The death of Sultan Mahmut Shah — the last effective Sultan of Acheh — occurred shortly after the loss of the Dalam (the Sultan’s court and residence at Kuta Raja) in the early months of the war with the Dutch. Snouck Hurgronje notes the event in a single sentence: “When Sultan Mahmut Shah died shortly after the loss of the Dalam, it was not thought necessary even in so perilous a crisis to select from among the candidates for the succession to the throne a man before all things. They contented themselves with a child, Tuanku Muhamat Dawot.” The death thus marks the formal close of the old sultanate and the beginning of the long interregnum that was to last until the final Dutch conquest.
Background: the loss of the Dalam
Before the Dutch gained possession of the Dalam, the Sultan had already “disappeared from the scene”. During the subsequent course of the conflict, Hurgronje writes, “it was always separate and independent bodies of troops, led either by adat-chiefs or by some newly-arisen commanders of energetic personality, that turned their arms against the invaders through their own impulse or to advance their own interests.” Thus the most powerful compulsion from without could produce no union in Acheh, “utterly broken up as she was.” The sole individual who succeeded during the first portion of the war in organising the forces to a comparatively high degree was an ambitious and skilful foreigner, Sayyid Abdurrahman Zahir by name. The Sultan, in the last months of his life, was therefore already a cipher.
The succession of a child
The choice of a child as Sultan at so perilous a crisis was characteristic of the late sultanate’sabdication of responsibility. “They contented themselves with a child, Tuanku Muhamat Dawot; and though his guardian Tuanku Asem (Hashim) was a man of royal blood most bitterly hostile to the Dutch Government, even he preferred to watch the contest with interest from a distance rather than himself to take a serious share in it, much less to enter the lists as a leader.” The new “court” was thus, from its inception, a court in name only. When once it had found a safe place of refuge in Pidie territory, far removed from the theatre of the conflict, “the condition of the sultanate became very much the same as it had been before the war, the scene alone being changed.”
The sultanate in shadow
The young Sultan, gradually emerging from childhood, soon showed that “he aspired to something very different from sharing the weal or woe of his country as leader of the contest against the Gompeuni.” True to the traditions of his house, “he sought and still seeks diversion in lawful and unlawful love, drink, fiddling, fights of animals, gambling and the pursuit of elephant and deer.” His letters to the Achehnese chiefs still always commenced with the solemn admonition “continually to remember ‘Allah, his Messenger, the departed sovereigns and ourselves’;” and this last reminder took tangible form in the latter portion of these letters in a request “to forward a certain sum of money or some costly merchandise.” With the death of Mahmut Shah and the accession of his child-successor, the sultanate of Acheh had become, in effect, what it remained until its final abolition — a shadow court, exercising no effective authority over either the war or the country.
The death of Sultan Mahmut Shah thus marks the formal close of the line of effective Sultans of Acheh. The child Tuanku Muhamat Dawot was to be the last holder of the title, and his long wandering life — broken up by quarrels with local chiefs, by the death of his guardian Tuanku Asem in January 1897, and by the gradual Dutch subjugation of the country — was to end only with his own submission, “almost without exception” along with the other members of the Sultan’s family, under Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz.
See Also
- Sultan Mahmut Shah
- Tuanku Muhamat Dawot
- Tuanku Asem
- Loss of the Dalam
- Achehnese War
- Habib Abdurrahman Zahir
- Keumala
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.