Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/49

 nor theologians. They are all trained up in the doctrine that adat (custom law) and hukōm (religious law) should take their places side by side in a good Mohammedan country—not in the sense inculcated by the Moslim law-books, that they should fall back on the adat whenever the hukōm is silent or directs them to do so—, but in such a way that a very great portion of their lives is governed by adat and only a small part by hukōm. They are well aware that the ulamas often complain of the excessive influence of the adat and of its conflict with the kitabs or sacred books, but they do not forget that they have themselves cause to complain of the ambition of these ulamas. They account for this conflict by the natural passion all men feel for extending their authority, a passion they believe would be reduced to a minimum or altogether extinguished if all men tried to be just. They see herein no conflict between Mohammedan and non-Mohammedan elements, but between Moslim rulers who "maintain the adat" according to the will of God, and Moslim pandits who "expound the hukōm", both of which parties, however, sometimes overstep their proper limits.

They have no touchstone to distinguish exactly between what is in accordance with Islam and what conflicts therewith. All their institutions they regard as those of a Mohammedan people and thus also Mohammedan, and these they wish to guard against the encroachments of the kāfir.

That Mr. Der Kinderen and his friends found "no trace of popular customs in conflict with Islam" or of "a customary law having its existence in the consciousness of the people", is as natural as the disappointment of an angler who tries to catch salmon in a wash-tub. They exist all the same, these adats, they control the political and social life of Acheh, but—pace all dogmatic jurists and champions of facile methods—they are nowhere to be found set down in black and white. We arrive at them only after painstaking and scientific research and not through the putting of questions which the questioned "apparently do not understand".

To be explicit and avoid all misunderstanding, we should add that Mr. Der Kinderen in a later part of his memorandum (pp. 10 et seq.)