Padang Mekka — known in Arabic as the Padang Mahshar (the Plain of the Resurrection, al-mahshar) and in Achehnese as Padang meuka — is the eschatological plain upon which, according to the Mohammedan faith, the dead shall be raised at the last day and assembled for judgement. In The Achehnese Vol. I, Snouck Hurgronje invokes the plain in connection with the choice of sacrificial animals and with the popular eschatology of the Achehnese.
The Sacrifice and the Steed of the Resurrection
The author explains that the choice of the sacrificial animal in Acheh is regulated by a belief in the widespread Eastern Archipelago, that an animal offered as a sacrifice will hereafter serve the sacrificer as a steed upon the “plain of the resurrection” (padang meuka). A goat is too small for this purpose, and a buffalo, accustomed as it is to wallow in mud and shallow water, might inconvenience his rider at the Last Day. The Achehnese therefore commonly choose a cow, or — among the wealthier — a horse or camel where these are obtainable, in order that the sacrifice may serve the worshipper as a fitting mount upon the Plain of the Resurrection. The belief is connected with the great sacrificial feast of the Hajj, celebrated in the valley of Muna near Mekka.
Achehnese Eschatology
The mention of the Padang Mekka — literally the “plain of Mekka” — reflects the way in which the Achehnese imagination fuses the sacred geography of the Hajj with the eschatological geography of Islam. The plain upon which the dead shall be raised is, in Achehnese thought, the same plain upon which the pilgrims assemble at Mekka; and the sacrifice offered at home is conceived as a vicarious rite, by which the worshipper secures for himself a mount upon that same plain. The popular etymology which connects the padang meuka with the Padang Mekka testifies to the central place which the holy city occupies in the Achehnese religious imagination.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Padang Mekka
Padang Mekka — also Padang Mahshar, from the Arabic Sahat al-Hashr (the Field of the Gathering) — is not, properly speaking, a geographical place at all but the eschatological plain of resurrection in Islamic belief, on which, at the end of time, the dead will be raised and assembled for judgment. In the Malay and Achehnese Muslim imagination the plain is conventionally located near the holy city of Mecca, hence the name Padang Mekka — “the Plain of Mecca” — which fuses geography and eschatology into a single, instantly recognisable phrase.
Place in Van der Kemp’s article
In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the phrase belongs to the religious-cultural register that surrounded the Acheh court and that formed the indispensable background to its diplomacy. The Acheh treaty of 1819 was negotiated with rulers and chiefs who, like all Achehnese Muslims, framed their political dealings in language saturated with Qur’anic and prophetic reference; the same vocabulary that produced the sultan’s Arabic titulature and the formulas of Malay letter-writing also yielded expressions such as Padang Mekka, in which the destinies of this world and the next were held to meet. The phrase is therefore best read as an instance of the wider religious idiom within which the events of 1819 must be understood.
Religious background
Islamic tradition describes the Day of Resurrection (Yaum al-Qiyamah) as beginning with the sounding of the trumpet by the angel Israfil; the graves will give up their dead, and all humanity will be gathered — barefoot, naked, uncircumcised — on a plain of terrifying extent, there to wait for the scales, the books, and the bridge (Sirat) over which the faithful and the damned shall pass. Classical exegesis located the gathering at Jerusalem in some traditions and at Mecca in others; in either case the plain was imagined as a vast, level space. The Malay name Padang Mekka reflects the Meccan tradition, in keeping with the long-standing identification of Acheh itself as the Serambi Mekkah — the “Verandah of Mecca” — the most northerly outpost of Islam in the archipelago and the channel through which pilgrims and scholars passed on their way to the Holy Cities.
Acheh as Serambi Mekkah
The connection thus runs in both directions. Just as Acheh looked towards Mecca for its religious authority, so the eschatological plain was, so to speak, projected back onto Acheh’s symbolic geography. The phrase Padang Mekka, occurring in the cultural surroundings of the Acheh treaty of 1819, belongs to the same conceptual universe as the sultan’s Islamic titles, the reference to Djohor and Syf as claimants within an Islamic polity, and the dual role of the Panglima Polim and the Sagis of the XXII, XXV and XXVI mukims as both temporal magnates and religiously sanctioned notables.
Significance for the narrative
The eschatological resonance of such phrases is not mere ornament. Van der Kemp’s treatment of the 1819 agreement is, throughout, attentive to the religious and political categories that the Achehnese themselves employed; he reproduces the formulas of the Malay letters, the titles of the sultans, and the structure of the territorial divisions (mukims and sagis) without which the negotiations cannot be understood. Padang Mekka, in this context, is one element of that wider vocabulary — a reminder that the men with whom Raffles and Coombs treated lived, in thought as in ritual, in the shadow of the Last Things, and that their political decisions were framed by a sense of ultimate accountability quite foreign to the secularised diplomacy of the European plenipotentiaries.
See Also
- Muna (ancient Mina)
- Mekka
- Mecca
- Arabia
- Hasan-Husain festival
- Acheh
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Sultan Djohor
- Sultan Syf
- Panglima Polim
- XXII Mukims
- XXV Mukims
- XXVI Mukims
- Stamford Raffles
- John Coombs
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.
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.