286 islam, politics and change
in other words, was an instrument of moral self-fashioning, part of a
crucial (and in a sense very ‘modern’) literary development which may
be traced at least to the mid-18th century.⁴² This multilayered aspect
was lost to the ears of Dutch generals. For them, the poem was simply
a dangerous piece of propaganda. Soldiers of the colonial army were
ordered to search villages and houses for copies of the text. Most of these
were destroyed, while some were collected for study.⁴³
In the final decades of Dutch colonial rule Acehnese images of holywar and Dutch ideas about Acehnese fanaticism evolved further. In July
1933, a Dutch military officer called Captain Schmid was murdered in
the town of Lho’ Sukon, North Aceh. The perpetrator was an ordinary
Acehnese villager, who was also killed in the attack. The murder was
widely covered in the Dutch press and became the archetypical example of
a phenomenon known, across the Netherlands Indies, as ‘Aceh murders’
(d:Atjeh-moorden). The Dutch used this term to denote a particular
kind of suicide attack directed at the lives of Europeans. These attacks
were committed by Acehnese individuals (both men and women) who
lived on the margins of society. Poor, outcasts or suffering from an
incurable disease, they had lost any hope for their future and decided to
become martyrs in the name of their faith. Dutch administrators saw the
Atjeh-moorden as something related to, but also distinct from, the ‘holy
war’. In their eyes, the war in Aceh had come to an end in the late 1910s,
which meant that individual attacks on Europeans would no longer be
categorised as ‘acts of war’. Frustrated that the attacks continued to occur,
even though political and economic stability was clearly improving, they
accentuated the more primordial traits of the Acehnese ‘race’, including
religious fanaticism, conservatism, rebelliousness and, ultimately, an
inclination to craziness. In 1923, the largest mental asylum of the Dutch
East Indies was built in Aceh, with the specific purpose of dealing with
the problem of theAtjeh-moorden.⁴⁴
The image of holy war acquired new meanings in the independence
era. In 1945, a group of Acehnese religious leaders issued a declaration
which treated the Indonesian Revolution as jihad.⁴⁵ In the 1950s however,
the Darul Islam under the leadership of Daud Beureueh used the same
slogan to rebelagainstthe Republican government. The idea of jihad was
For an elaboration of this argument see Kloos,Becoming better Muslims.
Damsté, ‘Hikajat Prang Sabi’.
See David Kloos, ‘A crazy state: Violence, psychiatry and colonialism in Aceh,
Indonesia, ca. 1910–1942’,Bijdragen tot de Taal-,Land- en Volkenkunde170, 1
(2014), 25–65.
Reid,The blood of the people, 190.