R. L. Mellema

Properties2
tagsperson, scholar, dutch, colonial, ethnology, javanese, islam, indisch-instituut, 1947
aliasesR.L. Mellema, Reinier Lambertus Mellema, Drs. Mellema, Mellema (Indisch Instituut), Mellema (taalkundig medewerker)

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R. L. Mellema — Drs. R. L. Mellema, full name Reinier Lambertus Mellema — was a Dutch Javanist and ethnologist who served as Oud-Leraar in de Javaansche Taal en Letterkunde (former teacher of the Javanese language and literature) at the Oosters Letterkundige Afdeeling (Oriental Literature Section) of the Algemene Middelbare School te Djogjakarta, and afterwards as Taalkundig Medewerker (linguistic collaborator) at the Afdeeling Volkenkunde van het Indisch Instituut te Amsterdam (Ethnology Section of the Indisch Institute at Amsterdam). He is the author of De Islaam in Indonesië (in het bijzonder op Java) (Amsterdam, 1947), the concise ethnological survey of Muslim institutions in the Netherlands Indies in which the Atjehnese forms of the moekim–imeum system, the rangkang, the zakaat war-chest of the Atjehoorlog, the prestige of the Haddji title, and the oldest Arabic-inscribed graves are set in comparative relation to the Javanese pattern.

Career

Mellema’s career, as recorded on the title page of his 1947 survey, combined two successive posts: first, the teaching of Javanese language and literature at the Oriental Literature Section of the Algemene Middelbare School (the General Secondary School, commonly abbreviated AMS) at Djogjakarta in central Java; and second, a linguistic staff appointment at the Ethnology Section of the Indisch Instituut in Amsterdam. The former post placed him among the Dutch colonial scholars trained in the classical literatures of Java — the babad, the wayang corpus, the court chronicles — while the latter placed him within the institutional framework of metropolitan ethnology that the Indisch Instituut had inherited from the earlier Koloniaal Instituut and the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen tradition.

The move from Djogjakarta to Amsterdam — from teaching Javanese in the colony to compiling ethnological Mededeelingen in the metropolis — was a common trajectory for Dutch Indies scholars in the late colonial and immediate post-colonial period, and it is the trajectory by which Mellema came to write the Islam survey of 1947.

The Islam survey of 1947

Mellema’s De Islaam in Indonesië was issued as Mededeling No. LXXVII (and No. 25 of the Afdeling Volkenkunde) of the Koninklijke Vereeniging Koloniaal Instituut in 1947. In his introduction, Mellema states that the work is not a systematic treatise on Islam but a guide for the “vreemdeling in Indonesia” — the stranger in Indonesia — who comes face to face with a new world and an unfamiliar religion. The ordering of the topics is therefore pedagogic rather than systematic: the traditional Javanese city, the mosque, the prayer, the fast, the alms, the pilgrimage, the religious education, the creed, and the burial — each chosen because it is what the newcomer would first encounter.

Although the subtitle confines the detailed treatment to Java, Mellema draws on Atjeh at five distinctive points — the moekim–imeum system, the meunasah/rangkang, the zakaat war-chest, the Haddji title, and the Arabic-inscribed graves — and his Register explicitly flags the Atjehnese entries. This Atjeh content, though brief, is the distinctive contribution of the survey to the comparative ethnology of Islam in the archipelago, and it is the reason the work enters the AcehWiki corpus as a source independent of Snouck Hurgronje’s De Atjehers.

Scholarly posture

Mellema writes as a Javanist addressing a Dutch metropolitan readership. His method is descriptive and comparative: he sets the Javanese form of each institution beside its Atjehnese, Sundanese, Sumatran, or Arab counterpart, and he preserves the indigenous terms (aloen-aloen, langgar, soerambi, bedoeg, penghoeloe, meunasah, rangkang, imeum, moekim) in italics with glosses. He is careful to distinguish what is canonical — prescribed by the Koraan or the overlevering (tradition) — from what is adat (customary), and he repeatedly notes the degeneration or adaptation of canonical forms in Indonesian practice (the priesterraad that is “no council or court” in the European sense; the penghoeloe who is “no priest” since Islam knows no priesthood).

The survey is thus a document of the late colonial comparative ethnology of Islam — written, in 1947, from the retrospective position of a scholar whose institutional base, the Indisch Instituut, was itself a relic of the colonial order that the Indonesian revolution was then ending.

Significance

For AcehWiki, Mellema’s significance is that of an independent comparative source. Where Snouck Hurgronje’s De Atjehers of 1893–1894 gives the canonical monographic account of Atjehnese Islam from a scholar who had lived in the Atjehnese milieu, Mellema’s survey of 1947 gives a brief, comparative, Javanist’s view of the same institutions — one that sets them beside the Javanese and treats them as points on an Indonesian spectrum rather than as the autonomous object of a monograph. The complementarity is valuable: Mellema’s framing of the moekim as a territorial congregation arising from the practical need of several desa’s to unite for Friday service, of the rangkang as one regional name among many for the village prayer-house, and of the zakaat as a canonical category put to underground use in the Atjehoorlog — each is a comparative observation that Snouck’s monographic method does not foreground in the same way.

See Also

Source

De Islaam in Indonesië (in het bijzonder op Java), by Drs. R. L. Mellema, Oud-Leraar in de Javaansche Taal en Letterkunde aan de Oosters Letterkundige Afdeeling van de Algemene Middelbare School te Djogjakarta, Taalkundig Medewerker bij de Afdeeling Volkenkunde van het Indisch Instituut te Amsterdam. Mededeling No. LXXVII, Afd. Volkenkunde No. 25. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Vereniging “Indisch Instituut,” 1947. Title page and Inleiding.

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