Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese Vol II. - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/41

 of the pěngulus and naibs (but not the so-called desa-clergy) have, it is true, attended a pěsantrèn for a time, but there are many who have entirely neglected such instruction. What is still more striking, however, is the fact that the great majority of students in pěsantrèns never think of competing for a "priestly" office; indeed it may be said of ninety per cent of the santri or students that they would be unwilling to fill such offices, and that they rather as a class view those who occupy them with contempt and sometimes even with hatred.

As in Java so also in Sumatra and elsewhere relations are proverbially strained between the gurus or "kyahi" (as they are called in Java) i.e. the non-official or teaching pandits, and the pěngulus and their subordinates, including those officials in other countries whose duties correspond to those of pěngulu in Java.

Those who administer the Moslim law of inheritance and marriage, who control the great mosques and conclude marriage contracts, regard these kyahis and all belonging to them as a vexatious, quarrelsome, hairsplitting, arrogant and even fanatical sort of people; while these teachers and pandits, on their part, accuse the pěngulus of ignorance, worldliness, venality and sometimes even of evil living.

As we have already observed, by far the greater number of the students who frequent the pǒsantrèns or pondoks in Java, the suraus in mid-Sumatra, or the rangkangs in Acheh, is composed of embryo teachers or pandits, who disdain rather than desire office, or of those whose parents set a value on a specially thorough course of religious instruction. Such institutions could only properly be termed "schools for the priesthood" if we might apply the name of priest to all persons who had passed through a course of theological training.

In Acheh as well as in Java there are to be found among the students young men of devout families; sons of the wealthy and distinguished whose parents consider it befitting that some of their children should practise sacred learning; lads who study from an innate love of and impulse towards learning, to contradict which would be esteemed a sin on the part of their parents; some few who are later on to be pěngulus, naibs, teungkus of meunasahs or kalis, though fewer in Acheh even than in Java, since devolution of office by inheritance forms the rule in the former country; and finally those of slender means, who hope to attain through their learning a competence in this world and salvation in the next.