ofthe SAME TREE

and the Hikayat Aceh. The Taj al-Salatin, a “Mirror of Kings,” was written in
1603 by Bukhari al-Jauhari and relies heavily on Persian sources. Instead of
engaging in philosophical discussions or definitions of concepts, the text offers
explanations through stories based on the tales of the prophets and on Islamic
myths and histories. This narrative technique, popular and widely used in
the archipelago, was effective in providing models of good Muslim behavior
for rulers, ministers, and ordinary people. The Taj enabled Aceh to create a
model of Muslim Malayu kingship in the seventeenth century, which reached
its pinnacle under Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607–36). The ruler’s daulat or sovereignty
plays a major role in this text. While a just (adil) society is the ideal,
it is never promoted at the expense of the ruler’s daulat. Order represented by
the ruler, no matter how evil, is preferable to rulerless chaos. It was also the
message contained in the Sejarah Melayu, the Malayu text that emerged from
the fifteenth-century Melaka court. The pragmatic view of kingship in the Taj
reflected the situation at the time of writing in Aceh, which had witnessed the
assassinations of five rulers and the deposing of another. 4 The attitude of the
Taj was appropriate for the type of Malayu kingship that began to emerge in
Aceh in the early seventeenth century.
The second text, possibly by Syams al-Din, is the Hikayat Aceh, written in
the Aceh court sometime after 1612. 5 It is a paean of praise to Sultan Iskandar
Muda, and draws upon Malayu, Mughal, and Persian traditions to describe
his supernatural origins and his direct descent from the legendary Islamic
hero Iskandar Zulkarnain. 6 The crowning touch was the depiction of Iskandar
Muda as a Sufi ruler “in-dwelt by God.” 7 In both the Hikayat Aceh and the
Taj al-Salatin, Islam has a major presence. The customs, the activities of the
court, the officialdom, and the ceremonies of the kingdom reflect the strong
influence of the Islamic kingdoms of central Asia and India. As leader of alam
Malayu, Aceh promoted and strengthened Islam in the society and thus made
it a crucial component of Malayu ethnic identity.
When Johor displaced Aceh as the leader of alam Malayu in the late seventeenth
century, Aceh began to promote its own distinctive identity based
on texts written in the Acehnese language. The interior, agriculture, the local
leaders (uleebalang), local religious officials, and the Acehnese language of
the interior were all privileged. They were clearly meaningful boundaries that
separated the new Acehnese identity from the former Malayu one based on
the coasts, international trade, the powerful Sufi religious teachers at court,
and the Malayu language of Pasai and the coastal polities. These new emphases
underscored Aceh’s rejection of the Malayu label and its proclamation of a new
identity and status in the archipelago. Aceh’s subsequent history of resistance
to the Dutch and the overwhelming influence of Snouck Hurgronje’s study
of the Acehnese in the late nineteenth century have obscured Aceh’s earlier
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