Beseumelah is the Achehnese form of the Arabic bismillāh (“in the name of Allah”), the solemn invocation with which Mohammedans preface every important undertaking. In Acheh, as C. Snouck Hurgronje observes in The Achehnese, the beseumelah is “indispensable” before a wide range of actions — agricultural, ceremonial, religious, and domestic — and forms the verbal threshold by which an ordinary act is transformed into one consecrated in the name of God.
The Formula and Its Usage
The beseumelah is the Achehnese rendering of the Arabic formula bismi ‘llāhi ‘r-raḥmāni ‘r-raḥīm, “in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” which opens every chapter of the Quran but one. Among the Achehnese the formula is shortened in common speech to beseumelah, and is used as an indispensable prelude to any undertaking that is to be performed in accordance with adat or with religious law. It is repeated, for example, before slaughtering an animal, before eating, before setting out on a journey, before beginning any of the principal ceremonies of life — birth, marriage, and death — and, notably, before the planting out of the padi.
In Agriculture
In the agricultural cycle, the beseumelah accompanies the peusijië or “cooling” rite that opens the planting of the rice-field. After the centre of the umòng has been besprinkled with flour and water, and the green besom of “cooling” plants has been planted in the middle of the field — the rite called peuphon padé, the “inauguration of the padi” — the cultivators begin planting from the centre outwards, having first of all uttered the indispensable beseumelah. As they plant, they follow the direction of the wind, so that the newly planted padi may acquire the requisite slant, regarded as a guarantee of its shooting up straight and strong later on. The beseumelah thus opens the entire agricultural cycle in the pula or seuneulong system of rice cultivation, the most ritually charged of Achehnese seasonal undertakings.
In Other Ceremonies
The same formula introduces every other solemn rite of Achehnese life. At the planting of the tombstones, the teungku first performs the peusijië or cooling rite, besprinkling the stones with flour and water using a besom formed from the three kinds of “cooling” plants. The ceremony is introduced with a bismillah before the teungku sets the stones and consecrates the accompanying kanduri with a prayer. The number 44 — the interval at which the pula batee is ideally performed after death, and at which seedlings are transplanted from nursery to field — is itself connected with the ritual calendar of which the beseumelah forms the threshold. The same invocation opens the kanduri feasts, the cutting of a child’s hair, the commencement of a journey, the slaughter of a buffalo, and a hundred other acts of daily and ceremonial life.
See Also
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.