Article

Genealogies

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Genealogies

Genealogies constitute one of the most persistent and structurally significant genres in the historiographical tradition of the Malay world, serving simultaneously as instruments of political legitimation, markers of ethnic identity, and the principal means by which pre-modern Malay polities anchored their rulers in a continuous temporal framework. Across the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, genealogical texts appear in royal chronicles, court records, and independent family documents, ranging from the mythological progenitor lists of the Tuhfat al-Nafis to the practical pedigree charts of Perak’s noble houses and the royal descent records of Brunei. Their significance is not merely antiquarian: as R. O. Winstedt observed in 1918, Malay history “typically lacks chronological data,” and genealogies provided the principal means of establishing approximate dates for events and persons [1, p. 55]. The genre’s regional prevalence is attested from the Acheenese sultanate’s appropriation of Malaccan royal descent to the Bugis legitimizing constructs of Johor, and from the Hadrami scholarly lineages of Perak to the selesilah (Book of Genealogical Descent) of the Brunei rajas [2], [3], [4].

Scope and Historical Definition

The term “genealogy” in the Malay historiographical context encompasses a range of textual forms that differ in purpose, audience, and degree of historical verifiability. At one end of the spectrum stand the royal chronicles, in which genealogical passages are embedded within larger narrative frameworks. The Tuhfat al-Nafis, the great Malay chronicle of the Johor kingdom composed by Raja Haji Ahmad and his son Raja Ali Haji in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contains a forty-generation Bugis genealogy intended to demonstrate the ancient and exalted lineage of the Raja Muda (vice-regal) family, whose members were of Bugis (non-Malay) extraction in the male line yet occupied the second-highest position in the Malay state system from the early eighteenth century [2, pp. 63–64]. The Bustanu’s-Salatin, composed at Acheh by Shaikh Nuru’d-din Muhammad Jilani ibni Hasanji ibni Muhammad Hamid a’r-Raniri in the early seventeenth century, presents a variant royal genealogy linking the kings of Singapore and Malacca through the post-conquest dynasties of Johor and Pahang to the Acheenese sultanate, offering a rare window into how early seventeenth-century Acheenese historiographers understood the peninsular Malay past [3, pp. 39–40].

At the other end of the spectrum stand the practical pedigree charts produced for administrative or family purposes. Winstedt’s 1918 article presents five such charts of Perak royal and noble families, copied from a manuscript by Raja Haji Yahya, the late mufti of Perak: the Seri Adika Raja, the Seri Amar ‘diraja, the Penglima Kinta, the Megats who held the office of Bendahara until 1770, and the Laksamana, whose founder Nakhoda Hitam was a trader from Pasai [1, pp. 56–62]. These documents are explicitly utilitarian in character, their value lying in their capacity to fix approximate dates for otherwise undated historical figures. The selesilah of Brunei, reproduced in the Society’s Reprint 18, represents yet another form: a dedicated genealogical register of the royal house, published by Hugh Low in 1880 and supplemented by W. H. Treacher’s “Genealogy of the Royal Family of Brunei” in 1885 [4, p. 192].

A further category comprises the religious genealogies of Hadrami-origin families, which trace descent from the Prophet Muhammad through the Alawiyin clan. The Jamalullail family of Perak, descended from Syed Husain Al Faradz, a Hadrami religious scholar who settled in Perak in the early sixteenth century, maintained such a lineage as a matter of both religious identity and political standing [5, pp. 119–121]. The principal Arabic genealogical source for the ahl al-bait (the Prophet’s family), the Shams al-Zahirah by Abd-al-Rahman al-Mashhur (c. 1911), was not available in Southeast Asia until well after the colonial period, a fact that explains the gaps and errors in earlier British scholarship on these families [5, pp. 120–121].

Symbolic and Legitimating Functions

The most analytically rich dimension of Malay genealogical writing is its symbolic function as an instrument of political legitimation. Noorduyn’s 1988 study of the Bugis genealogy in the Tuhfat al-Nafis provides the most detailed demonstration of this principle. He shows that the number forty was deliberately targeted as a symbol of completeness and numerousness, and that the insertion of Prophet Sulaiman and Queen Bilkis of Saba at the head of the genealogy served to Islamize the lineage from its very beginning [2, pp. 83–84]. This was necessary because the genealogy also states that La Maddusila, near its end, was the first Bugis king to embrace Islam—a claim that would otherwise render all preceding generations non-Muslim and undermine the family’s standing in the Muslim Malay world [2, pp. 83–84]. The Tuhfat authors, Noorduyn argues, introduced rationalizing elements, such as their skeptical treatment of the Bilkis connection, that partially obscured the genealogy’s originally more overtly symbolic character [2, p. 84].

The genealogy’s upper reaches (names 2–7: Datu Palinge’, Patoto’, Batara Guru, Batara Lattu’, Sawerigading, La Galigo) are drawn directly from the La Galigo epic, the great Bugis mythological poem, though with errors that reveal the composer’s imperfect knowledge of the source: Patoto’ (the Creator in Bugis mythology) is placed as a descendant of Datu Palinge’ rather than as her consort, and the sequence deviates from the epic’s own genealogical order [2, pp. 73–74]. The middle and lower portions correspond to real historical figures and places in Luwu’ and Wajo’ in South Sulawesi, including Arung Palakka (identified as La Tenritata’) and several Arung-matoas of Wajo’ whose posthumous names are attested in other sources [2, pp. 75–80]. However, the genealogy contains internal contradictions—such as duplicating certain names and placing mythological figures in genealogical positions that contradict their mythological roles—that indicate it was compiled from memory and oral tradition rather than from written Bugis sources [2, pp. 73–74]. Crucially, none of the five Bugis noble brothers who migrated to the Malay world (Daeng Parani, Daeng Marewa, Daeng Cellak, Daeng Menambun, and Daeng Kamase) or any of their ancestors have been traced in surviving Bugis sources from South Celebes, meaning the genealogy cannot be externally verified against its claimed homeland [2, pp. 87–88].

The Bustanu’s-Salatin genealogy illustrates a different legitimating strategy: the projection of a single continuous royal house across multiple polities. The text explicitly connects the Acheenese sultanate to the Malaccan royal house, presenting Sultan Iskandar Ala’ud-din Mughayat Shah II of Acheen (1636–1641) as the son of Sultan Ahmad Shah of Pahang and Puteri Bongsu Chendera Dewi, herself a descendant of the Malaccan line through Siak [3, pp. 46–47]. This construction served the political interests of the Acheenese court, which after the fall of Pasai and Malacca had become the centre of Islamic religion and learning in the region [3, p. 39]. The genealogy’s claim that Sultan Mansur Shah of Malacca was “the most wise and powerful” king, credited with conquering Kampar, Siak, and Indragiri, and that he married a Majapahit princess and a Chinese princess, reflects the Acheenese historiographer’s desire to present the Malaccan past as a prelude to Acheen’s own ascendancy [3, pp. 41–42].

Genealogies also served concrete administrative and legal functions within the Malay state system. The Perak pedigree charts published by Winstedt were valued precisely for their capacity to establish approximate dates: the comparative study of the Perak genealogies points to the end of the seventeenth century for Tun Saban, the earliest figure in Perak’s history, while the more reliable genealogy of the Perak Sayids would place the founding of the Perak dynasty at the beginning of that century [1, p. 55]. The Laksamana pedigree, whose founder Nakhoda Hitam was a trader from Pasai, illustrates how genealogical records could document the integration of foreign-origin families into the Malay administrative elite [1, p. 62].

The Jamalullail case demonstrates the intersection of genealogical accuracy and political authority. The family held three of the four major court positions in Perak—Bendahara, Orang Kaya Besar, and Orang Kaya Menteri—continuously from the founding of the sultanate in 1528 until 1862, a span of over three centuries [5, p. 128]. The “Ninety-Nine Laws of Perak,” a significant legal contribution to the state, were in fact the personal laws of the Jamalullail family, applied through their advisory role as Menteri [3, p. 130, n. 31]. The accuracy of the family’s genealogy was therefore not merely a matter of scholarly interest but directly implicated in the legitimacy of their political and legal authority. Syed Jaafar Aznan’s 2020 article corrects significant errors in Winstedt’s 1918 account, arguing that the number of generations connecting Syed Husain Al Faradz to Muhammad Rasulullah was 25 rather than 23, and that the specific lineage path ran through Ahmad Ba Hasan rather than Abdur-rahman Sakaf [5, pp. 121–122]. Aznan also challenges Winstedt’s dating of the family’s arrival, marshalling the Hikayat Misa Melayu (1784), the appointment of a sixth-generation descendant as Bendahara in 1750, and oral tradition to place the arrival firmly in the early sixteenth century rather than the first half of the seventeenth [5, pp. 125–126].

The Brunei selesilah similarly served to document the continuous descent of the royal house, a matter of particular importance for a sultanate whose early history was “inextricably linked to the maritime trade route on which it was located along the southern fringes of the South China Sea” and which in its halcyon days “enjoyed China’s patronage and became Borneo’s most powerful kingdom” [4, p. 192]. The fact that these early papers, published in 1880 and 1885, are now “all but unobtainable” yet contain “extremely valuable historical information not available elsewhere” underscores the archival fragility of genealogical documentation in the region [4, p. 192].

Textual Transmission and Variant Traditions

A recurring feature of the genealogical record is the existence of multiple variant versions of the same lineage, each reflecting the interests and knowledge of its particular compiler. The Tuhfat al-Nafis genealogy exists in four manuscripts (KITV Or. 65 and three others), while the Silsilah Melayu dan Bugis (printed 1911; MS LOr. 6345, Leiden) generally preserves more original and linguistically correct readings of the Bugis names than the Tuhfat manuscripts and includes two additional names absent from the Tuhfat [2, p. 69]. Ahmad al-Patani’s Hadiqat al-Azhar wa’l-Rayahin (mid-nineteenth century) records a Pontianak version of the same genealogy containing exactly forty names, compared with the 38–39 in the Tuhfat version [2, pp. 83–84]. Ahmad al-Patani dates La Maddusila’s conversion to Islam to 800 A.H. (1397/8 A.D.), a date Noorduyn judges “more than two centuries too early” given that the first Sultan of Luwu’ embraced Islam around 1604–1605 [2, pp. 84].

The Bustanu’s-Salatin genealogy exists in multiple manuscript traditions. Winstedt’s 1920 article is based on a Romanized extract copied for W. Barnes from a manuscript formerly owned by the Sultan of Pahang; the original manuscript has not been traced [3, p. 39]. Winstedt notes that R. J. Wilkinson printed two volumes of the Bustanu’s-Salatin (American Mission Press, Singapore, 1900), but the manuscript was lost before the chapters on peninsular Malay history could be printed [3, p. 40]. Additional copies are known to exist in the Leiden University Library (Codex 1971 and Codex 5303) and the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society, though Winstedt was unable to trace a complete copy in the Peninsula [3, p. 40]. The article’s footnotes record variants between the Barnes copy and a second manuscript whose source Winstedt could not identify, providing a comparative textual witness to the Sejarah Melayu royal genealogy [3, pp. 39–40].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on genealogies reveals a clear evolution in methodological approach across more than a century of publication. The earliest contributions, such as Hugh Low’s Selesilah (1880) and W. H. Treacher’s “Genealogy of the Royal Family of Brunei” (1885), were essentially documentary in character: they reproduced existing genealogical texts with minimal critical apparatus, their value lying in the preservation of material that was otherwise inaccessible [4, p. 192]. Winstedt’s 1918 and 1920 articles represent a transitional phase: while still primarily documentary, they introduce comparative analysis, noting variants between manuscript traditions and situating genealogical claims within broader chronological frameworks [1, p. 55], [3, pp. 39–40]. Winstedt’s 1918 article on the Hadrami Sayyids of Perak, in particular, established a baseline that would later be subject to critical revision.

The most significant methodological advance came with Noorduyn’s 1988 article, which applied Bugis-linguistic analysis to the Tuhfat al-Nafis genealogy for the first time, superseding the earlier partial efforts of Hans Overbeck (1926) and Andi Zainal Abidin (1974) [2, pp. 69–70]. Noorduyn’s work demonstrated that genealogical texts could be analysed not merely as historical data but as symbolic constructs whose internal contradictions reveal the faded state of the compiler’s source knowledge [2, pp. 73–74]. His corrected transcriptions formed the basis for Virginia Matheson’s 1982 romanized text edition of the Tuhfat [2, pp. 69–70]. The primary archival sources for this work include the Tuhfat al-Nafis manuscripts at the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, Leiden, and VOC correspondence in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague [2, pp. 65].

The most recent contribution, Aznan’s 2020 article on the Jamalullails of Perak, represents a new phase in which family members themselves engage critically with the colonial-era scholarly record, correcting errors that arose from the British researchers’ lack of access to Arabic genealogical sources such as the Shams al-Zahirah [5, pp. 120–121]. Aznan’s intervention highlights a structural limitation of the earlier literature: colonial-era scholars, working without access to the primary Arabic sources of Hadrami genealogical tradition, relied on unverified local information, making their accounts subject to critical revision [5, pp. 120–121]. The article also documents the family’s present-day distribution, with descendants concentrated around Teja, Chegar Galah, Parit, Kuala Kangsar, Sungai Siput, and Chenderiang, and notes that the family has reached its seventeenth generation and is probably the largest ‘Syed’ family in Malaysia today [5, pp. 127].

The Society’s Reprint 18, Papers Relating to Brunei (1998), represents an institutional effort to address what its editors identify as “an inexplicable lack of interest among scholars” in Brunei’s early history, resulting in authoritative accounts that “remain relatively rare” [4, p. 192]. The reprint, which includes a foreword by Professor Cheah Boon Kheng, supplements the original publications with papers by Hughes-Hallett, Amin Sweeney, Black, P. M. Shariffuddin, Abdul Latif Hj Ibrahim, and Tun Suffian [4, p. 192]. Similarly, the 1974 reprint of Winstedt and Wilkinson’s A History of Perak (226 pages) made available a foundational text that incorporated genealogical evidence within a broader narrative of the state’s development [6]. Together, these publications illustrate the continuing relevance of genealogical documentation to the historical understanding of the Malay world, and the ongoing need for critical engagement with both the primary sources and the scholarly literature that has accumulated around them.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R.O. Winstedt (1918). Some Perak pedigrees JSBRAS 79: 55–62.
  2. Noorduyn. J (1988). The Bugis genealogy of the Raja Muda family of Riau-Johor JMBRAS 61(2): 63–92.
  3. R.O. Winstedt (1920). The genealogy of Malacca’s kings from a copy of the Bustanu‘s-Salatin JSBRAS 81: 39–47. Read on JSTOR
  4. Hugh Low et al. (1998). Papers Relating to Brunei : 192.
  5. Jaafar Aznan (2020). The Jamalullails of Perak JMBRAS 93(1): 119–132. Read on JSTOR
  6. R.O. Winstedt and R.J. Wilkinson (1974). A History of Perak : 226.