Article

Malay Sufism as illustrated in an anonymous collection of 17th century tracts

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Malay Sufism as illustrated in an anonymous collection of 17th century tracts

A.H. Johns published this extensive study in 1957, presenting a transcription, translation, and doctrinal analysis of an anonymous collection of eighteen Sufi tracts in archaic Malay, composed at Aceh in north Sumatra during the first half of the seventeenth century. The work argues that the tracts represent the teaching of a competent but unoriginal Achenese instructor belonging to the school of Shamsu’l-Din (d. 1630), and that they illustrate the homogeneity of Muslim mystical thought across the Indo-Malay world at a period when Aceh was the successor to Malacca as the region’s political, commercial, and religious centre.

Summary

The manuscript under study is MS. 11648 of the Marsden Collection at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a 325-page volume containing eighteen tracts written in a single hand on local bark paper, with archaic Malay spelling and occasional Achenese vocabulary (pp. 5–6). Johns establishes the dating through internal evidence: the latest quotations are from Shamsu’l-Din’s Jauhar al-Haka’ik and from Sharif ‘Aidarus (d. 1628), and the text states it is written “in the language of the people of Pasai” (p. 6). The tracts open with khutbah-like formulas and read as a series of lectures delivered by a guru at a mosque or surau, presupposing considerable prior knowledge in the audience (p. 9).

The doctrinal content is firmly within the Wujudiyya (pantheistic) tradition, built upon a schema of seven grades of being: Ahadiyya, Wahda, Wahidiyya, followed by the World of Spirits, the World of Ideas, the World of Bodies, and the World of Man (pp. 21–22). The central metaphysical principle is that all being is one; God’s attributes and acts are identical with His Essence, and the visible world is merely a set of aspects (mazahir) under which the One reveals itself (p. 20). The position of man is that of the Perfect Man (insan kamil), who is the point of return by which God’s self-thought returns to its own absoluteness, and who bears God’s twenty necessary attributes as vice-regent (khalifah) (pp. 26–27). The practical path to union with God is through dhikr (recitation), murakabah (observation), tawajjuh (concentration), and mushahadah (contemplation), with the recitation of La ilaha illa’llah, Allah Allah, and Hu Hu as the three ascending objects of practice (pp. 27–28).

Johns situates the tracts within the broader development of Sufi metaphysics by tracing the lineage from al-Hallaj’s dualist Lahut/Nasut doctrine through ibn al-‘Arabi’s absolute monism to al-Jili’s Insan al-Kamil, which provided the most widely circulated formulation of the system (pp. 11–19). He then demonstrates that the tracts diverge from Hamzah Pansuri’s teaching, which follows a different emanation schema closer to al-Jili, but align closely with Shamsu’l-Din’s Jauhar al-Haka’ik in their use of the seven-grade framework, the creation of the Ruh al-Kudus, the allegory of God addressing the spirit, and identical quotations from Malik ibn Dinar and Sharif ‘Aidarus (pp. 30–31). The seven-grade system itself appears to be of Indian origin, first crystallized in Fadl Allah’s Tuhfa al-Mursala ila’l-Nabi, on which a commentary was written expressly for the people of Aceh (p. 32).

Key Findings

  • The manuscript is a 325-page volume of eighteen tracts in the Marsden Collection (SOAS MS. 11648), with a verbatim copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (Malayo-Polynesien 31); the paper is local bark paper without watermark or lines (p. 5).
  • The tracts employ a seven-grade emanation schema (Ahadiyya, Wahda, Wahidiyya, ‘alam al-arwah, ‘alam al-mithal, ‘alam al-ajsam, ‘alam al-insan) that differs from Hamzah Pansuri’s system but matches Shamsu’l-Din’s Jauhar al-Haka’ik in structure and key passages (pp. 30–31).
  • The author is identified as a competent but pedestrian teacher, not one of the four major Achenese figures (Hamzah, Shamsu’l-Din, al-Raniri, ‘Abd al-Ra’uf of Singkel), based on the mechanical repetitiveness of the style and the precis-like structure of the tracts (p. 29).
  • The tracts contain two quotations from Sharif ‘Aidarus, an Indian author who died in 1628, providing direct evidence of religious contact between India and Aceh (pp. 6, 31).
  • The seven-grade framework first appears in the Indian mystic Fadl Allah’s Tuhfa al-Mursala ila’l-Nabi (Leiden MS. Cod. Or. 5690), and the substitution of Ahadiyya for the earlier al-‘ama may represent either a re-affirmation of the Muslim doctrine of God’s oneness or a return to the Neo-Platonic tradition (p. 33).
  • The political context mirrors developments in Mughal India: the death of Iskandar Muda in 1636 and the arrival of al-Raniri in 1637 brought a sudden reversal of policy against heterodox mystics in Aceh, paralleling the orthodox turn under Shah Jahan and Aurangzib in India (p. 33).

Conclusion

Johns concludes that the tracts, while lacking the originality of the great masters of Muslim mysticism, form part of an integral whole that demonstrates the homogeneity of Islamic thought across the Muslim world at this period. They are of the same type as mystical writings found in India and Java, and their study illuminates the development of Muslim religious thought in medieval India, of which very little is otherwise known. The Neo-Platonic tradition had become so thoroughly integrated into orthodox as well as heterodox Sufism that even al-Raniri, the most intolerant representative of orthodoxy, employed a thoroughly Neo-Platonic doctrine, differing from the Wujudiyya only in insisting that the world is a manifestation of God rather than God Himself (pp. 33–34).

Context

  • The manuscript belongs to the Marsden Collection at SOAS, assembled by William Marsden during his time in Malacca; Marsden himself described it as “An exposition of the mystical doctrine of the Sufis in the Malayan language” and translated several extracts for his dictionary (p. 5).
  • The article originated as a doctoral thesis written in London in 1954 under the supervision of C.C. Brown and Dr. Fakhri, with assistance from P. Voorhoeve, Curator of the University of Leiden library, making it the first thesis on Indonesian Islamic mysticism written for an English university (pp. 3–4).

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