The establishment of the bale menhakamah (properly bale iu-muhakimah, “house of judgement”) was the formal creation, in the time of Habib Abdurrahman’s ascendancy, of a new kind of religious court of justice at the Achehnese capital. As C. Snouck Hurgronje narrates, the Sultan “found himself constrained, after discussion with the most important chiefs, to establish a new kind of court of justice [bale iu-muhakimah] in which the Habib should decide all questions relating to religion.” It was the culminating act in the Habib’s programme of reform, and the principal monument of his brief ascendancy over the political life of Acheh.
The creation of such a court posed at once the difficulty inherent in every attempt to establish a modus vivendi between the adat and the religious law. As Hurgronje explains, the religious law “comprehends everything, and no good Mohammedan can or may suggest the advisability of replacing any portion of it by a new system.” Where a Mohammedan government is compelled to establish a court of justice to deal with all matters connected with the sacred law, there arises of necessity a conflict as to the limits of the functions of such a tribunal. “Here again the party of the adat must as a rule yield to that of the hukom in theory, and can only save itself by having recourse to circuitous methods, or by seeking a reason for abolishing the court thus incautiously instituted.”
Such was the case with the bale iu-muhakimah. The Habib “succeeded in forcing [it] from the adat potentates; he drew almost all questions within the purview of this court, and thus robbed the constituted authorities, whom he had made powerless elsewhere by his reforms, of all control in this department also.” The Habib’s adversaries did not fail to attack the court by stratagem. “Certain highlanders were instigated to bring before him suits which, if dealt with according to the letter of the sacred law, could never have been brought to a pacific conclusion. The Habib was disposed on such occasions to resort to compromise and to set the spirit of the religious law above the letter. How would it be then when he, the strict reformer, was requested to decide the question ‘according to the Book of Allah and the sunat of the Prophet?’” The Habib saw through the plot and “frustrated it,” seizing the pretended suitors by their heads and saying: “If ye are so anxious for the sunat of the Prophet, go ye first to your homes and apply it to your own faces, dogs that ye be” — a reference to their being clean-shaven in accordance with Achehnese custom, but in conflict with the sunat. “He who in Acheh lets his beard or beard and mustache grow (as many leubes and teungkus do) is said to have adopted ‘the sunat of the Prophet.’”
The court was thus at once the instrument and the cause of the religious party’s brief political triumph. The Habib’s rough handling of the chiefs — “If they put in an appearance much later than the time appointed … or sat or spoke in what an Arab would consider an improper manner, he would smite, kick and even spit upon them by way of correction” — was enabled by the fact “that his followers formed a united and active whole, eager for the advancement of his programme, while the opposition presented to the view a disordered and disunited mass, held together by no other motive than their anxiety to maintain the existing order of things.” The Habib also compelled the Achehnese “to do what they were powerless to undertake on their own initiative, viz. to carry out useful objects by general cooperation.” He got a new chief appointed, suppressed public opium-houses, and “rigourously punished” the company-smoking of opium practised with formal observances on the West Coast.
The end of the bale menhakamah was the end of the Habib’s own ascendancy. With his fall the party of the adat regained the upper hand, and the court — like the Adat Meukuta Alam before it — passed from document into a memory. Its establishment nonetheless remains, in Hurgronje’s account, the high-water mark of the Achehnese ulamas’ effort to translate the religious law into a governing institution, and a vivid illustration of the constant tension between adat and hukom in Achehnese public life.
See Also
- Habib Abdurrahman
- Sayyid Abdurrahman Zahir
- Sarakata
- Adat Meukuta Alam
- Five daily prayers (seumayangs)
- Friday service (Jum’at)
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.