Bad’ al-Amali (Arabic Badʾ al-Amālī, Arabic script بَدْءُ الأَمَالِ, “the beginning of the dictations” or “the opening of aspirations”) — also known as Kasīda al-Lāmiyya fil-tawwidd (in the older Dutch transcription; modern scholarly form al-Lāmiyya fī al-tawḥīd, Arabic اللامية في التوحيد, “the L-poem on [divine] unity”) — is a short Arabic creed poem (qaṣīda) of fewer than seventy verses composed by Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn ʿUthmān al-Ushī around 569 AH / 1173 CE. The poem’s distinctive formal feature is that every verse ends with the Arabic letter lam (ل), giving the work its alternative name al-Lāmiyya (“the L-poem”). The poem was widely memorised and circulated across the Muslim world, including a Malay translation preserved in a sixteenth-century Acehnese manuscript.
Authorship and date
The Bad’ al-Amali was composed by Sirāj al-Dīn al-Ushī around 569/1173. Al-Ushī was a Hanafi jurist and theologian of Central Asian origin, and the Bad’ al-Amali is his best-known work, condensing the principal articles of Sunni creed into a verse form suitable for rote memorisation in the elementary curriculum of the madrasah.
Textual features
The opening line — yakūlu ‘l-ʿabdu fī badʾi ‘l-amālī (“the believer says at the start of the dictation”) — explains the title Bad’ al-Amali. The poem’s distinctive formal feature is that every verse terminates with the Arabic letter lam (ل), hence the alternative name al-Lāmiyya (“the L-poem”) and the description of the work as “the L-poem on creed.” The poem presents a concise theological statement of fewer than seventy verses, suitable for rote learning.
Historical reception and commentaries
The poem was incorporated into Islamic curricula throughout the Muslim world and was the subject of numerous commentaries in Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and other languages of the Islamic commonwealth (see Brockelmann for a catalogue of twenty-nine such commentaries). Its popularity extended to the Malay world, where a sixteenth-century Acehnese manuscript contains an interlinear Malay translation.
Transmission to Aceh
An interlinear Malay translation of the Bad’ al-Amali appears in a sixteenth-century Acehnese manuscript (folios 31–35), demonstrating the poem’s reach into Southeast Asia. The Malay version contains a greater proportion of Arabic lexical items than the contemporary Malay translation of the Burda preserved in the same manuscript tradition — a feature reflecting the creed’s denser Arabic theological vocabulary and the translator’s strategy of retaining key technical terms rather than paraphrasing them.
See Also
- Siraj al-Din Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Uthman al-Ushi
- Burda (poem)
- Kasida (Acehnese poetic form)
- Brockelmann
- Aceh
- Sultanate of Aceh
- Mu’tazila
- Ash’ari
- Qasida
- Acehnese religious poetry
- Islamic creed
Source
20260707_232246_DLP-54-Een_16de_eeuwse_Maleise_vertaling_van_de_Burda_van_al_Bu_s_i_ri_OCR.txt, pp. 98–99 (digitised manuscript containing the sixteenth-century Malay translation of the Burda of al-Busiri, together with the interlinear Malay version of the Bad’ al-Amali on folios 31–35).