Taj ul-Alam

Ratu Safiyyat ad-Din Taj ul-Alam , (* before 1636 , † 1675 ), was the 14th Sultana of Aceh .

She was the daughter of the Sultan Iskandar Muda and the wife of his successor, Iskandar Thani , who came to power in 1636 , after whose death in 1641 she became sultana herself.

She was the first of four women to hold this position. It owed this to the efforts of the Aceh nobility, who, as a result of Iskandar Muda's government reforms aimed at suppressing the nobility, wanted to weaken the power of the Sultanate and therefore supported Taj ul-Alam because the nobility assumed that a female Ruler would be able to exercise less influence. These efforts were largely successful, so that during her reign the sultanate became a weak, purely symbolic institution, whose authority was limited to the capital, while the real power came from the noble families of the outlying provinces and religious leaders such as the imams and the ulama was practiced.

Taj ul-Alam continued the tradition of Islamic teachings at court. She was less sympathetic to the religious scholar Nūr ad-Dīn ar-Rānīrī than her husband, so he had to flee in 1644. The most important scholar at the court during their reign was Abdurrauf of Singkil, who wrote about the jurisprudence of the Shafiʿites and about mysticism . By the end of their rule, the royal court's reputation as a center of Islamic teachings had faded along with its political fortune.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jean Gelman Taylor: Indonesia: Peoples and Histories. Yale University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-300-09709-3 , p. 212.

literature

• Merle Calvin Ricklefs: A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1300th reprint. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1993, ISBN 0-8047-2194-7 , pp. 35-36, 51.