The Female Rule of Acheh — the period from 1641 to 1699 during which the throne of Acheh was occupied by four successive female rulers — is treated by C. Snouck Hurgronje in The Achehnese as a fact of capital importance for understanding the comparatively high position of women in Achehnese society. For more than half a century the sultanate was governed by sultanas, beginning with Tajul-alam (Safiyyat al-Dīn), who succeeded her husband Iskandar Thani in 1641 and reigned until 1675.
The Four Sultanas
The line of female rulers begins, according to the list of Achehnese sultans inscribed on the ninefold seals, with Tajul-alam — the first sultana — whose reign, depending on the chronology followed, is variously given as 1639 or 1641 to 1675. She was followed by three successors during the next quarter-century, the last of whom was deposed in 1699 and replaced by the first male ruler of the so-called Bugis dynasty. The four sultanas together presided over the long, slow decline of Achehnese power that followed the great age of Sultan Meukuta Alam (1607–1636), but they maintained the outward dignity of the court and the bureaucratic forms of the sultanate.
Constitutional Significance
The female rule is significant not only for its duration but also for the Achehnese precedent that it set. There was nothing in Achehnese tradition that excluded a woman from the throne, and indeed the institution of the janji jinamee (the dowry-security on marriage) and the matrilocal residence rules meant that women of the ruling class were already, in many practical respects, the mistresses of their own houses. The four sultanas could not, however, exercise direct military command, and their authority depended on the support of the great chiefs of the sagis and the ulamas of the capital.
Influence on the Position of Women
Snouck Hurgronje stresses the lasting effect of the female rule upon the position of women in Achehnese society. The comparative rarity of talaq (repudiation), the fact that the woman is the mistress of the house (pruinōh), and the efforts of the men to obtain wives of social standing not inferior to their own, all testify, in his view, to the position of the woman in Achehnese society — “a fairly high one for a Mohammedan country.” This is, indeed, what we should expect to find in a country where the throne was occupied for more than half a century by four successive female rulers.
Even at the time of writing, in the early twentieth century, Snouck Hurgronje could point to instances of female government in the dependencies, and to the rule rather than the exception that the wives of uleebalangs and other chiefs exercised a very considerable influence on all their actions. It was very common for the wife of a chief to wield her husband’s authority in his absence, and a case had occurred not long before on the East Coast where a woman of the ruling class, with her hair hanging loose, had taken actual part in a civil war. The women were also the hereditary guardians of old-fashioned words and expressions, the meanings of proverbial sayings, and so forth; when Snouck Hurgronje enquired into such matters he was often told by Achehnese that they must refer to their wives or mothers, and the latter seldom failed to supply the desired information.
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.