(Redirected from Seri Ratu Ta\'jul Alam Shah)'Ratu Safiatuddin Taj ul-Alam' (d. 1675) was the fourteenth
sultan of Aceh. She was the daughter of the sultan
Iskandar 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 or
ulama).
Taj ul-Alam inherited a tradition of
Islamic scholarship in the court. She was not as favorable to
Nuruddin ar-Ranirias her predecessor, and he left the royal employ in 1644. The major writer in her reign was
Abdurrauf of Singkil, who wrote on
Shafi'i jurisprudence as well as mysticism. Towards the end of her reign, the reputation of the court as a center of
Islamic 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.