Sir Richard Winstedt’s summary of the “Tuhfat ul-Nafis”
Amin Sweeney’s short note identifies a series of factual inaccuracies in Sir Richard Winstedt’s summary of the Tuhfat ul-Nafis, a Malay historical text concerning the Bugis and Malay polities of the Riau-Lingga archipelago.
Summary
Sweeney collates passages from the Tuhfat ul-Nafis and the Silsilah Melayu dan Bugis and documents at least nine specific errors in Winstedt’s summary, including misattributions of marriage partners, incorrect identification of who initiated the Selangor-Perak war, confusion over the ethnic identity of certain figures (e.g., the Raja Tua as Bugis rather than Malay), and a misreading of kinship terms (Sayid Ali as nephew rather than brother-in-law of Y.T. Muhammad Ali). (p. 155)
Sweeney further challenges Winstedt’s broader claim that the Tuhfat ul-Nafis and the Silsilah Melayu dan Bugis were both authored by Raja Ali of Riau, noting a pencilled note inside a manuscript dated A.H. 1307 attributing the work to Raja Ali’s father, and observing the implausibility of both texts being completed within three months of each other in A.H. 1282. He concludes that the Maxwell manuscript contains fewer corruptions than the 1923 text Winstedt published. (p. 156)