Sjeih Abdoel bin Djnali was a Sjeih (Arabic shaykh) and Teungku of the kampong of Tiro in the Pedir region — the predecessor of the more famous Teungku di Tiro Mohammed Amir as the principal religious authority of that village — and the teacher and patron of the man who would later become, in the Atjeh-Album’s phrase, een groot man in die richting — a great man in that line — the Teungkoe di Tiro of the Dutch war period.
The kampong of Tiro
The kampong of Tiro in Pedir was, by the late nineteenth century, the principal seat of Atjehnese religious learning and the burial-place of many distinguished ulamas. Its reputation rested on the conjunction of teaching and burial: ulamas trained at Tiro returned there in their declining years, so that the village accumulated both living scholars and the tombs of dead ones, and the resulting sanctity made Tiro a kind of vrijplaats — asylum — for those involved in internal feuds. Sjeih Abdoel bin Djnali was, in the succession of Tiro scholars, the immediate predecessor of Teungku di Tiro Mohammed Amir, whose own successor — Teungku di Tiro (Cheh Saman) — would become the commander-in-chief of the Atjehnese holy war against the Dutch.
The succession
The Atjeh-Album records the succession in a single clause: Hij was vroeger de rechterhand van den beroemden Teungkoe di Tiro Mohammed Amir, dien hij opvolgde — “He [the later Teungku di Tiro] was formerly the right-hand man of the famous Teungku di Tiro Mohammed Amir, whom he succeeded.” The “right-hand man” relationship is the standard Atjehnese pattern of succession for the ulama office: the senior pupil becomes, on the teacher’s death, the new Teungku, and the office acquires its continuity from the chain of teacher-pupil relationships rather than from heredity. Sjeih Abdoel bin Djnali’s place in this chain — as the teacher of Teungku di Tiro Mohammed Amir — is the upstream link that connects the early-nineteenth-century Tiro scholarly tradition to the late-nineteenth-century resistance.
Significance
Sjeih Abdoel bin Djnali’s significance in the documentary record of the Atjeh-oorlog is principally genealogical: he is the named predecessor whose teaching transmission connects the Tiro scholarly tradition to the resistance leadership of the Dutch war period. His appearance in the Atjeh-Album of 1896 is brief, but it preserves the chain of teacher-pupil relationships that gave the Tiro ulama office its continuity and its authority.
See Also
- Tiro
- Pedir
- Teungku di Tiro Mohammed Amir
- Teungku di Tiro
- Ulama
- Teungku
- Aceh War
- Atjeh-Album (Eigen Haard, 1896)
Source
Atjeh-Album van Eigen Haard, uitgave van de N.V. Het Tijdschrift “Eigen Haard”, Amsterdam, 1896, p. 16 (De Geestelijkheid in Atjeh — Teungkoe di Tiro).