The Achehnese succession war of 1756–1760 was the conflict waged by the Achehnese prince Pochut Muhamat on behalf of his brother Alaedin Juhan Shah (Sultan 1756–60) against the latter’s Arab rival Jamalul-alam. The war is the subject of the celebrated Achehnese heroic poem Hikayat Pochut Muhamat, which Snouck Hurgronje describes as depicting “with no small skill the conflict waged by that prince in behalf of his brother Alaedin Juhan Shah against the latter’s Arab rival Jamalul-alam.” The conflict belongs to the eighteenth-century phase of Achehnese history in which Arab adventurers and Bugis princes competed for the throne of a sultanate whose old port-kingship had collapsed.
The conflict
The succession war took place in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, when the sultanate of Acheh had passed into the hands of a succession of short-lived rulers. Alaedin Juhan Shah, who ruled from 1756 to 1760, was opposed by an Arab rival, Jamalul-alam; and the conflict was carried on, on the side of the legitimate prince, by his brother Pochut Muhamat. The intervention of an Arab pretender was characteristic of the period. “The great literati or holy men were almost without exception foreigners”, Hurgronje observes, in the Acheh of the late sultanate; and the same was true of many of the rich traders and high officials. The Arabs and Bugis who had settled in Acheh — “nay even some of the slaves” — were a more enterprising element than the native aristocracy, and their competition for the throne was one of the marks of the country’s eighteenth-century transformation.
The Hikayat Pochut Muhamat
The Hikayat Pochut Muhamat is one of the two ancient epic poems of Acheh — the other being the Hikayat Malem Dagang — and is the chief literary source for the war. Hurgronje notes that the poem “was composed shortly after the war which it describes, and gives upon the whole an accurate description of the events and condition of things at that period.” Its value to the historian of Achehnese institutions is considerable. In it we find “frequent mention of ureueng wakeueh sabeu’ (or sa’) raja” — “wakeueh-men on the side of (or with) the king” — which appears to mean that a certain district was allotted them to live in, within which they enjoyed complete independence. This is one of the earliest evidences of a peculiarly Achehnese institution, the formal allocation of fiscal districts to hereditary officials.
The imeums as military leaders
The Hikayat Pochut Muhamat is also the source of one of Hurgronje’s most striking observations on the historical evolution of the imeum office. “Here, then, we find the imeums appearing as military leaders among whom the prince seeks his supporters, and as chiefs who of their own initiative take the part of the hero or oppose him. It is clear from this epic that even at that time some of the imeums troubled themselves little about the uleebalang, to whom they were nominally subordinate, whilst others appear in the retinue of their chiefs as minor uleebalangs.” The imeums — nominally the heads of the mukims and subordinates of the uleebalangs — were, by the mid-eighteenth century, already “minor uleebalangs”, a process of assimilation that had continued ever since.
Place in Achehnese history
The succession war of 1756–60 thus marks, in Hurgronje’s account, an important moment in the long transformation of Achehnese society from the old port-kingship to the late sultanate. By the time of the war, the imeums had ceased to be merely the religious officials of the mosques and had become military chiefs in their own right; the wakeueh-men had acquired hereditary fiscal districts of their own; and the throne itself was a prize to be contended for by Arabs as well as by Achehnese princes. The Hikayat Pochut Muhamat — composed shortly after the war it describes — preserves, in Hurgronje’s judgement, an accurate picture of these conditions; and it is from that picture that the historian of the eighteenth-century Achehnese sultanate must take his start.
See Also
- Hikayat Pochut Muhamat
- Hikayat Malem Dagang
- Alaedin Juhan Shah
- Jamalul-alam
- Pochut Muhamat
- Imeum
- Bugis origin dynasty
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.