- Taj ul-Alam
Ratu Safiatuddin Taj ul-Alam (d. 1675) was the fourteenth
sultan of Aceh . She was the daughter of the sultanIskandar Muda and the wife of his successor,Iskandar Thani , who became sultan upon the death of her husband. She was the first of four women to hold the position, thanks to the efforts of the Acehnese nobility to weaken royal power following Iskandar Muda's administrative reforms aimed to undermine them. These efforts were largely successful, and from her reign on the sultanate became a weak symbolic institution, whose authority was limited to capital city itself, while real power was held by the hereditary rulers of outlying districts (the "uleëbang" set up by Iskandar Muda) and the religious leaders (imam orulama ).Taj ul-Alam inherited a tradition of
Islam ic scholarship in the court. She was not as favorable toNuruddin ar-Raniri as her predecessor, and he left the royal employ in 1644. The major writer in her reign wasAbdurrauf of Singkil , who wrote onShafi'i jurisprudence as well as mysticism. Towards the end of her reign, the reputation of the court as a center ofIslam ic scholarship had faded along with its political fortunes.References
* M.C. Ricklefs. "A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1300", 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, pp. 35-36, 51.
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