Bahasa Djawi (“the Jawi language”) is the name given in the religious literature of Acheh and of the wider Malay-Indonesian world to the Malay language in its written, literary form — the language of the court, of religious scholarship, and of the kitab. It was the language in which Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī composed his Malay treatises, the language in which the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān* and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* were written, and the language that Raniri knew — as Voorhoeve records — before he ever set foot in Acheh in 1637.
The term
The term Djawi (modern Jawi) is, in its widest sense, a designation for the Malay of the Muslim Malay-Indonesian world, written in the Arabic-based Jawi script and used as the lingua franca of religion, commerce, and diplomacy from the harbours of Gujarat to the Straits of Malacca and the Spice Islands. In the narrower sense in which Raniri uses the term — the bahasa Djawi of the Achehnese court — it designates the specific literary Malay that was the language of the court of Iskandar Muda and his successors, and that served as the vehicle for the production of Malay religious prose in the golden age and the orthodox reaction of the seventeenth century.
Bahasa Djawi in Gujarat
Voorhoeve’s introduction to the 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises makes clear that the bahasa Djawi was not unfamiliar in the harbour towns of Gujarat in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The coastal towns of Gujarat had at this period a very international population; ships regularly sailed thence to the Strait of Malaka; among the mercenary troops of the sixteenth century were “Javanese” — that is, in this context, Indonesians. To learn Malay, Raniri had no need of distant travel: “there were Malays enough in Gujarat, and his uncle Muhammad Djailani Hamid will have spoken that language too.” Whether Raniri wrote his first Malay books in Gujarat or elsewhere is, however, an open question.
Bahasa Djawi at the Achehnese court
In Acheh, the bahasa Djawi was the language of the court. Raniri, on his arrival in 1637, knew the language and had already written two Malay works in it, while a third was in progress. His position in Acheh was therefore that of an immigrant scholar who entered a court in which his own literary language was already the language of religious and political life — a position that gave him, with the favour of Iskandar Thani and Taj al-Ālam, an immediate authority in the religious controversies of the day.
The witness of the Tibjān and Ḥujjat
The *Tibjān* and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* are written in the bahasa Djawi of the Achehnese court. The Leiden manuscript Cod. Or. 3291 of the Tibjān — the only complete manuscript, copied about 1855 for Van der Tuuk from a good older exemplar of Achehnese provenance — preserves Achehnese linguistic forms, such as sidjuk (Ach. sidjueʾ) for sedjuk, and the consistent replacement of kesembilan with kesemilan (cf. Ach. seumah, Mal. sembah). The Moluccan manuscript Cod. Or. 1255 of the *Maʿrifat al-madhāhib* with interlinear Malay translation — which Voorhoeve identifies as Raniri’s source for the second part of the Tibjān — preserves an “old-fashioned” Malay in which, for instance, pulang is used for pula.
The play of kuphō and kuphu
A remarkable trace of the bahasa Djawi in the religious literature of Acheh is the play on the words kuphō (Arabic kufr, “unbelief”) and kuphu (Arabic kufʾ, “equal, like”) cited by Hamzah Pansuri in his *Kitāb al-Muntahī* — a play that depends on the fact that pada in Achehnese means both “equal” (Javanese pepada) and “sufficient” (Malay pada). Voorhoeve notes that “the play is in the language of Pasai — that is, in the Achehnese Malay of Pasai” — and that it cannot be reproduced in standard Malay. The play is itself a document of the linguistic specificity of the bahasa Djawi of the Achehnese court: a Malay in which Achehnese forms and meanings were still audible beneath the surface of the Arabic script.
Significance
The bahasa Djawi of the Achehnese court is the language of the golden age of Achehnese letters — the language of Hamzah Pansuri’s *Asrār al-ʿārifīn* and *Kitāb al-Muntahī*, of Shamsuddin of Pasai’s *Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn* and *Chirkah*, and of Raniri’s *Tibjān*, *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq*, *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm*, and *Bustān as-Salāṭīn*. It is also the language by which the scholastic apparatus of Arabic and Persian Islam was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian world: Raniri’s Malay translations from the *Tamhīd* of as-Sālimī, the *al-Insān al-kāmil* of al-Jīlī, and the *Maʿrifat al-madhāhib* are among the principal vehicles of this transmission.
See Also
- Acheh
- Asrar al-‘arifin
- Bustan al-Salatin
- Chirkah
- Gudjarat
- Hamzah Pansuri
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk
- Kitab al-Muntahi
- Mir’at al-muhakkikin
- P. Voorhoeve
- Pasai
- Raniri
- Raniri’s arrival in Acheh (1637)
- Sirat al-mustaqim
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
Source
Twee Maleise geschriften van Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī: in facsimile uitgegeven met aantekeningen door P. Voorhoeve. Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje, No. 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955. Inleiding §1 (“De auteur”), pp. 5–7; and apparatus criticus ad pp. 99–101 of the Tibjān facsimile, where the play on kuphō and kuphu is discussed.