The Kanduri beureu’at is a small and simple religious feast held by most adult male Achehnese in the meunasah of their gampong on the malam beureu’at — the night preceding the 15th of Shaʽban, the middle of the eighth Mohammedan month. As C. Snouck Hurgronje explains, the malam beureu’at (in the Deccan Shab-i-barat) is the night on which Allah is believed to determine the fate of mortals during the coming year. The most popular idea is that there is a celestial tree of symbolic import, on which every human being has a leaf to represent him; this tree is shaken during the night preceding the 15th of Shaʽban, causing the leaves of all those who are to die during the coming year to fall. The same night, “no less than on that of the middle of Shaʽban, all manner of rich blessings are supposed to be dealt forth by Allah to those who keep vigil therein, wakeful and if possible engaged in pious devotions.”
The kanduri itself is unpretentious: a small offering of food given by the worshippers and consumed in the meunasah after the prayers of the night. It belongs to the same class of family or village kanduris as the Kanduri Boh Kaye’e of Jumada al-akhir and the Kanduri Apam of Rajab, but it has a sharper urgency, since the night it commemorates is one on which the worshipper’s destiny is believed to be fixed. The feast is essentially a means of laying up merit in advance of the divine decision, and of commending the giver and his household to the mercy of Allah on the very night when their leaves are about to be shaken from the tree.
In addition to the kanduri, the night is marked in many gampong by special devotions. Some hold during the evening a prayer called the seumayang teuseubeh (Arabic ṣalat at-tasābīḥ), the “service of praise,” in which a tasbīḥ-formula is constantly repeated in praise of the Creator. Others perform, in place of this, the seumayang hajat, prescribed as the introduction to special supplications addressed to the Deity. During the malam beureu’at three such prayers, comprising six rakʽahs in all, are sometimes offered up; each has its particular motive — the first for prolongation of life, the second for the necessary means of supporting life, and the third for a blissful end. This last form of devotion is observed by the women with much greater zeal than by the men, who content themselves for the most part with the kanduri and the common prayers.
The kanduri beureu’at is one of several Achehnese observances which, like the wider kanduri of Shaʽban of which it forms the central rite, point to a Deccani rather than an Arabian origin for many of the popular religious customs of Acheh. The Arabic-speaking Mohammedans observe the night, but it is in the Deccan and in the Indian Archipelago that it has become the occasion for a domestic feast of fate. The Achehnese, characteristically, have neither elevated the kanduri beureu’at to the dignity of a national festival nor allowed it to sink into desuetude: it remains, in Hurgronje’s account, one of the small, indispensable pieties by which the average householder discharges his debt to the unseen world on the night when that world most nearly touches his own.
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.