“Sangsui beuneung tawoe bak pruet, karu buet tawoe u punca.”

A tangled thread returns to its origin; a tangled matter returns to its root.

(Hadih Maja-Acehnese Proverb)

On 31 March 2026, the Dutch Director-General for Culture and Media and the Indonesian Ambassador to the Netherlands signed the restitution of three objects from Amsterdam’s Wereldmuseum collections to the Republic of Indonesia: a 13th-century Shiva statue from East Java, an inscribed stone known as the Prasasti Damalung from Central Java, and a lithographed Qur’an looted in 1896 from the home of Acehnese resistance leader Teuku Umar (1854–1899) and his wife Cut Nyak Dhien (1848–1908) in Lampisang,  Aceh.

The transfer was the fourth major restitution to Indonesia under a Dutch colonial collections policy that since 2021 has returned over 500 objects to former Dutch colonies. The program represents a genuine shift in how the Netherlands handles its colonial past.

My first instinct—or rather my hope—was that the Qur’an would go back to the house. It has not, at least not yet.

The Qur’an along with the other two objects will go to the Museum Nasional Indonesia in Jakarta, 2,700 kilometres from Lampisang, a village where Dutch soldiers seized the Qur’an from a burning home in May 1896. It will not go to Rumah Cut Nyak Dhien, the replica of the house from which it was taken, which stands in the province of Aceh today as a local museum.

The Dutch government returns objects exclusively to national governments. In the Indonesian case, what happens after an object is returned by the Netherlands is decided to authorities in Jakarta. Mirjam Shatanawi, who conducted the provenance research on Teuku Umar’s Quran confirmed recently that, no restituted object has yet made a second journey from Jakarta to its place of origin; everything stays in the capital.

Returning colonial loot is necessary and long overdue. But this Qur’an (inventory number WM-74931) exposes a gap in how restitution is done. The restitution process painstakingly traces who took the object and where it went over the past 130 years. But it has overlooked the social and legal order that existed before it was taken, including gender relations. By leaving it unexamined, the process validated the colonial act of naming even while having physically returned the book. The result is a Qur’an taken from a woman’s home in Aceh being returned to Jakarta under her husband’s name.

The politics of naming

Dutch colonial sources consistently refer to the house in Lampisang as Huis van Toekoe Oemar te Lampisang or Teuku Umar’s house. Acehnese sources describe it differently.

In Acehnese adat (customary law), the wife, known as po rumoh or “owner of the house,” holds authority over the marital home. The Lampisang house was built with Dutch funds given to Teuku Umar after his brief alliance with the Dutch in 1893. In local terms, it remained his wife’s domain, belonging to Cut Nyak Dhien. After Teuku Umar died in 1899, she continued leading resistance until her capture in 1905. Dutch officials still recorded the house under his name because their legal system did not recognise Acehnese property customs.

Between 23 and 25 May 1896, KNIL troops attacked the house in Lampisang. It was not only a military target but also a domestic space run under local custom by a woman. They were destroying a domestic space that, by local custom, a woman owned and ran. A war correspondent for De Locomotief published a detailed account of the attack, describing soldiers moving through a well-furnished home—containing rocking chairs, large mirrors, beautiful cabinets, a music box worth 300 guilders—and pausing to assess what “the lot might be worth”. He noted favourably that the troops “deserve[d] a little windfall”. The house was burned the following day, with soldiers and bystanders picked through the wreckage taking what remained.

Shatanawi further points out that at least four Qur’ans were taken from the house across those two days: one by Sergeant Major Meijer Content, now at Leiden University Library; one by Captain G.C.E. van Daalen, has unknown whereabouts; and the one taken by Ferdinand Kenninck, which became WM-74931. A fifth was taken in August 1896 as Teuku Umar fled. That multiple Qur’ans were present is not surprising. In Acehnese households, each person typically had their own Qur’an, so each seized copy belonged to someone specific, even if the archive does not record them.

The looting of Qur’ans was not random. Dutch forces during the Aceh War had a documented pattern of confiscated Islamic manuscripts, including works seen as inspiring resistance, such as the Hikayat Prang Sabi. Qur’ans were taken as part of an effort to weaken ideological support, not just to take valuables.

By the 1890s, objects linked to Teuku Umar had also become collectible among Dutch officers. The attribution to him was itself unreliable, donors sometimes named him to raise an object’s value. At least eleven objects described as originating with him entered Dutch museum collections. The category was unstable, and it was male-centered. Cut Nyak Dhien, the po rumoh, who actually managed the household, is absent from the records. The house was rebuilt as a museum replica in 1982 and is known as Rumah Cut Nyak Dhien. But the Qur’an taken from it will not be returning there.

The inscription that made it matter

The Qur’an now known as WM-74931 was not made in Aceh. Its colophon shows it was printed in February 1879 by the al-Hasaniyya press in Bombay. It was a common, mass-produced book, one of many exported each year to Muslim communities across Southeast Asia. In fact, three Qur’ans in Dutch collections linked to the Lampisang raid came from the same publisher and year. Before 1896, there was nothing unusual about it.

Objects like this often become historically important not because of what they are, but because of what happens to them.

On 6 June 1896, Ferdinand Kenninck, a Dutch colonial officer with the KNIL (Royal Netherlands East Indies Army), wrote on the flyleaf: “On the 25th of May 1896 (Whit Monday) this qur’an was taken by the undersigned from the home of Teuku Umar at Lam Pisang”. With this note, a household Qur’an, likely used by one of the women in the family, as it was common in Acehnese households for individuals to keep their own copies, was turned into a named war trophy and linked to a male resistance leader. The timing is also not neutral and carries significant meaning: Whit Monday is Pentecost, a Christian feast day marking the founding of the church. Recording the seizure of a Muslim holy book on that day places the act within a Christian calendar, subtly framing it as part of a broader claim of authority over Acehnese Islamic resistance.

The book itself holds no trace of its earlier life. There are no handwritten notes in Arabic, no local markings, nothing to show who owned or used it. The only recorded claim of ownership is the one written by the officer who took it.

The Dutch Colonial Collections Committee’s 2025 report states that it “cannot be definitively established” whether the Qur’an belonged to Teuku Umar or to another household member. This is technically correct, but it reflects the limits of the record rather than the absence of ownership. Under Acehnese adat (customary law), household property was organised in ways Dutch colonial records did not recognise, so it was never recorded. What looks like missing information is actually a system that never documented certain forms of ownership. This is the difference between a missing record and an excluded one.

Looted in 1896, nationalised in 2026

Over 130 years, the object has passed through two transformations. In 1896, Dutch soldiers turned a household Qur’an into a war trophy. The continued prominence of Teuku Umar as a national hero in Indonesia has helped sustain those colonial narratives of ownership. Although Cut Nyak Dhien is also honoured as a national hero, both the archive and public narratives about the Lampisang house have continued to centre on Umar. The Dutch archive gave the object his name, and Indonesian national narratives have largely kept it. The absence of the female owner and the decision to place the Qur’an in Jakarta are not separate issues. They reflect the same underlying structure. The Qur’an was a printed book in Bombay in 1879. It became a war trophy in Lampisang, Aceh in 1896. It is now treated as national heritage in Jakarta in 2026. At no point in this trajectory does the woman who owned the house appear in the official record.

This outcome is not only shaped by Dutch policy, which returns objects to national governments by design. The Indonesian state also has the authority to decide where restituted objects go, including placing them in regional or local institutions.

In practice, however, priorities are set differently. In 2023, Sri Margana, a historian at Gadjah Mada University and a member of Indonesia’s Repatriation Committee, noted that priority is given to “artefacts from Indonesia’s Hindu period and royal regalia”. his focus on court culture, especially from Java, leaves little space for objects like a looted Qur’an from an Acehnese household. As I have discovered, the care of Cut Nyak Dhien’s memorial sites outside Aceh has itself functioned as a diplomatic instrument, a way of managing the tension between Acehnese regional identity and Indonesian national unity. The Qur’an going to Jakarta follows the same logic. Acehnese heritage moves from one capital’s custody to another.

In Addition, Hafnidar, Curator and and co-author of research on decolonising Acehnese museum collections, in a personal communication made points about the practical obstacles. Sending objects back to regional museums requires transport, insurance, conservation, and packing standards that many local institutions cannot yet afford. These are real constraints, but the deeper issue is structural. The restitution system was not designed to ask where an object should go. By default, it assumes national institutions as the destination.

A different approach is needed. At minimum, the Indonesian Ministry of Culture should consult regional stakeholders before deciding where restituted objects are placed. This includes identifying which community has the closest connection to the object and what support is needed to house it properly. Objects from the Aceh War have clear and traceable origins. Placing them in a national museum in a city with no direct historical link is not decolonisation, it is relocation.

Returned, but not home

A replica of the house now stands in Lampisang where the original was burned in 1896. It is known as Rumah Cut Nyak Dhien. The Qur’an taken from that house will be displayed 2,700 kilometres away.

The restitution of Teuku Umar’s Qur’an corrects one historical wrong. The Dutch state has acknowledged that the object was looted and agreed to return it without conditions. This is a real and hard-won step.

But the restitution still rests on a colonial record. The Qur’an is identified through a note written by a Dutch officer, Ferdinand Kenninck. The Acehnese domestic setting in which the object was kept does not appear in the archive. The restitution follows the colonial name, relies on colonial documentation, and places the object in a national museum far from where it was taken. The act of taking has been addressed. The act of naming has not.

Cut Nyak Dhien’s name is on the house. It should also be part of the record of the object that came from it.