Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/204

 of the theoretically recognized inviolability of the life and goods of Mohammedan strangers, "I am no Kling who can be slain unavenged", we can imagine how little regard is paid to the life and property of unbelievers who derive no protection either from religion or adat.

The history of the Achehnese has withheld from them the indispensable practical lesson, that Mohammedans may not in fact assail the lives and property of those of other creeds with impunity. Thus appearances favoured a belief in the truth of the teaching of the old adat, which was here in accord with religion; and we cannot wonder that the Achehnese expounders of the law, who had little sympathy with any intercourse between Mohammedans and people of other nations, should have refused absolutely to admit the use or necessity of that remedy of moderation which elsewhere mitigated the strictness of the doctrines regarding infidels.

Here too, just as at Mekka, the special few who through travels in distant countries had formed new opinions regarding the proportion existing between the power of Islam and that of the unbelieving world, kept the results of their experience a secret, as the betrayal of such a spirit would have been laid to their account as heresy or concealed infidelity. Where the people in Great-Acheh or the litoral states refrained for a time from plunder and cheating they did so from a short-sighted conception of personal interest, and never grasped the fact that their truest interests demanded the complete abandonment of such malpractices. We only meet sporadic germs of such a notion among the inhabitants of the coasts.

Infidels who let it be seen that they considered themselves on a level with the Achehnese were objects of universal abhorrence; the rest were regarded as fair game for all manner of deception and cheating, since neither religion nor moral or political insight laid any restraint on such conduct where the infidel was concerned.

This state of things still remains almost unchanged. The fact that such is the case is not mainly attributable to the augmentation of hatred against infidels which was the necessary result of the invasion of a kafir power. Indeed this very invasion gave rise here. and there to a belief in the desirability of forming alliances with other infidel powers. When all efforts to this end proved unsuccessful, those other infidels who would have no relations with the Achehnese save those of commerce, rose in the estimation of that people, while their hatred