Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah

Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah — known in Achehnese pronunciation as Manso Shah, in Kreemer’s spelling Sultan Mantsoer Sjah (also Mansur Syah), and in the formal genealogical style of his house as Alaedin Mansur Shah — was the voorlaatste (next-to-last) Sultan of Acheh of the decadent period of the sultanate, who reigned in the middle decades of the nineteenth century (the sources differ as to the exact dates: one passage of The Achehnese gives 1838–1870, another 1858–1870; Kreemer confirms 1838–1870). He was the father of Sultan Alaedin Muhamad Daud Shah Juhan, the last sultan recognised by the Achehnese before the final establishment of Dutch rule over the kingdom, and the predecessor of the last ruling Sultan Ala ad-dïn Mahmoed Sjah (1870–1874). His name appears in the centre of the ninefold seal of the sultanate and his mediation (afwah) is invoked in the preamble of sultans’ letters patent (sarakata); at his instance, the religious-political leader Teungku Kuta Karang (Shaikh Abbas) wrote the Taj-ul-mulk, an important compendium of Islamic mystic arts, prognostications, and native medicine.

The Reign and the Date Discrepancy

Snouck Hurgronje gives two different dates for the reign of Mansur Shah in The Achehnese. One passage gives 1838–1870 — a reign of more than thirty years — and styles him the father of Sultan Alaedin Muhamad Daud Shah Juhan. Another passage, in connection with the disputed succession to the panglimaship of the XXVI Mukims, names him as Ibrahim Manso Shah reigning 1858–1870. The first passage explicitly notes that the sultan of 1838–1870 “is apparently identical with the Ibrahim Manso Shah named elsewhere in the text as reigning 1858–1870,” so that the discrepancy is recognised in the source itself. Kreemer’s account treats the 1838–1870 dating as authoritative. The reign fell entirely within the decadent period of the sultanate: the descendants of the great Sultan Iskandar Muda had long since ceased to exercise effective authority beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, and the territorial chiefs — the uleebalangs of the three sagis and the panglima sagi of the highlands — had become the real wielders of power in Great Acheh.

The sarakata’s

Sultan Mantsoer Sjah issued sarakata’s (royal charters) — the formal letters patent bearing the ninefold seal — to:

The heads of Paté and Lhö Gloempang
The bestuurder of Lhö Kroeët
The Kali Malikön Adé, who obtained half of Panglima Meuseugit Raja’s territory from the Sultan

The Ninefold Seal and the Sarakata

The chab sikureu’eng — the ninefold seal of the sultans — as Snouck Hurgronje explains, consists of a large central circle bearing the name of the reigning sultan, surrounded by eight smaller circles each containing the name of a celebrated predecessor. The choice of the eight names rests with the reigning sultan, though the names of the great sultans of the past and of the immediate predecessors of the reigning king are never omitted. The four names that recur on virtually every seal are Sultan Sayyidi al-Mukamnal (Alaedin al-Qahhar), Sultan Meukuta Alam (Iskandar Muda), Sultan Tajul-alam (Sapiatodin), and Sultan Ahmat Shah.

Mansur Shah’s appearance among the eight namesakes on his son’s seal reflects his position as the immediate predecessor of the pretender-sultan. The preamble of the letters patent (sarakata) granted by Daud Shah Juhan to Panglima Meuseugit Raya on 4 Rabi’ al-Awwal 1307 H (1889) explicitly invokes the mediation of “His late Majesty Alaedin Manso Shah”, alongside Sultan Meukuta Alam, Sultan Tajul-alam, Sultan Ahmat Shah, Sultan Mahmut Shah, Sultan Alaedin Muhamat Shah, and Sultan Jauhar Alain Shah. In the formal documents of his house, Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah is thus remembered chiefly as the father of the last sultan. His son styles himself in the 1889 sarakata “son of the late Sultan Alaedin Manso Shah Juhan, the Blessed, Allah’s shadow in the world.”

The Disputed Succession to the Panglimaship of the XXVI Mukims

The reign of Ibrahim Manso Shah is mentioned in The Achehnese chiefly in connection with the disputed succession to the *panglimaship* of the XXVI Mukims, one of the three sagis (territorial divisions) of Great Acheh, which took place during his reign and is characteristic of the constitutional disorder of the late Sultanate. The panglima of the XXVI Mukims had long been a person of small importance. When the holder of the title died during the reign of Ibrahim Manso Shah, one Teuku Muda Lampaseh was, according to the adat, the proper successor; he was accordingly, after reporting himself in the Dalam, solemnly recognised by the Sultan as panglima. Even before he had quitted the Dalam, however, the firing of guns was heard from the direction of the XXVI Mukims, and it appeared on enquiry that the people of that district, who objected to Teuku Muda Lampaseh on the ground that he was an opium-smoker, had installed a younger brother of the deceased panglima as the latter’s successor. This was Teuku Chut Lamreueng, father of the later panglima Teuku Nya’ Banta, who is also called Teuku Lamreueng.

The Sultan knew no better way out of the difficulty than to recognise the second aspirant as well, so that there were then two panglimas in the XXVI Mukims. This doubled panglimaship is one of the clearest examples of the inability of the late Sultanate to enforce its own decisions even in matters of succession within the sagis of Great Acheh itself.

Patron of the Tadj-oel-moelk

At the instance of Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah, the religious-political leader Teungku Kuta Karang (Shaikh Abbas) wrote the Tadj-oel-moelk (also Taj-ul-mulk) — a 141-page Atjèhnese-popular Malay compilation containing chronology, astrology (èleumèë noedjöm), medical recipes, and magical formulas. The work’s full title translates as “Crown of the realm, set with all manner of ordered pearls and precious stones.” The commission of such a work by a sultan of the decadent period is itself notable, in that it shows the continued cultural — if not political — authority of the throne as a patron of religious-scientific literature, even at the moment when the Sultan’s effective authority over the territorial chiefs of the sagis had collapsed.

Snouck Hurgronje’s Anecdote of the Drunken Frenzy

Snouck Hurgronje’s portrait of Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah is brief but pointed. From his widow Snouck learned that the sultan had once murdered his own child in a fit of drunken frenzy. The anecdote is introduced in The Achehnese Vol. I to illustrate the prevalence of intoxicating liquors in the Dalam, the royal palace at Banda Acheh, notwithstanding the honoured Achehnese tradition by which any member of the Sultan’s family with the reputation of being even a moderate opium-smoker was excluded from the succession. The open presence of strong drink in the Dalam thus coexisted, paradoxically, with a severe adat against the use of opium in the royal house.

Court connections

Sultan Mantsoer Sjah’s reign (1838–1870) preceded that of the last ruling Sultan, Ala ad-dïn Mahmoed Sjah (1870–1874). The prominent woman Pö Tjoet Meurah (Tjout Nja’ Meurah) — daughter of Teukoe Pakèh Dalam (former Oelèëbalang of XII Moekim’s Pidië) — had an aunt who married Sultan Mantsoer Sjah, connecting the royal house to the Pidiësche Pakèh-geslacht.

Succession and the End of the Sultanate

His son and successor, the child Tuanku Muhamat Dawot, was elevated to the sultanate in 1879 (A.H. 1296) after the death of Sultan Mahmut Shah, and ruled — at least nominally — from the sultan’s fortress at Keumala until his submission to the Dutch. The son lived to see the destruction of the Dalam and the establishment of the Dutch colonial government in Kuta Raja. Through the son’s long pretender-ship, the name of Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah continued to be invoked in the formal style of the sultanate’s last documents, long after the practical authority of his house had disappeared.

Significance

The reign of Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah thus coincides with the period of the most rapid decay of the Sultanate’s effective authority. The Sultan’s inability to settle a disputed succession within his own capital territory — and his recourse to the compromise of recognising both claimants — exemplifies the constitutional principle, repeatedly stressed by Snouck Hurgronje, that the Sultan of Acheh had by this time become little more than primus inter pares among the chiefs of Great Acheh. His patronage of the Tadj-oel-moelk shows the survival of the sultanate’s cultural and religious functions even as its political power collapsed; the anecdote of the drunken frenzy shows the moral counterpart of that collapse; and his son’s career, from the sultanate of 1879 to the submission to the Dutch, shows the final extinction of the political reality to which Mansur Shah’s name remained, in formal style, attached. Kreemer’s account, in turn, supplies the list of sarakata’s he issued — to the heads of Paté and Lhö Gloempang, to the bestuurder of Lhö Kroeët, and to the Kali Malikön Adé — that allows the documentary record of his reign to be reconstructed.

Account from Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh (1923)

Sultan Ibrahim Mansur — “Ibrahim Mansoer” in Joh. Langhout’s spelling — was the Sultan of Atjeh with whom General J. van Swieten, Governor of Sumatra’s West Coast, in 1857 concluded the treaty of peace, friendship and commerce, the last Dutch attempt “along the road of reconciliation” to call a better state of affairs into being before the slide toward the Acheh War.

The treaty of 1857

After the chronic sea- and strand-robbery on the Atjehnese coasts — the American chastisement of Koeala Batië in 1831, the plundering and burning of the schooner Dolphiijn in 1836 (whose money and guns the Sultan of Atjeh had kept for himself), the plundering of a Neapolitan schooner in 1851 and of an English merchantman in 1852 — the Netherlands Indian Government ordered General van Swieten, then Governor of Sumatra’s West Coast, to conclude with Ibrahim Mansoer, meanwhile come forward as Sultan of Atjeh, an agreement of peace, friendship and trade. It contained inter alia provisions on the admission of each other’s subjects to trade, shipping and residence in one another’s countries, provisions to combat sea-, strand- and man-robbery, and the agreement that all claims on account of former facts would lapse.

Aftermath

“It went well — until 1858!” Then the Netherlands Indian government concluded a contract with the Sultan of Siak, whose realm had formerly belonged to Atjeh but had loosened itself from it since 1705; the Sultan of Atjeh thereupon suddenly remembered that he could assert his long-lapsed claims upon Siak and Dependencies — claims which the Dutch side naturally did not recognize — with the consequence of several utterances of a less good understanding, among them a firing by the Atjehnese upon Batoe Baroe.

Sources

The Achehnese, Vol. I and Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.

Atjèh. Algemeen samenvattend overzicht van land en volk van Atjèh en onderhoorigheden, door J. Kreemer, Archivaris van het Atjèh Instituut. Tweede Deel. Leiden: N.V. Boekhandel en Drukkerij voorheen E.J. Brill, 1923. Identifier: Delpher MMKB02B:000001798; PPN 395084288. Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Atjèh. Algemeen samenvattend overzicht van land en volk van Atjèh en onderhoorigheden, door J. Kreemer, Archivaris van het Atjèh Instituut. Tweede Deel. Leiden: N.V. Boekhandel en Drukkerij voorheen E.J. Brill, 1923. Identifier: Delpher MMKB02B:000001798. Atjeh-Album van Eigen Haard, uitgave van de N.V. Het Tijdschrift “Eigen Haard”, Amsterdam, 1896, p. 14 (De Geestelijkheid in Atjeh — Habib Abdoe’r Rachman).

Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh, by Joh. Langhout (The Hague: N.V. Boekhandel v/h W. P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1923), pp. 16–18.

description	Sultan of Acheh c. 1838/1858–1870, voorlaatste (next-to-last) Sultan, father of the last Achehnese sultan Tuanku Muhamat Dawot; patron of the Taj-ul-mulk; name recurs on the chab sikureu'eng of his son's sarakata.
tags	person, ruler, sultan, sultanate, acheh, nineteenth-century, 19th-century, achehnese, kraton, pre-1873, aceh, opium
aliases	Ibrahim Manso Shah, Ibrahim Mansur Shah, Sultan Mansur Shah, Manso Shah, Alaedin Manso Shah, Alaedin Mansur Shah, Sultan Manso, Sultan Mantsoer Sjah, Mansur Syah, Sultan of Aceh 1838-1870, voorlaatste Sultan, Mantsoer Shah, Sultan Ibrahim Mansjoer Sjuh, Ibrahim Mansjoer Sjuh, the Sultan of Atjeh under the Habib, Sultan Ibrahim Mansyur Syah, Ibrahim Mansoer, Sultan Ibrahim Mansoer Sjah, Mansur Shah of Atjeh, Sultan of Atjeh Ibrahim Mansur

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