Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/273

 strictly requires to be provided among the dainties laid before guests on the two Mohammedan feast-days.

It is regarded as 'pantang' for a husband to cohabit with his wife during the night of the feast. Transgression of this prohibition is supposed, should pregnancy supervene, to result in the birth of a child with too many fingers or toes or some other such deformity.

Guns used to be fired in the Dalam on the uròë raya from 4 till the afternoon. Early in the morning all the men go forth and take a "feast-bath (manòë uròë raya). Besides this bath, the law strongly recommends a religious service to celebrate the feast (seumayang uròë raya). This is held in the chapels, great and small, or else without regard to place, in the morning after sunrise, and a sermon follows. In many countries this service, although not obligatory, is more strictly observed than other devotional exercises prescribed by the law. In Java, for example, most chiefs, even though they may never come near the mosque on a Friday, are strict in the observance of the feast-çalat.

Such is not the case in Acheh. Those who assemble to perform the seumayang uròë raya are composed of devotees met together by chance. Chiefs and even the teungkus of meunasahs take but little share in this service. In this case again it is the women who combine together in various places under a female teungku to celebrate these prayers.

Before arraying themselves in festal attire, the men go to pay their pitrah to the teungku. All whose means allows of their paying this tax without fear of stinting their families, must contribute a certain quantity of the grain which forms the staple food of the place in which they reside. They are required to pay so much per head on account of each of those for whose support they are responsible, including their wives and slaves and in some cases their children and parents as well. The staple in Acheh is of course rice, and the Arabic legal measure has been fixed in Achehnese dry measure at 2 arès so heaped up so to rise in a cone at the top. Hardly a single duty prescribed by the law is so faithfully observed throughout the whole Mohammedan world as this. Even those who are really hard pressed by its fulfilment, are loath to neglect this contribution. Persons of distinction in Acheh