The Kanduri to’ thon Tuan Meurasab was a religious feast held on the 10th day of the sixth month of the Mohammedan year (Jumada al-akhir) in honour of the saint known in Acheh as Tuan Meurasab. Its full Achehnese name means “the religious feast for the expiration of the year of Tuan Meurasab”, and the 10th day of that month was accepted by the Achehnese as the anniversary (haul) of his death. The saint’s tomb stands at Nagore on the Coromandel coast of India, where he is known as Kadir Wall Sahib; the Achehnese form of the name (Meuralisab or Meurasab) is a contraction of Meurah Sahib, in which Meurah is an ancient title of foreign origin preserved in the records of the kingdom of Pasai, and Sab an abbreviation of the Indian title Sahib.
Strange stories were told in Acheh of Tuan Meurasab. He was said to have grown up in the wilderness in complete innocence, and to have once seen the breasts of a woman for the first time while he himself was suffering from a pimple on his hand. Mistaking the woman’s breasts for tumours, he prayed for their removal, and his prayer was at once answered; the woman, distressed at the sudden disappearance of her charms, prevailed upon her family to entreat the hermit, who then offered up a second prayer restoring what had been lost. A further miracle accounted for the saint’s reputation as protector of navigation: a ship’s captain, whose vessel was on the point of foundering, vowed a handsome offering to Meurasab if the leak were stopped; the saint, at that moment sitting under a barber’s razor with a small mirror in his hand, flung away the mirror, which made its way through air and water to plug the leak beneath the ship.
The vows made to Tuan Meurasab in Acheh were by no means confined to ships and sailors. His intervention was invoked on behalf of sick children, the vow consisting in the promise of a gold or silver hand, or of “the height of the child in gold” (santeut aneuk) in the event of recovery. Such hands or pieces of gold thread were given to Kling traders journeying to Madras for transmission to Nagore. Other vows were fulfilled at the place of abode of those who made them: even the payment of what had been promised to the great saints of Acheh did not always involve a visit to their graves. A shipmaster who had vowed a goat to Tuan Meurasab might kill the goat in his own gampong, make a kanduri with it, and request the teungku to recite over it the fatihah for the benefit of the saint.
Despite these observances, Snouck Hurgronje notes that Tuan Meurasab “has thus really no place in the Achehnese calendar of festivals.” The anniversary was occasionally celebrated in Kuta Raja and Trumon by a great kanduri on the 10th day of the month, but the givers of this feast were always the Klings who resided there, and the Achehnese who partook of it did so only as guests. The saint’s cult thus represented one of the many survivals of the South-Indian influence that had entered Acheh along with the creed of Islam itself, preserved in folk-memory and in the vows of those who had reason to seek a patron at sea, but never fully domesticated in the calendar of native observances.
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.