Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/196

 Where, however, an ulama goes beyond these everyday limits and travels about the country to enforce reform according to the spirit of the law, the respect he inspires increases to the highest degree, unless his life be in gross contrast with his preaching, and his proceedings manifestly dictated by ambition only. Many Achehnese sinners sympathize in the fullest sense with such a revival, while the rest dare not do otherwise than pretend to assent to it. At times indeed a section of the people will range themselves in opposition to such an ulama; not however under an uléébalang, but under another ulama who differs from the first in his interpretation of certain doctrinal points.

The Habib then, as we have already remarked, combined with his knowledge of the world and his sacred descent all those characteristics which in the long run render the energetic ulama in Acheh the irresistable rival of the chiefs.

Under his leadership a crusade was quickly inaugurated against ram and cock fighting, gambling, opium smoking, paederasty and other illicit intercourse, while the people were strongly urged to the fulfilment of their principal religious duties, as for example the five daily seumayangs or services of prayer.

In the preliminaries to the carrying out of his programme the Habib at once showed himself a competent politician. The opium-smokers were not tracked down to their most secret dens, but only the more public opium-houses were suppressed, and opium smoking in company as practised with various formal observances, especially on the West Coast, was rigourously punished.

One or two marriage alliances with the daughters of powerful chiefs (including the widow of a sultan) strengthened the Habib's position from a wordly point of view, and soon the upholders of the hukōm recognized with joy, and the supporters of the adat with embarrassment, that all others in Acheh were but as dwarfs beside the great ulama.

The Sultan found himself constrained, after discussion with the most important chiefs, to establish a new kind of court of justice (balè meuhakamah) in which the Habib should decide all questions relating to religion. Here they were confronted by the peculiar difficulty that presents itself in every attempt to establish a modus vivendi between the adat and the religious law. For this law comprehends everything, and no good Mohammedan can or may suggest the advisability of replacing any portion of it by a new system.