Luar Batang is a locality in Batavia (colonial Jakarta) where, in Snouck Hurgronje’s account, a member of the celebrated ‘Aidarus family of sayyids lies buried. His tomb is “widely venerated” — one of a number of sacred sites scattered through the Malay-Indonesian world that testify to the spread of the Hadrami sayyid diaspora and to the persistent popular reverence for the descendants of the Prophet.
The ‘Aidarus Family
Snouck Hurgronje introduces the ‘Aidarus family in the course of his chapter on the sayyids of Acheh. Among the living in Acheh, he mentions “a Habib kramat of the famous family of ‘Aidarus” — a half-crazy young man, the son of Teungku di Buket, whose father had been in conjunction with the lately deceased raja of Idi the first pioneer of that district. The ‘Aidarus family, originating in the Hadramaut, had produced over the centuries a long line of saints, scholars, and political adventurers; in the Archipelago its members were to be found in almost every commercial centre, from Batavia and Singapore to Penang and the ports of Acheh.
The footnote in which Snouck Hurgronje notes the Luar Batang tomb makes clear that the family’s presence in the Netherlands Indies was of long standing. The veneration of the tomb at Luar Batang — by the early twentieth century a well-established place of pilgrimage — must be understood against the same background of popular Hadrami sainthood that gave the sayyids of Acheh their peculiar authority. To this day Luar Batang is one of the best-known pilgrimage sites (ziarah) of the Javanese north coast; the shrine associated with the Hadrami sayyid Habib Husayn bin Abi Bakr al-‘Aydarus (d. 1756) was one of the most important such sites in colonial Batavia.
Significance
Snouck Hurgronje’s mention of Luar Batang is brief, but it bears on the wider question of the Achehnese sayyids’ trans-regional connections. The same family that produced the “Habib kramat” of Acheh had, generations earlier, planted one of its members at Luar Batang; and the veneration enjoyed by the latter’s tomb is a measure of the spiritual capital on which the Achehnese branches of the family were able to draw. The case illustrates the network character of the Hadrami diaspora, in which a single family might maintain a presence simultaneously at Batavia, in the Hadramaut, and at the several ports of the Achehnese coast.
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.