ofthe SAME TREE

and religious teachers arriving from the western lands. Building upon the
Islamic traditions established in Pasai and other northeastern Sumatran communities,
Aceh became the pre-eminent Malayu kingdom in the region. It
borrowed models of literature, court protocol, governance, and amusements
from the great Islamic civilizations in India and central Asia. Its greatest legacy
to alam Malayu was to make Malayu synonymous with Islam.
From the middle of the seventeenth century, Johor, with the assistance of
the VOC, began its steady recovery as a power in the Straits of Melaka. By the
end of that century, it had displaced Aceh as the leader of alam Malayu. As
things Malayu became increasingly associated with the Malay Peninsula, Aceh
began to create a distinctive Acehnese ethnic identity often in direct contrast
to the Malayu. The Hikayat Malem Dagang, written in the Acehnese language,
stresses the importance of Islam, but differs from the Malayu emphasis by
elevating the position of the ulama over even that of the sultan. Its focus and
sympathies are with the ordinary people, rather than with the ruling classes,
and the occupation that is most highly valued is that of a farmer rather than a
trader. The Hikayat Pocut Muhamat, another Acehnese work, praises agriculture
as the fundamental basis of Acehnese society and identifies the agricultural
interior as the core of the kingdom. It also depicts the mukim and their leaders
as wielding the true authority in the land, displacing the all-powerful rulers of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Trade in Aceh remained important, but agriculture was becoming increasingly
dominant with the expansion of rice and pepper cultivation. By the late
seventeenth century, restrictive VOC trade policies and the increased competitiveness
of the ethnicized Minangkabau fanned out on both the eastern and
western rantau eroded some of the advantages that Aceh had enjoyed in international
trade. The beginning of the shift in economic priorities from trade
to agriculture is evident during the long reign of Sultanah Taj al-Alam Safiyat
al-Din in her efforts to expand the cultivation of rice and pepper in the interior.
According to the Adat Aceh, this was the period that Aceh’s lands underwent
reorganization into mukim to form the three sagi (provinces) named
after the number of mukim in each: Mukim XXII, Mukim XV, and Mukim
XVI. It was this reorganization which led to the rise of the landed uleebalang
and the importance of the interior, along with Islam and the ulama, as major
features of Acehnese ethnic identity. 185
By the late nineteenth century Snouck Hurgronje, a leading scholar
of Aceh, observed that Malayu was rarely spoken in the kingdom. 186 Yet as
recently as two centuries before, Malayu was the primary language of Aceh’s
court and administration and one of two languages spoken in the kingdom.
In general, the coastal populations spoke Malayu and those in the interior
spoke mainly Acehnese and a few other languages. From being a model of
144 Chapter 4