ofthe SAME TREE

again attacked Johor, and Tun Sri Lanang fled after completing thirty-four
episodes. 89 The second Acehnese attack may have been motivated once more
by the challenge that the resumption of the writing of the Sulalat al-Salatin
posed.
Such an interpretation appears reasonable in light of an earlier episode
involving Aceh and Perak. According to the Silsilah Raja-Raja Perak (The
Genealogy of the Perak Kings), sometime in the mid-sixteenth century the
widow and children of the second Perak ruler were taken by the conquering
Acehnese armies back to Aceh, where they were treated as honored guests
rather than as prisoners of war. The eldest son was taken as husband by the
sultanah of Aceh, and four years later in 1579 succeeded as ruler with the title
Sultan Alauddin. He then sent his younger brother back to Perak to rule. 90 The
favorable treatment accorded the royal captives from Perak, and the subsequent
marriage of a member of the Perak royal family to the Acehnese sultanah,
are consistent with seventeenth-century events involving Sultan Iskandar
Muda. In both cases the Aceh rulers were sensitive to the importance of the
Melaka royal line in providing legitimacy to their attempts to be acknowledged
as leaders of the Malay world.
Iskandar Muda’s commissioning of the Hikayat Aceh, apparently sometime
either after the first attack on Johor in 1613 or after the second in
1615, was a significant affirmation of the new identity evolving in Aceh. The
removal of the rival claim from Johor prepared the way for Aceh’s assertion of
leadership in alam Malayu through the legitimizing document of the Hikayat
Aceh. While Sriwijaya used strategically placed stone inscriptions invoking
sacred sanctions to maintain loyalty among its subjects, its successors sought
the same results employing a new medium, the written text. 91 The change in
medium would have combined an older significance of sacred objects with a
new understanding of sacred contents to create an even more powerful object
of sanction and legitimacy for the ruling class. 92
While scholars have argued over which model informed the writing of the
Hikayat Aceh, 93 the more important issue is its intended functions. The most
obvious, of course, was to praise the great Iskandar Muda. After his death, it
appears that this hikayat continued to be recited at special occasions to commemorate
a ruler “whose life,” according to a Dutch East India Company
envoy in the seventeenth century, “was cruel but whose good name would
never die among the Acehnese.” He describes how the Dutch were accorded a
singular honor by the sultanah of Aceh by being invited to a performance by
the musicians and singers of her late father, Sultan Iskandar Muda. The performers
offered a “praise song in which the sultanah’s late father’s deeds were
extensively celebrated, so affecting the nobles and other Acehnese listening to
it that they burst into tears.” 94 This could have been segments of the Hikayat
From Malayu to Aceh 127