Habib Abdoerrachman el Zahir — properly Sejjid Abdurrachman Zahir, and known to the Dutch and the Acehnese alike simply as de Habib (the Habib) — was an Arab sayyid of prophetic descent whose deep religious learning and political gifts made him, in the words of Zentgraff, one of the most dangerous and influential leaders of the Atjeh resistance in the last years of the 1870s. He was, with Tengkoe Sjech Saman di Tiro after him, one of the two great figures who in that early phase succeeded in drawing the fragmented land towards anything resembling unified leadership, preaching the prang sabil (holy war) and drawing thousands of fighters to his standard.
The Dutch colonial government considered him such a dangerous adversary that, rather than continue the military contest, it resolved to remove him from Atjeh by negotiation. His submission was celebrated in Batavia and Koetaradja as a political success: on 13 October 1878 he formally submitted on the condition that he settle in Mekka with an annual pension, charged to the colonial budget, of no less than 10,000 dollars. On 24 November 1878 he was embarked for Djeddah on board Hr. Ms. Curaçao. The Atjeh officers of the day sang of this “costly buy-off” of the Habib in the Falderaldera-leed that Major Macleod — husband of Mata Hari, then a lieutenant in Atjeh — later recalled:
“Daar ligt een ijzeren zeekasteel, / Dat heet de ‘Curaçao’, / Waarmee die brave Habib / Naar Mekka varen zou. / Nu zingt hij vroolijk ‘falderaldera, / Voor dit Gouvernement. / Zoo’n duizend dollars in de maand: / Ben ik geen knappe vent?”
The return to Atjeh, March 1876 (Meijer, 1883)
The official field reports gathered by H. F. Meijer in Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876 (1883) describe how the Habib re-entered the war. About mid-March 1876 the Dutch political agent at Penang, Lavino, reported that the Arab Habib Abdoer Rachman ben Zahir — for a short time chief minister (rijksbestierder) of the late Sultan and afterwards a member of the notorious Council of Eight (Raad van achten) at Penang — had escaped the island despite all the precautions of the British police and of the Dutch agent, disguising himself as a sailor and shipping on a schooner trading to Atjeh’s north coast. He landed near Edi; the Radja of Edi besar confirmed his arrival to the Dutch officials there.
His journey from the little coastal states to the focus of resistance in Groot-Atjeh was a triumph. His enemies soon circulated that a debt of about 5,000 dollars had driven him out of Penang; but his following in the dependencies grew daily. On three successive meetings in Groot-Atjeh he made the principal chiefs of the three Sagis hand in written declarations of their wishes and confirm them by oaths, and he bound himself personally — at the chiefs’ own request, by his later declarations — to take the conduct of the war. He organised payment and feeding of the fighters who rallied under his banners, levied a war contribution (oorlogsschatting) of 30,000 dollars, and sold gunpowder at 4 dollars per forty-odd catties to the population.
The strategy and the unexecuted general attacks (Meijer, 1883)
Meijer presents the Habib’s strategic thinking in the metaphor of the laboe plant with which, he noted, the Atjehers compared the E. I. Company: a little seed, carelessly thrown into a corner of a garden, becomes a creeping plant that strangles every smaller plant beneath its foliage; cutting here and there at the sprouts only strengthens it — the root itself must be torn out. Only a combined general attack by united forces, in mutual concert, on the Dutch troops could crush the Company’s dominion in Atjeh.
Yet the Habib never succeeded in bringing about the general attack in his own spirit. On 25 July 1876 came the first report that he had entered the XXII Moekims with 2,000 men; his force was later put at 15,000. Spy reports of August said he was at kampong Lamsi near Panglima Polim, holding a great assembly and ordering the people to store rice; that he had prescribed his fighters a three-day fast before attacking; that at the mesigit of Montasih he gathered the chief leaders — Panglima Polim, Toewankoe Moeda Daoed and Toewankoe Hasjim — and that, after prayers at the Mesigit Raija which he claimed to have built himself near the Kraton, a divine revelation had pointed out to him the 27th of the month Redjeb (17–18 August 1876) as the favourable day for a general attack, whose three-fold design the spies claimed to know. Dutch dispositions were made for that night — ambushes everywhere, two companies with artillery posted behind the Pedir-dijk — but the night passed everywhere undisturbed; nor did the second announced date, 30 August, when Lambaroe and Oleh Karang were to be overwhelmed by 3,000 men in a break into the IV Moekims, bring any attack. Meijer judged: all the partial actions of the guerilla had only served to show the Dutch minority in brilliant relief and to harden the Atjeher in his resistance; had the Habib succeeded in bringing the mass of the enemy before the Dutch troops and leading it himself, one serious field battle might have ended the war — in which sense it would almost have been desirable that he had succeeded.
His appearance nevertheless changed the war: the greater activity of the guerilla after March 1876, chiefs who nearly crossed over now rejoining the resistance, the letters to the chiefs of the IV Moekims sent by Toekoe Tjihiq Lamngga — son-in-law of the well-known Toekoe Nanta — were ascribed to him, as were the reported instructions to the principal chiefs of the enemy to fatigue the Dutch everywhere by partial actions until his great plan should be ripe.
The 1884 memorandum
Even from Mekka, where he consumed his handsome annual stipend, the Habib could not detach himself from the Atjeh question. In 1884 he sent from Mekka a memorandum to the Netherlands-Indies Government outlining a scheme by which the submission of Atjeh might at last be achieved. Dated 3 Moharram 1302 — October 1884 — and signed HABIB ABDOERRACHMAN EL ZAHIR under a seal reading “Rijksbestierder van het Gouvernement ATJEH” (Chief Minister of the Government of Atjeh), the memorandum proposed that the Government appoint a Muslim distinguished by personal excellence, noble descent, and knowledge of Atjeh affairs as regent — under the title of Radja or similar — to govern the internal affairs of the country on behalf of the Netherlands-Indies Government, in cooperation with a college of chiefs, scholars, and notables, and within a precisely defined commission set out in his diploma. The Habib naturally saw himself as the coming regent of Atjeh; the seal he had had cut already named him so.
In Mekka he remained in regular contact with Atjeh pilgrims, who came to him for counsel as well as for the rites of the hadj. Zentgraff notes that this expectation, seen from the Dutch side, may look absurd and arrogant, but must be read in the light of an age when the colonial government itself judged the Habib’s voluntary withdrawal from Atjeh so important that it paid him a princely annual stipend for Arabia.
Significance
The Habib’s removal in 1878 closed the first phase of unified religious-political leadership of the Atjeh resistance, but it also opened the era of the Tiro-oelama’s. As Zentgraff puts it: after the Habib’s period “our weak government received more slaps in the face; the Tiro-oelama’s took care of that.” His memorandum of 1884 is preserved as one of the curiosities of the early diplomatic record of the war — a sayyid’s proposal that the Netherlands-Indies Government install him, with a sultan’s title, as its Muslim chief minister over Atjeh.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege — after Kielstra’s lecture in the Indisch Genootschap of December 1883 (Indische Gids) — preserves the Habib’s neglected offers as the main station on the road not taken: already in 1874, at his earlier offers, it had been declared from the Dutch side “dat er slechts sprake kon zijn van volledige onderwerping” (“that there could only be talk of complete submission”); and on 20 May 1875, at the residence of the Lieutenant-Governor of Penang and in his presence, a meeting took place of the Dutch agent for the Atjehsche affairs, Mr. Lavino (later Consul-General at Singapore), with Habib Abdoerrachman el Zahir, who declared himself ready to go to Groot-Atjeh to try to obtain from the chiefs a mandate (volmacht) for negotiating with the Dutch; the foundations of those negotiations were to be the elevation of Toeankoe Daoed to Sultan and the Habib’s own appointment as regent. In connection with the Habb’s characterised as “vast en ondernemend” (“firm and enterprising”), Verstege comments that there would at that time already, in case of acceptance, have been a chance of reaching the end of the Atjeh question. “Maar de Indische Regeering wees het ten eenenmale van de hand” (“But the Indian government put it aside entirely”), “because the nature of our establishment in Atjeh, whereby we step into the place of the princely native government, was not compatible with a new Sultanate” — the reading of the annexation of 1874 that the government itself confirmed thereby (see Herstel van het sultanaat).
See Also
Source
Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia. OCR-filename: 20260709_002148_DLP-81-Atjeh_OCR.txt.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), p. 97 note. OCR: DLP-158.