MAPPING THE ACEHNESE PAST
Preface
The tsunami that swirled over Aceh’s capital on 26 December 2004 was an
unparalleled disaster. It killed over 160,000 people in the province, including a high percentage of its administrative and academic elite, and destroyed much of its infrastructure of roads, bridges, houses, industries, offices and records. This disaster was on such an undreamt-of scale that it shamed the human actors into overcoming their relatively puny conflicts. Both the agents of Jakarta’s rule in Aceh and the pro-independence activists fighting to end that rule suffered in one day many times the losses their enemies had inflicted on them in decades of conflict.
The main jail of Banda Aceh was among the buildings destroyed by the
giant waves that crashed over the city that day. Among the hundreds of
prisoners killed there were a large proportion of the civilian elite of Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM, Free Aceh Movement), who had been transformed from peace negotiators to criminals seven months earlier, when Jakarta launched its attempted military solution. One of only a handful to survive by getting onto the roof was Irwandi Yusuf, who in the post-tsunami chaos managed to escape to Malaysia, and later to take part in the negotiations for a lasting peace that began only a month after the tsunami. In February 2007 he became the first directly elected governor of Aceh, charged with implementing the Helsinki peace agreement of August 2005 conferring extensive self-government on the territory of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (the State of Aceh, Abode of Peace).
The rebirth of Aceh was long overdue. It had been more at war than at
peace ever since the Netherlands, with the support of Aceh’s erstwhile ally
Britain, launched its assault on the independent sultanate in 1873. The long
conflict with Jakarta has had ruinous effects also on the understanding of
Aceh’s past. Its legendary distaste for foreign rule was distorted by both sides of the conflict for their respective propaganda purposes. Serious research was made impossible by the unsafe conditions and the exclusion of foreign researchers, particularly since 1989. The 2004 tsunami wrought another crisis in this area, annihilating the Pusat Dokumentasi dan Informasi Aceh (PDIA, Aceh Documentation Centre), destroying books and manuscripts, and killing some of Aceh’s leading historians and intellectuals.
The Acehnese past and its present state of study
What does it mean to study the history of Aceh? What kinds of questions have been asked, and which remain to be formulated? Once posed, what sources are available to consult in answering these questions? This volume presents a series of investigations into the diverse source bases that have relevance to Aceh in various periods of its history. This introductory essay aims to provide a broader framework for these individual studies by presenting an overview of the current state of Acehnese history, while highlighting the areas where new work is needed in order to develop a better understanding of the rich heritage and experience of this region.
Aceh has a long, rich and complex history, and the earliest sources we have
point already to its position as a site of cultural and commercial contact with a wide range of other societies stretching from China to the Coromandel Coast of India. Maritime sites in the area such as Lamri are mentioned in the texts of Arab geographers as early as the ninth century.2 Archaeological finds from that site reflect its position as a node in trans-regional trading networks, with considerable amounts of South Indian red-ware found alongside higher-fired ceramics from China, including Yuan blue and white porcelain, in deposits demonstrating a clear intermixture of these various trade items, rather than simply stratigraphic layering.
Some still preliminary observations on the northern and eastern coasts
of Aceh also report the presence of early Muslim grave markers carved in a
distinctive obelisk-like form known as plang pleng, that bear possible southernIndian stylistic overtones (Illustration 1). Similar markers are also found at Gampong Pande in Banda Aceh.3 Another early Islamic site, in the vicinity
Photograph by R. Michael Feener
of Perlak, is known locally as Cot Meuligue — a name that may be derived
from the Tamil malikai (‘palace’ or ‘temple’).4 Despite calls for further work
on this site published over two decades ago, very little has been done, and
Lamri, Cot Meuligue and other heretofore understudied sites remain long
overdue for a systematic archaeological survey (McKinnon 1988:121). With
the openness of post-conflict Aceh, new possibilities for the exploration of
Aceh’s archaeological heritage now present themselves.
This volume thus begins with a state-of-the-field review of early Acehnese
history by Daniel Perret. Drawing upon existing archaeological survey
data, as well as early textual materials in Chinese, Javanese, Armenian and
European languages, Perret presents an overview of early urban settlements in Aceh. The picture that emerges from this is one of a complex constellation of trading ports with far-flung connections across both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. However, much work remains to be done in order to better understand the particular patterns of exchange and relations centred on these North Sumatran nodes in broader regional commercial and cultural networks. Perret’s essay points to some practical avenues for pursuing such work through his catalogue of over a score of sites in Aceh requiring more systematic archaeological investigation, as well as through his assessment of analogous work already done in the neighbouring area of Barus.
During the thirteenth century, the various settlements along the coasts of
northern Sumatra appear to have been largely autonomous under the rule
of various coastal ‘rajas’. It appears that during this period, some of these
ports, including Perlak, were being established under Muslim rule. The earliest Islamic sultanate in the region for which we have any significant surviving sources was established at Pasai (on Aceh’s north coast) at the end of the thirteenth century. This area is particularly rich in early stone monuments in the form of grave markers (Illustration 2), which have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Elizabeth Lambourn, for example, has produced groundbreaking work on both the importation of South Asian models of Muslim funerary monuments and the development of local traditions of Muslim grave markers in the region (Lambourn 2003, 2004). More recently, Claude Guillot and Ludvik Kalus have produced a comprehensive catalogue of inscriptions from the major cemeteries on Aceh’s north coast, dating from c. 1400 to 1523. The catalogue is complete with identifications of Qur’an, Hadith, poetry, and other texts in their inscriptions, as well as a proposed new typology of forms (Guillot and Kalus 2008). Nearly half of the book, however, is taken up by essays advancing new interpretations of this data, in which they reconstruct
the genealogies of Pasai’s rulers in ways that challenge established recensions derived from later Malay literary texts, including the Hikayat Raja Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu. Among the important points advanced by Guillot and Kalus’ work for understanding the earlier history of the region is their highlighting of the significance of latter-day descendants of the Abbassid nobility in contests for religious and political legitimacy during the earliest period of Pasai’s history, as well as the apparent prominence of women in positions of authority. Both of these cases demonstrate important early precursors to subsequent developments of the Acehnese sultanate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
