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Nuruddin ibn Ali al-Raniri

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Nuruddin ibn Ali al-Raniri

Nuruddin ar-Raniri (d. 1658) was an Indian-born Islamic scholar and historian who resided in the Sultanate of Aceh for seven years (1637–1644) and produced a substantial body of religious and historical literature, the most ambitious of which, the Bustanus-Salatin, attempted to supersede all earlier Malay historical narratives by situating the Acehnese sultanate at the centre of a universal history [1, pp. 43–44]. His work placed him at the heart of one of the most significant theological controversies in the early modern Malay world—the dispute between orthodox Ash’ari scholars and the Wujudiyyah mystics associated with Hamzah Fansuri and Shams al-Din—and his writings remain central to the study of seventeenth-century Malay historiography, Sufi doctrine, and the political culture of the Acehnese court [2, pp. 83–104].

Life and Literary Output

Nuruddin ar-Raniri was born in Rander on the Gujarat coast of India and undertook the pilgrimage to Mecca in A.H. 1030 (1630–31) [1, p. 43]. He arrived in Aceh on 6 Muharram A.H. 1047 (31 May 1637), carrying with him two Malay-language works, the Durrat al-Fara’id and the Hidayat al-Habib [1, p. 43]. During his seven-year residence in the Acehnese court, he produced fourteen religious works, thirteen of which were composed in Malay [1, p. 44]. In 1638, he was commissioned by Sultan Iskandar Thani to compile the Bustanus-Salatin, a work of seven books and forty-two chapters that ranged from cosmogony to the history of Aceh [1, pp. 43–44]. Book II alone contained thirteen chapters covering the rulers of Persia, Byzantium, Egypt, Arabia, Delhi, Malacca, Pahang, and Aceh [1, p. 52]. The work was conceived as a deliberate attempt to supersede both the Tajus-Salatin as a mirror for kings and the Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Aceh as historical narratives, with Iskandar Thani positioned at the centre of a universal history [1, p. 52].

Nuruddin ar-Raniri died in Gujarat on 21 September 1658 [1, p. 43]. His full name, as recorded in the Bustanus-Salatin tradition, is Shaikh Nuru’d-din Muhammad Jilani ibni Hasanji ibni Muhammad Hamid a’r-Raniri [3, p. 39].

The Wujudiyya Controversy

The most enduring aspect of Nuruddin ar-Raniri’s intellectual legacy is his role in the theological controversy with the Wujudiyyah, a group of Sufi mystics associated with Hamzah Fansuri and Shams al-Din who had flourished at the Acehnese court under Sultan Iskandar Muda [2, pp. 83–84]. His anti-Wujudiyya tract, the Hujjat al-siddiq li-daf’ al-zindiq (‘The True Proof for Refuting the Heretic’), is a twenty-seven-page work that systematically addresses the doctrines of four groups—mutakallimūn (theologians), Sufis, philosophers, and the heretical Wujudiyyah—on the question of whether God’s Being and the being of the Universe are different or identical [2, p. 84].

The tract was commissioned by what Drewes identifies as most probably the Sultan of Aceh himself, successor to Iskandar Muda, based on the singular suffix in the eulogy that follows the reference to the ‘illustrious friend’ (ba’ḍu ‘l-ajillā’i min aṣḥābinā) who requested the work [2, p. 87]. The Sufi position as stated in the tract holds that wujud (being) has a single denotation only—the Essence of God—and that the Universe is ‘adam mahd (pure non-being) [2, pp. 90–91]. The heretical Wujudiyyah, by contrast, held that the formula lā ilāha illā ‘llāh means ‘I have no being save God,’ which they further interpreted as ‘God’s Being is my being,’ and that God’s Essence can be known and His qualities and dimensions are manifest as a concrete entity in space and time [2, pp. 94–95].

A critical distinction drawn in the tract concerns the Sufi judgement on shathiyyāt (ecstatic utterances). The orthodox Sufi position permits expressions such as Ana’l-Haqq (‘I am the Truth’), which are punishable by the letter of the Law but excused by the state of ghalabat al-ḥāl (overwhelming spiritual state), while explicitly forbidding heretical doctrines and any action not agreeable to God, even in states of fanā’ (annihilation) and spiritual intoxication; formal religious duties (taklīf) are not suspended [2, pp. 101–102]. The term faqd in Sufi terminology means ‘absence from the range of perception’ (the opposite of wajada, ‘to find’), not ‘non-being’ (‘adam), and the Sufis object to its equivocal use to describe the nature of things other than God [2, pp. 97–99].

The Bustanus-Salatin and Peninsular Malay History

The Bustanus-Salatin contains a continuous genealogical narrative that traces the descent of the Malaccan, Johore, and Pahang royal houses from the Indian lineage through Sang Sapurba and Sang Nila Utama, following the founding of Singapore and Malacca, the Portuguese conquest, the establishment of Johor, and the parallel Pahang succession, ultimately arriving at the birth of Sultan Iskandar Ala’ud-din Mughayat Shah II of Aceh (r. 1636–1641) [3, pp. 40–47]. The text identifies Raja Iskandar Shah (styled Seri Rama Adikrama) as the first ruler to establish Malacca, giving him a reign of thirty-two years, and presents an elaborate account of Sultan Mansur Shah’s conquests of Kampar, Siak, and Indragiri, as well as his five wives and their offspring [3, pp. 41–42]. The Pahang succession is rendered in considerable detail, with sultans distinguished by honorifics such as Marhum Ziarat, Marhum di-Hilir, Marhum di-Tengah, Marhum di-Bukit, and Marhum Shahid, and the text records the assassination of Sultan Mansur Shah of Pahang by his own hulubalang (warrior retainers) [3, p. 45].

The genealogical account in the Bustanus-Salatin is largely derived from the Sejarah Melayu of Tun Seri Lanang (c. 1612). Linehan, while stationed in Pekan between 1923 and 1926, examined a manuscript of the Bustanus-Salatin lent to him by Tengku Sulaiman, the Tengku Besar of Pahang, and identified a passage in which the Bendahara Paduka Raja states that he composed the genealogies of the rulers of Malacca, Johore, and Pahang, tracing their lineage back to Iskandar Zu’l-Karnain [4, p. 144]. Dr. Ph. van Ronkel confirmed that the same passage appears identically in the old folio manuscript at Leiden University Library, with only minor variant readings [4, p. 144]. Linehan concluded that the Bendahara Paduka Raja is Tun Seri Lanang, and that the genealogical account in the Bustan is largely derived from the Sejarah Melayu [4, p. 144].

The text explicitly connects the Acehnese sultanate to the Malaccan royal house: Sultan Iskandar Ala’ud-din Mughayat Shah II of Aceh is presented 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 genealogical construction served a clear political purpose, legitimising the Acehnese sultanate as the inheritor of the Malaccan royal tradition at a moment when Aceh was the dominant power in the region.

Research and Documentation

The scholarly investigation of Nuruddin ar-Raniri’s works has proceeded along two principal tracks: philological text-criticism and doctrinal interpretation. Winstedt’s 1920 article in the JSBRAS provided the first Romanized extract from a manuscript of the Bustanus-Salatin that had belonged to the late Sultan of Pahang, originally intended for publication by the late W. Barnes [3, p. 39]. Winstedt’s contribution was primarily editorial, presenting the genealogical passage with footnotes recording variants from a second manuscript whose source he could not identify [3, pp. 39–40]. Linehan’s 1933 note, though brief, established the crucial link between the Bustanus-Salatin genealogies and the Sejarah Melayu, a finding that remained foundational for subsequent work on the textual transmission of Malay royal history [4, p. 144].

The doctrinal dimension of the al-Raniri legacy was first investigated systematically by Kraemer, followed by Van Nieuwenhuijze’s detailed study in 1948, Zoetmulder’s summary in 1965, and Al-Attas’s 1966 edition and English translation of the Hujjat al-siddiq, which defended the position of Hamzah Fansuri against al-Raniri’s critique [2, p. 83]. Drewes’s 1974 re-examination in the JMBRAS occupied a specific position in this historiography: rather than adjudicating the theological merits of the case, he confined himself to close textual and linguistic commentary on Al-Attas’s edition, proceeding page by page through the tract and correcting misreadings, mistranslations, and romanization errors [2, pp. 83–84]. Drewes drew on parallel passages in al-Raniri’s Tibyan, on al-Ghazali’s Ihya’, on Ibn ‘Arabi’s Fusus al-hikam and Futuhat, on al-Hujwiri’s Kashf al-mahjub, and on Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon to support his emendations [2, p. 84].

Iskandar’s 1967 article provided the most comprehensive biographical and literary context for al-Raniri’s work, situating the Bustanus-Salatin within the broader Islamic literary milieu of the period and tracing the scholar’s movements from Gujarat to Aceh [1, pp. 43–44]. The article also represented a transitional moment in Malay studies, engaging directly with Winstedt’s textual criticism while introducing comparative literary analysis that would become more standard in subsequent decades [1, p. 53]. The primary sources consulted across these studies include the manuscript of the Hujjat al-siddiq (copyist Enchi ‘Abdulaziz), Voorhoeve’s 1955 facsimile edition with apparatus criticus, the Raffles manuscript collection (Mss 18, 39, 80), the Shellabear edition (1909), Cod. Or. 1954 in the Leiden University Library, and the old folio manuscript of the Bustanus-Salatin at Leiden [2, p. 84], [1, p. 53], [4, p. 144].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. T. Iskandar (1967). Three Malay historical writings in the first half of the seventeenth century JMBRAS 40(2): 38–53. Read on JSTOR
  2. Drewes G.W.J (1974). Nur al-Din al-Raniri’s Hujjat al-Siddiq li-daf al-Zindiq re-examined JMBRAS 47(2): 83–104.
  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. W. Linehan (1933). Source of the Malacca, Johore and Pahang genealogies in the Bustan-al-Salatin JMBRAS 11(2): 144.