The Kanduri meureung woe jeurat — the “kanduri of those returning from the grave” — is the funeral feast held in the house of mourning immediately after the interment of an Achehnese Muslim. As C. Snouck Hurgronje describes, the company that has accompanied the bier to the burial-ground returns to the house of mourning, where a kanduri of rice and its accessories is set before them. The name of the feast points directly to its occasion: it is the meal of those who have just conducted the dead to the tomb (meureung woe — “coming back from”), and have thereby completed the first of the four duties specially enjoined upon the survivors of a deceased Mohammedan.
The kanduri meureung woe jeurat forms the closing act of the burial itself. After the body has been washed, shrouded, prayed over and borne to the grave, the teungku who has conducted the teuleubuet (the funeral prayer) pronounces the formula of faith — lā ilāha illā llāh — and recites the du’a kubur, the prayer of the grave. The company, having partaken of the plantains brought for their refreshment at the cemetery, returns to the house of the deceased, where the kanduri awaits them. As a fee for his teuleubuet the teungku receives by fixed custom a samaïh — a quarter of a dollar — though the growing demands of the time have gradually increased the amount to nearly a dollar; most people lay by during their lifetime the money destined for this purpose, and do not touch it under any circumstances.
The kanduri meureung woe jeurat is distinct from the series of memorial feasts which follow in the days after the burial — the kanduri of the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 10th, 40th, 44th, 50th, 100th and 1000th days after death, which are observed throughout the Eastern Archipelago. Whereas those later feasts are given at the choice of the survivors and may be omitted or simplified according to the means of the family, the kanduri meureung woe jeurat is a necessary part of the burial itself, the meal by which the mourners, having committed the dead to the earth, break their fast of grief and resume the ordinary round of life. It is, in this sense, less a memorial than a rite of transition — the moment at which the company of the grave becomes once more the company of the living.
The Achehnese custom of the kanduri meureung woe jeurat has its analogues in many parts of the Mohammedan world, but the Achehnese form is shaped by the wider Achehnese understanding of the kanduri as both a pious offering and a communal meal. As Hurgronje notes in his general account of the kanduri, the word supplies in Achehnese both the learned sense of a sadaqah — a gift made for the recompense of the dead — and the popular sense of a feast given to guests distinguished by their religious life. The kanduri meureung woe jeurat partakes of both meanings: it is at once the meal of the mourners and the first offering made on behalf of the deceased, the foundation upon which the subsequent memorial feasts of the 7th, 40th and 100th days will build.
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.