms of military might and authoritative in terms of scholarly production. State revenues were used to build and maintain an increasingly splendid court (Hadi 2004; Ito 1984; Reid 2005).

The sultan of Aceh was a principal among equals, who emanated from a class of rich traders known as orangkaya (lit. “rich men”). The orangkaya maintained the relationship between the center and the interior. They operated from Banda Aceh and other, smaller ports. Some of them held military titles, such as uleebalang or panglima, a practice modeled on examples in the Muslim world, notably the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal dynasty in South Asia (Andaya 2008, 132). From the seventeenth century onward, the orangkaya were integrated into the administrative structure of the state through a royal seal, the sarakata, that legitimized their privileged position, but also tied them to the sultan as vassals, obliging them to pay revenues in times of peace; to provide military service in times of war; and, increasingly, to serve as officers of the state (Snouck Hurgronje 1893–94, 1:91–93). The relationship between the sultan and the orangkaya was ambiguous, however. Although the sultan depended on the nobility, he also competed with them over commercial interests. This was not a fair competition, for the sultan could use his military power to create monopolies (see, e.g., Kathirithamby-Wells 1986). This situation caused perpetual friction and alternating periods of political stability and unrest.

It is sometimes claimed that the sultanate state enforced on its subjects a strict Islamic normative code. Evidence to support this is scarce. Certainly, there is much to suggest that, at times, Islamic norms were taken very seriously by the court. For example, Sultan Alauddin Riayat Syah Sayyid al-Mukammil (r. 1588–1604) is described in the Bustan al-Salatin as a just and God-fearing king, who received many ulama, told his subjects to keep to God’s law, and commanded the nobles at his court to dress in Arabic-style clothes. Iskandar Muda was reported to enforce particular religious prescriptions, such as the daily prayers, as well as Islamic interdictions, such as those against gambling and consumption of alcohol, and to have “executed at least two drunken Acehnese by ‘pouring molten lead down their throats’” (Reid 1988, 143). In Banda Aceh, a criminal court administered justice on the basis of a combination of Islamic and adat law. Cases were brought before the court by inhabitants of the city and by “guards” (panghulu kawal) who patrolled the various quarters (Beaulieu 1705, 743–44). Yet the available evidence suggests that, in many cases, adat took the upper hand (Peletz 2002, 27–29). At the same time, very little is known about the administration of other ports, let alone the interior. The French commander Beaulieu (1705, 744), author of the most detailed description of Banda Aceh during the rule of Iskandar Muda, mentioned a “watch of two hundred horse that patrols every night in the country and along the shore.” He also wrote that the orangkaya presided personally over their province or country-district, “where [they] give orders, and [administer] justice to the inhabitants,” but provided no further details. Although a relatively complex judicial system thus served to maintain order in a bustling and increasingly heterogeneous confluence of people and commodities—explaining, perhaps, the “severe, draconian and sensationalistic punishments” (Peletz 2002, 29) reported in the early seventeenth century—there is neither evidence to support that this system reached far beyond the confines of the city, nor reason to imagine a uniform, or evenly spread, enforcement of Islamic norms and regulations.

This discussion raises important questions about conversion and the formation of Muslim subjectivities beyond the confines of the court. Like other negeri, Aceh did not exert strong territorial claims. Its power was based on maritime trade, and its priority was to control the sea rather than the land. The religious scholars who visited Aceh engaged with the court and the transoceanic networks of which they were part rather than with the interior (Laffan 2011, 18–24). Islam did penetrate territories and social spaces beyond the court, but this was not a top-down process. As the port cities in the Indian Ocean region became “saturated with overriding Islamic values,” questions of purpose or direction seem to be of limited relevance. Religious change was driven by multidirectional processes of internal networking, rather than by acts of proselytization (Hall 2001, 225–26).

After the rule of Iskandar Muda, the power of the sultanate started to crumble. His daughter, Sultana Safiyyat al-Din Syah (r. 1641–75), who became queen after the death of her husband, Iskandar Thani, inherited a troubled realm. Her father’s futile military excursions to Malacca and tight domestic control over agriculture and trade had exhausted the interior (Reid 2006b, 60). In contrast, Aceh’s old rival Johor experienced a revival as a result of the Dutch conquest of Malacca in 1641.² In 1699, Aceh’s fourth queen in succession, Sultana Kamalat Zainat al-Din Syah, was forced to abdicate.³ By then, the Acehnese sphere of influence had shrunk to the northern tip of Sumatra (Lieberman 2009, 862–63). A long and unstable period of foreign rule followed, in which sultans succeeded each other rapidly. In 1726, Sultan Jemal al-Alam Badr al-Munir, the last of a brief dynasty of Arab sultan-sayids, was overthrown by (the ethnic Bugis) Sultan Alauddin Ahmad Syah, who is regarded as the progenitor of all subsequent Acehnese sultans until the institution was abolished by the Dutch in 1903 (Snouck Hurgronje 1893–94, 1:92–95).

Al...