The proclamation of the Pretender Sultan in 1878 was the recognition of the infant Tuanku Muhamat Dawot as sultan of Acheh, in succession to the recently-deceased Sultan Alaedin Mahmut Shah and the fugitive Sultan Alaedin Manso Shah. As C. Snouck Hurgronje records in the introduction to The Achehnese, “their head himself who in 1878 as a child had been proclaimed Pretender-Sultan, submitted almost without exception” only at the close of the war under van Heutsz. The child thus proclaimed grew up to be the last sultan recognised by the Achehnese; his proclamation marked the definitive end of the old sultanate and the beginning of the long Dutch-Achehnese contest which was to last for nearly thirty years.
The letters patent issued in his name, and especially the letters patent with the ninefold seal to Panglima Meuseugit Raya of 4 Rabi’ al-Awwal 1307 H (28 October 1889), preserve the formal chronology of his recognition. The central circle of the ninefold seal bears the inscription: “May Allah give good guidance unto His Majesty Sultan Alaedin (pronounced in Ach. Alaedin) Muhamad Daud Shah Juhan … the shadow of Allah in the world 1296” — i. e. 1879, the year of his formal election as Sultan, following upon his proclamation in 1878. In the left-hand top corner of the document stands the word al-mustahiqq (“the rightful possessor”), by which expression Tuanku Muhamat Dawot makes known his claims to the throne of Acheh. The use of the term al-mustahiqq in place of the reigning sultan’s titles is itself a token of the abnormal position of the pretender: he was not recognised as sultan by the Dutch, and his authority was, in the words of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles quoted by Hurgronje, that of a sovereign “revered throughout his whole kingdom, but obeyed nowhere.”
The proclamation of 1878 was made under the stress of the Dutch war, which had already broken up the old sultanate. The earlier sultans — Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah (1838–1870) and his son Sultan Mahmut Shah — had seen the effective power of the port-kings reduced to little more than the limits of the Dalam (the Sultan’s Court at Banda Acheh). The loss of the Dalam to the Dutch in 1873–1874 and the flight of the sultan reduced the sultanate to a “pretender” status, and it was as a pretender — recognised by the Achehnese, but not by the Dutch — that Tuanku Muhamat Dawot was proclaimed in 1878. As Hurgronje observes, the rumour of the Dalam that reached the outer world was far from pleasant, and “the sultanate at once exhibited itself in all its nullity” upon the loss of the capital; the proclamation of the pretender was thus an act of Achehnese resistance rather than of regular succession.
The career of the pretender illustrates the paradoxical position of the sultanate in the late nineteenth century. On the one hand, the sultan and the Dalam “were since the earliest times the objects of a somewhat extraordinary reverence in the minds of the Achehnese, though this never prevented them from making a football of the sultanate at their pleasure.” On the other, the sultan exercised “no perceptible influence on the conduct of affairs, and was in fact but an expensive luxury like the documents sealed with the chab sikureu’eng.” The pretender was for some time “regarded by a portion of his subjects as kramat, i. e. one miraculously revealed as the chosen friend of God”; but his political authority was, from the first, narrowly circumscribed. His submission, along with that of the members of his family and the chiefs of the dependent states, came only at the close of the war under van Heutsz — when, in Hurgronje’s words, “the traitor Uma and numbers of adventurers, fanatical leaders and guerrilla chiefs perished; the chiefs of dependent states, the members of the Sultan’s family, and finally their head himself who in 1878 as a child had been proclaimed Pretender-Sultan, submitted almost without exception.”
See Also
- Tuanku Muhamat Dawot
- Sultan Mansur Shah
- Sultan Mahmut Shah
- Achehnese War
- Concentration Scheme
- General van der Heijden’s excursions (marches through the highlands)
- Letters patent with the ninefold seal to Panglima Meuseugit Raya
- Coronation of the Sultan
- Governor Van Heutsz
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.