Chirbon — the modern Cirebon, on the north coast of Java — is named in Vol. I of The Achehnese as one of the Javanese places where, in olden times, the ta’līq (the conditional divorce formula pronounced by the bridegroom after marriage) was ordained by the rulers of the country. It is paired by C. Snouck Hurgronje with Banten and with the kingdom of Mataram as the Javanese localities in which this customary ordinance was established.
The ta’līq — known in Javanese as janjining ratu (“the promise ordained of the Prince”) — was, Snouck writes, ordained in Java “not only in the kingdom of Mataram, but also in such places as Chirbon and Banten.” The Javanese tradition ascribes its introduction to the great Sultan Ageng; Snouck allows that “this tradition is of course to say the least of it open to doubt,” but observes that the formula continued to be called “the promise ordained of the Prince” even outside the Native States, and that the official who concluded the marriage-contract still routinely asked the bridegroom: “do you accept the janjining ratu?” — a question purely formal, since “a reply in the negative is unheard of.”
The historical importance of Chirbon in this connection lies in its having been, from the seventeenth century onwards, one of the principal independent sultanates of Java — split, like Mataram and Banten, into several lines and reduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under Dutch suzerainty. Its inclusion in the list of places where the ta’līq was ordained testifies to the diffusion, throughout the older Javanese sultanates, of a single Mohammedan-adat institution; and the survival of the Javanese name janjining ratu points to a common origin in the ordinance of a prince.
The mention of Chirbon in Vol. I is incidental to a comparative discussion of Achehnese marriage-customs, but it carries a wider significance. Snouck’s point is that the Achehnese peulieh beusoe — the analogous conditional divorce formula known in Acheh — is one of a family of similar institutions diffused through the Mohammedan Archipelago, of which the Javanese janjining ratu of Mataram, Banten and Chirbon is the most familiar example. The comparative mention thus helps to fix the Achehnese institution within a wider Javanese-Malay frame.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.