Ibrahim Abu Bakar
A 16
TH
CENTURY POET
Comment on the book
AL-A TTAS, S. M. (1970): The mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri
T
his book on the mystical teachings of a Malay mystic named Hamzah Fansuri is originally a doctoral thesis submitted in May 1966 to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. The thesis is published “in its original form, with the exception of a few additional footnotes and bibliographical citations, no other alterations have been made in the text of the book.”(p. ix) Generally speaking the book presents Islamic philosophical mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri who lived in the sixteenth century A.C. in Barus on the west coast of north Sumatra. Sumatra is one of the islands in the Republic of Indonesia in the present political setting. Fansur is another named for Barus. Technically speaking the book is divided into parts, chapters, appendices and cited bib liography. Covering the first chapter up to the sixth chapter, Part One is the comprehensive presentation, ex position and commentary of Hamzah’s life, his main opponent and his mystical teachings based on his prose works and poetic verses or poems. The first chapter presents presents the biography biography of Hamzah Fansuri, and Chapter II presents Nuruddin al-Raniri who opposed Hamzah Fansuri. Chapter III covers Hamzah’s mystical teachings and doctrines namely God’s oneness, the created things in the world, the perpetual creation, the fixed essences, the spirit and the soul or self, the divine attrib attrib  utes, and the meanings of extinction, gnosis and freedom in Islamic mysticism or Sufism. Chapter IV analyzes Hamzah’s concept of the divine will (God’s iradah ), and semantically compares it with the Malay word hendak that means iradah in Arabic. Chapter V semantically analyzes Hamzah’s mystical key words. Chapter VI is the conclusion for the Part I. The book Part II has six chapters ch apters and al-Attas explains that t hat the Part II contains “An annotated Romanized Malay edition of Hamzah’s three prose works and an annotated English translation of the texts.” (p.203). The introduction for the Part II traces what has been done by the previous scholars to some of Hamzah’s works. For example, John Doorenbos of Holland worked on Hamzah’s works for his doctoral dissertation for the University of Leiden and it was later on pub lished in 1933. Doorenbos’s published work has many problems. For al-Attas, “Doorenbos was not sufficiently familiar with the structure of the Malay language in general, and Hamzah’s indi vidual use of it in particular, to be in a position to fulfil his task satisfactorily. This judgement is based on an examination of his edition which, in certain respects reveals much to be desired and in others is fraught with telling errors both trivial and grave.”(p. 205). It seems that al-Attas has found some minor and grave mistakes in Doorenbos’s work on Hamzah Fansuri, and al-Attas’s work points out to those mistakes and makes corrections to those mistakes. Chapter VII is devoted to the work of Hamzah entitled Asrar entitled Asrar al-arifin , and Chapter VIII is to his work named n amed Sharb al-ashiqin , and Chapter IX is to his work named al-Muntahi. The titles of Ham zah’s works are written in Arabic but the texts are written in Malay of Arabic alphabets. For Chap
Entelequia, revista interdisciplinar, interdisciplinar, nº 2, otoño 2006
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by Ibrahim Abu Bakar / 323
ter X, XI, and XII, they are devoted to Hamzah’s poetical works translated into English namely “The Secrets of the Gnosis”, “The drink of Lovers” and “The Adept”. There are seven appendices included in the book. The first appendix consists of short state ments by Hamzah (pp. 475-477). The second, third and fourth appendices are the works of Raniri who opposed Hamzah (pp.478-489). The fifth and sixth appendices are works of Hamzah Fansuri (pp.490-526). The seventh appendix is “Alphabetical index of the semantic vocabulary in Hamza h’s mystical system”. The seventh appendix is from page 527 to 542. The last part of the book contains the cited bibliography (pp. 545-556). Al-Attas claims that his work represents the first undertaking made “in terms of a comprehens ive exposition and commentary” of the mystical ideas and teachings of Hamzah. The previous works on Hamzah’s teachings and ideas have not been so comprehensive but covered the small portions of his poetic verses. “Modern Orientalist scholars too —who have merely noticed him al beit only in connection with their bibliographical and historical interest in their notion of Malay lit erature— have understandably failed to recognize and evaluate positively the significant influence” of Hamzah “in the domain of the literary history of the Malays —in particular that aspect of it which bears close connection with the role of Islam in the cultural history of the Malay-Indone sian.”(p. ix). Al-Attas claim is most likely reasonable and acceptable since his work is from his doc toral thesis submitted to SOAS, the University of London. A doctoral thesis customarily and nor mally demands and emphasizes on the new academic contributions in the fields. In this case, the field is the Malay Islamic philosophical mysticism as found and based on the prose and poetic works of Hamzah Fansuri. On the title page, it is stated about the author’s academic qualifications, professorship and aca demic positions. Academically al-Attas, the author, obtained his master degree from McGill Uni versity and his doctoral degree from the University of London. His professorship is in Malay lan guage and literature and his academic and administrative positions are the Dean of Faculty of Arts, the National University of Malaysia, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts, the University of Malaya. From my viewpoint, this book is a very good academic work and its English is also very academic and fluent. It may be considered a classical work for the study of the contributions of Hamzah Fansuri in the Malay-Islamic mysticism and the Malay classical language and literature.
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<p>Vincent Monteil</p><p>Syed Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Hamzah FansuriIn: Archipel. Volume 4, 1972. pp. 244-248.</p><p>Citer ce document / Cite this document : Monteil Vincent. Syed Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri . In: Archipel. Volume 4, 1972. pp. 244248. http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/arch_0044-8613_1972_num_4_1_1028</p><p>244 Les notices sont gnralement assez prcises et donnent les rfrences bibliographiques ncessaires. On remarquera que la statue quadricphale de Gurah que M. Soekmono avait identifie comme Brahma dans une pr cdente publication (3), est identifie ici (n 16) comme une forme de Si va (Bhalra Guru ou Agastya ?) et qu'une statue considre, depuis Stuterheim, comme une reprsentation de Bhma (ongle du pouce long, nudit) est prsente ici (n 20) comme une effigie de Kertolo, un des suivants de Panji. L'une et l'autre interprtation mriteraient un commentaire plus circonstanci. On saura gr aux diteurs et la Caltex Pacific Indonesia qui a f inanc l'dition anglaise et l'dition indonsienne de ce catalogue d'avoir ainsi mis la disposition d'un large public les reproductions de bronzes et d'objets en or qui taient rests jusqu'alors peu connus. D.L.</p><p>Syed</p><p>Muhammad Naguib AL-ATTAS, The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansr, University of Malaya Press, 1970, XVII-556 p., including an annotated romanized Malay edition of Hamzah's three prose works and an annotated English translation of the texts, followed by appendices, a facsimile of the manuscript of Al-Muntah in Arabic script, a bibli ography and an alphabetical index of the semantic vocabulary in Hamz ah's mystical system.</p><p>This book is a Doctoral thesis, presented in 1966 to the University of London. It deals with the mystical ideas and teachings of Hamzah Fansuri, a Malay Sufi poet of the 16th century who lived in Barus (Fansr, in Arabic) on the west coast of North Sumatra, the country of camphor (kapur), had been born in Siam (in Shahr Nawi, which means New Town in Persian), and was most likely dead before 1607. Hamzah travelled in the Middle East and in Java, he had been in Siam and in Malaya ha spoke and wrote fluently Malay and apparently also Arabic and Persin e He belonged to the Qdir Order and his writings reveal the paramount influence of Ibn 'Arabi from Cordoba (who died in 1240) and of Al Insn al-Kmil by 'Abd-al-Karm Jl from Baghdad (who died in 1428). In fact, Hamzah Fans uri was not unknown to the specialists, since the dissertation on De Gesch riften van Hamzah Fansoeri, published in 1933, in Leiden, by J. Doorenbos. But the aim of Professor Al-Attas is different. He uses here a general linguistic and semantic approach. According to him, 'in Hamzah's system the voca3) R. Soekmono, Gurah the link between the central and the east-javanese arts, Bulletin of the Archaeological Institute of the Republic of Indonesia, Djakarta, 1969.</p><p>245 bulary employed does not mainly consist of new words; they are Malay words that were all in existen e even perhaps in pre-Islamic times. But it will be demonstrated that the conceptual network imposed upon these already existing words is new and significant'. More than that, 'this book represents the first undertaking of such a task'. Nobody, so far, has succeeded in placing Hamzah Fansuri in his rightful position. It is from the point of view of tafstr, in addition to the point of view of the history of ideas, that Professor al-Attas's works should be evaluated: the Hamzah Fansuri he knows was never known and never even revealed himself. The author, Professor Dr. Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas, is cur rently Professor of Malay Languange and Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, The National University of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur). As for every outstanding personality, his opinions may be discussed eagerly and even sometimes frowned upon. But one cannot ignore them and one has to weigh them, to consider and finally to decide that this book is important and stimulating, because facts and concepts are studied from a new angle, by a Malay philosopher and linguist, who is himself from a family of well known Sufis, both from his father's and mother's side and even a master in the difficult art of Arabic calligraphy (the cover design represents the Basmalah, in the form of a kingfisher). For him, 'Sufism is the true light of Islam'. And once I heard him say that the purpose of any secular State is to form good citizens, whereas the ideal of Islam is the Perfect or Universal Man (in Arabic: al-insn al-kmil; in Malay: orang kamil or manusia sempurna). Maybe it is necessary to be a genuine Malay Sufi to see through Malay mysticism, a perequisite some what discouraging and even crippling for foreign scholars if they are unaware of the influence of Browne, Nicholson and Arberry and even of Professor T. Izutsu (Keio University, Tokyo) whose lectures Syed M.N. Al-Attas attended in Mc-Gill University (Montral, Canada). In Chapter II, allegations concerning the 'heresy' levelled against Hamzah by Nr ad-Dn Rnr are critically examined. Raniri, who died in 1666, came in 1637, from Gujerat (India) to Atjeh in North Sumatra. Rnr, who branded Hamzah with 'infidelity', is famous and celebrated to-day in Atjeh, but Hamzah Fansuri's writings are nowhere to be found (let us seize this opportunity to praise here the excellent Ph.D. presented by Miss Tudjimah, in 1961, in the University of Jakarta, on the manuscript of Asrr al-Insan, whose author is Rnri himself). Syed M.N. Al-Attas insists on Rnr's point about Hamzah's 'materialistic pantheism'. It appears to him that 'the fundamental issue which lies at the bottom of Rnr's distortion or misconception is the question of the definition of Being'. In short, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that 'Rmn is in fact saying the same thing as what Hamzah has more clearly said'. As the author remarks in Chapter III, 'all Western scholars who in some</p><p>246 way or other studied Hamzah's mysticism have never failed to label it pant heistic' (p. 66). Discussing Hamzah's metaphysics and teachings, Professor Al-Attas makes it clear that 'Hamzah's rejection of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the sense he means is not an affirmation of the doctrine of the World': for him, in fact, God is eternal, He exists in all things that He brought into being, and the Universe Creation is not an illusion. Hamzah says that the things God knows exist 'because of His knowledge of them the condition of the waves is determined by the sea. 'In deed, 'in Hamzah the clear-cut distinction between gnosis and knowledge is vividly stressed in his crnsis'ent use of the Malay word kenal to translate macrifah and tahu to translate Him throughout his writings' (for this, see the often quoted saying of the Prophet: Man carafanofsahu,fa-qad carafa Rabbahu 'Whosoeer knows his self knows his Lord'). 'One of the most important concepts .. is that of human freedom {ikhtiyr) . . . Man, in Hamzah's analogy, is the keris (Malay dagger) whose 'action' .. is non-voluntary. God is the wielder of the keris' (p. 100-102). And Syed M.N. Al-Attas remarks how 'it is unfortunate that many scholars of Sfism, particularly the Western orientalists, have tended to regard the Sfi account of the vexed question of determination and freedom in a rather naive manner, posing philosophical problems and exposing contra dictions out of the formulation of Sfi concepts which they themselves have constructed' (p. 102). 'Finally, it is consistent with the cosmologicalandontological pattern set forth in Hamzah's mysticism that the key word kehendak, when applied to human will and desire in relation to the Divine, does not convey a real meaning, but a metaphorical one, since man as 'phenome non' not have himself as the determining ground of his will' (p. 140). does After this analysis revolving around the conceptual structure of the Malay word hendak (Chapter IV), the author deals in Chapter V with the key words in Hamzah's mystical concepts. In Hamzah's vocabulary, there are three major focus words: wujd, ada and diri. 'No suitable word presented itself in the Malay language, during the period of cultural change in the history of the Malays initiated by the coming of Islam among them, as an equivalent of the abstract concept of Being denoted by the Arabic wujd. As a result of this, Malay Sfi writers and translators have kept the word wujd untranslated, and have adopted it into the vocabulary of the Malay language' (p. 148) In 'Malay, ada conveys basically the meaning 'to be' or 'existing', with a very close semantic relationship with the Malay word m' (content). But 'in Hamzah there are seven differ ent uses of the word to in the relational sense, each defining a particular concept'. It is extremely interesting to note that 'the development towards philosophical abstraction in the Malay conception of being or existence, as reflected in the Malay language, is first found in the writings</p><p>247 of Hamzah. Indeed, they are the earliest evidence in which the usage of ada reveals a semantic change reflecting a new world view a Sfi world view, which though no doubt introduced with the coming of Islam, achieved its full definite and systematic Malay expression in them' (p. 165). As for din, its basic meaning in Malay refers to both the visible being and the human individuality or ego. In other words, in Hamzah diri means as the Self as well as the Universal Soul. In the last Chapter (VI), Professor Al-Attas brings out many important and stimulating conclusions. According to him, 'Hamzah Fansr must be regarded as the first man to set in Malay all the fundamental aspects of Sfi doctrines, and his writings must be regarded as the earliest of the kind in Mal ay, and, for that matter, in any other languages of the Malaysian Archipe lago. The fact that Hamzah says he writes the (Sharb) book in Malay so . that those . . . who do not understand Arabic and Persian may be able to discourse upon the subject seems to me to show clearly that before Hamzah wrote such a book, all known books on the subject were written in Arabic and Persian' (p. 180). Hamzah's texts remain the best and most lucid texts on Sfism, predominated as they are by the Persian influence. The methodolog ical approach chosen by Dr. Syed M.N. al-Attas is a modern semantic analys is, which has opened 'before our vision other horizons intimately connected with the historical problem of Islamization of the Malays At the outset I declare my agreement with van Leur that Hinduism, as the Malay Indones ian peoples practised it, was merely a superstructure maintained by the rul ing group above an indifferent community The Malay-Indonesian society was therefore not a Hinduized society; rather the Malay-Indonesian ruling groups were legitimized sacrally by an Indian hierarcy. .'Professor Al-Attas suggests that 'What (Hindu-Buddhist) philosophy they took they transformed into art at the expense of the rational and intellectual elements As far as I know there has been no Javanese translation of the Upanishads .. ,neither has there been any translation of works of Buddhist theology and philosophy in Malay. The Qur'n, however, has been fully translated with commentary in Malay in the second half of the XVII th century' (p. 187). For the general public, 'the philosophical-mystical world view envisaged by the poets of Old Javanese literature was glimpsed in the wayangs (theatres); filtered, as it were, again through the medium of art' (p.188). 'Neither the Hindu-Malay nor the Buddhist-Malay, as far as we know, have produced any thinker or philosopher of note' (p. 190). And here is the challenge: 'the reputation spread abroad of the MalayIndonesian peoples particularly in Java as being refiners of great cultures, who excelled in syncretizing the great pre-Islamic religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in the sense of fusing and blending them, has no firm basis . . Perhaps 'parallelism' would better describe the fact' (p. 190). On the con trary, 'unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam is traditionally linked with the</p><p>248 West. It carried on the traditions of Judaism and Christianity .. The Islamization of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago should therefore not be compared, it seems to me, with the earlier Hinduization, as has been traditio nally done. It would be more relevant to compare the Islamization process with Western elements' (p. 191). The most important phase was the second one: from the fifteenth century up to the end of the eighteenth century, be cause it is then that, through Sufism, 'the highly intellectual and rationalistic religious spirit entered the receptive mirds of the people, effecting a rise of rationalism and intellectualism not manifested in pre-Islamic times' and turning away the Malay-Indonesian world view from 'a crumbling world of mythology to the world of intelligence' (p. 194), so that, 'finally, it prepared the Malay-Indonesians, in a sense, for the modern world to come' (p. 195). 'Sfis were the disseminators of Islam in the Archipelago' (p.201) and the role of India and Indians has been magnified : in fact, 'India was the springboard for the Middle-Eastern missionaries, large numbers of whan came from the Hadramaut in South Arabia'. As for the spiritual Islamic influence, its sources were either Arab or Persian (p. 199). 'One of the most important single cultural phenomenon directly caused by the influence of Islamic culture, and especially effected during the second phase of the Islamization process, was the spread and development of the Malay language as a vehicle, not only for epic, romantic and historical l iterature, but even more so for philosophical discourse. The use of Malay as the language of Islamic philosophical literature in the Malay-Indonesian Ar chipelago enriched its vocabulary and technical terminology considerably and was one of the paramount factors that displaced the hegemony of Java nese' (p. 197). New view-points, new angles are always interesting, but the thesis presented by Professor Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas, about 'The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansr' is evidence of insight, sincerity and courage: three major virtues which nobody who knows him can deny him. Vincent MONTEIL. Paris, 11th June 1972.</p><p>WIDJOJO NITISASTRO, Population Trends in Indonesia, Cornell Univers ity Press, Ithaca &amp; London, 1970; 266 p. , avec une carte administrat ive l'poque coloniale, 12 graphiques et 84 tableaux. de Java Le Professeur Widjojo Nitisastro est, dans l'Indonsie d'aujourd'hui, l'un des conomistes les plus en vue. Il a fait ses tudes l'Universitas Indonesia de Djakarta, puis l'Universit de Berkeley, o il a obtenu son doctorat, avec un mmoire intitul Migration, Population growth and Econo-</p>