The five daily prayers — seumayangs in Achehnese, from the Arabic ṣalāt — are the prescribed liturgical prayers of Islam, performed by every adult Muslim at five stated hours of the day and night. In Acheh, as C. Snouck Hurgronje notes, they were among the principal religious duties whose observance was enjoined on the Panglima Meuseugit Raya in the letters patent with the ninefold seal, and the proper performance of which the Habib made it his business to enforce. The same document directs that orders be given “duly to perform the Friday service and the five daily prayers, to build meuseugits, deahs and meunasahs, also to contribute zakat and pitrah.”
The five daily prayers give their names to the principal divisions of the Achehnese day. The wate’e or “stated times” of prayer are: the morning prayer (subōh) at daybreak; the noonday prayer (lhō) just after the sun has passed the zenith; the afternoon prayer (ʽasar) in the late afternoon; the sunset prayer (maghrib) immediately after sunset; and the evening prayer (ʽisya) in the early part of the night. These five periods are interspersed with other notations of the day, some borrowed from the religious subdivision of time and others from daily occupations, meals, and the like: ban beukah maté uròë (“with the breaking forth of the sun,” about 6 A.M.); sigalah uròë (“the sun a pole high,” 7 to 7.30); uròë or wròë (“rice-time” or meal-time, 9); peulheuë meuneunu’e (“the loosening of the ploughing gear,” 10); peunab chōt (“the approaching of the zenith,” 11); chōt (“zenith,” 12 noon); leumbah chōt (“falling from the zenith,” 12.30 P.M.); peuteunggōhan leuho (“the middle of the period devoted to the obligatory noonday prayers,” 1.30 P.M.); akhè leuho (3 P.M.); asa (“the beginning of the time of the ʽasr or afternoon prayers,” 3.30); and so on through the night.
In practice, however, the Achehnese laity were not strict observers of the five daily prayers. As Hurgronje observes in connection with the funeral service, “in an Achehnese village the teungku is naturally the person first chosen” to perform the prayers at a funeral, “and he is not unfrequently the sole performer of the service, though when funds permit, some leubes are also summoned. It is only where the deceased are devout persons or religious teachers that a number of people come and join in the seumayang manyèt of their own accord.” A large number of those who attend funerals “scarcely ever perform their obligatory prayers, and who would yet be ashamed to exhibit their ignorance in public.” The same contrast between the formal prescriptions of the religious law and the practice of the laity recurs throughout Hurgronje’s account of Achehnese Islam.
The five daily prayers, like the Friday service, were thus the constant background of Achehnese devotional life, ordered by the sultan’s letters patent and enforced in his time by the bale menhakamah of Habib Abdurrahman, but in fact discharged mainly by the teungkus, leubes, and other professional representatives of religion. Their performance was the most basic “pillar” of Islam, and their stated times shaped the whole Achehnese notation of the day; but they did not, in Hurgronje’s account, occupy the centre of Achehnese religious imagination, which was given rather to the kanduri, the pilgrimage to holy tombs, the recitation of the *ratib saman]], and the other occasional observances in which the social and the religious were intertwined.
See Also
- Friday service (Jum’at)
- Letters patent with the ninefold seal to Panglima Meuseugit Raya
- Establishment of the bale menhakamah (religious court)
- Habib Abdurrahman
- Kanduri (general)
- Rateb Saman
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.