Aceh: Art and Culture.

• Author: ROSKIES, D. M.
• Position: Review

Aceh: Art and Culture. By HOLLY S. SMITH. Kuala Lumpur: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. xi + 75. $24.95.

There can be few parts of Indonesia that exhibit a greater or a more colorful diversity of historical influence than Aceh, fewer still more porous to external cultural pressure, and none in which the religion of the Prophet has occupied a position of greater centrality in quotidian life and in the popular imagination. A coveted source of pepper, gold, aromatics, precious metals, oils and timbers, and, in days long past, a great Indian Ocean trading emporium, Aceh is the homeland of a remarkable ethnos, one whose love of independence and freedom from external control have brought it into ferocious conflict, first with a government of the Netherlands East Indies anxious to extend its sway across the whole of the vast archipelago, then with the contemporary Indonesian state to whose hegemony Acehnese secessionism, enjoying wide support and latterly taking violent forms, is an intolerable affront.

A proud and warlike people, then, and a devout and enterprising one too; not for nothing has the region been known as Serambi Mecca, or "balcony of Mecca." Situated at the northernmost tip of the Island of Sumatra and, therefore, standing well beyond the range of those centripetal forces that have acted to draw the other islands and provinces of Indonesia inwards to Java, Aceh has always looked overseas, to the Arabian peninsula, and the heartlands of Islam, with whom it has had steady intercourse. With them arose commercial and dynastic ties over the centuries, links of equal importance to India, mainland southeast Asia (Malaya and Indochina, especially) and China evolving in tandem. To their somewhat forbidding cachet as uncompromising Sunni Muslims, everywhere attested in the praxis of daily life, the Acehnese add a renown for prowess and courage in battle, qualities seen to spectacular effect in the long and bloody campaign of resistance to Dutch colonial encroachment in the early years of this century. They enjoy, too, a well-deserved reputation for mercantile canniness and sophistication, fruit of contact (who can doubt) with the Arab, Persian, Indian, and Turkish traders for whom Aceh, in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, was an entrepot second in strategic commercial importance only to Malacca. The official title Daerah Istimewah, or "special region," bestowed upon Aceh in token of its position past and present (the Indonesian...