Taboet- of Hasji-Hosseinfeest — “Taboet or Hasji-Hossein festival” — is an illustrated article by J. J. Jongejans, published in 1939 in Onze Aarde (Our Earth), p. 326 e.v., recording the Taboet — also called Hasji-Hosseinfeest — the Shi’ite-derived commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein that is observed in parts of Sumatra under the name Taboet. The article is recorded as No. 571a in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter, as a companion piece to No. 571, Jongejans’s book Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu.
Subject
The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the Taboet — also called Hasji-Hosseinfeest — the festival of the Taboet. The Taboet (from Arabic tabūt, “ark” or “bier”) is the Sumatran name for the commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein — the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad — at the Battle of Karbala in AH 61 / CE 680, the central observance of the Shi’ite calendar. The festival, known in the wider Muslim world as ʿĀshūrāʾ and in Persia and South Asia as Muharram, is observed in parts of Sumatra — notably in the west-coast regions of Pariaman and Sumatra’s Westkust — under the name Taboet, with the construction and procession of tall decorated tabernacles (taboet) that are eventually cast into the sea. The alternative name Hasji-Hosseinfeest — “Hasji [Haji] Hossein festival” — records the identification of the festival with Hussein, and the Acehnese/Malay honorific Hasji (Haji) prefixed to the name.
The observation of the Taboet festival on Sumatra’s Westkust — within the broader sphere of Atjehnese influence on the west coast — is the point of the article’s inclusion in the Sumatra chapter of Van Meurs’s survey, and the festival’s presence on the west coast of Sumatra is itself a trace of the Shi’ite-derived devotional practice that entered the archipelago through the west-coast ports and that persisted in the region alongside the Sunni mainstream.
Author and venue
Jongejans — already known in the AcehWiki corpus as Resident Jongejans and as the author of the 1939 survey Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu — published the article in Onze Aarde (Our Earth), a popular geographical and ethnographic monthly that carried illustrated articles on the lands and peoples of the world for a general Dutch readership. The article’s appearance in Onze Aarde — alongside the companion piece Het heiligdom te Oelakan (No. 572) — indicates that Jongejans was, in 1939, presenting the religious and ethnographic material of Atjeh to a general readership in parallel with the more substantial survey published as the book.
Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht
The article is No. 571a in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey — the lettered sub-entry a to No. 571, Jongejans’s book. The use of a lettered sub-entry indicates that Van Meurs regarded the article as a companion piece to the book, to be read alongside it. No. 572 — Het heiligdom te Oelakan, also by Jongejans in Onze Aarde — is a further companion piece, and the three together — the book and the two Onze Aarde articles — mark Jongejans as one of the principal Atjeh-focused authors of 1939.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the article is significant as a 1939 record of the Taboet or Hasji-Hossein festival on Sumatra’s Westkust, and as a companion piece to Jongejans’s survey Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu. The article furnishes an independent source for the west-coast observance of the Taboet festival, and it complements the corpus’s existing entries on the Westkust of Sumatra, on Pariaman, and on the religious life of the Atjehnese-west-coast sphere. The festival’s Shi’ite derivation — in a region otherwise overwhelmingly Sunni — is of comparative interest for the history of Islam in the archipelago, and the article’s record of its observance in 1939 is a point of reference for the study of the festival’s persistence and transformation in the modern period.
See Also
- Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (Van Meurs, 1940)
- H. van Meurs
- Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu (Jongejans, 1939)
- resident-jongejans
- westkust-van-sumatra
- atjeh’s-westkust
- Pariaman
- Oelakan
- Husain
- Acheh
- 1939
- 1940
Source
Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 571a. Citing: J. J. Jongejans, “Taboet- of Hasji-Hosseinfeest. Met ills.,” Onze Aarde (1939), p. 326 e.v.