Note on nomenclature. The work is variously spelt in the sources as Sirat al-mustaqim, Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, and (in older Dutch transliteration) Sirat al-moestakim or Sjirat al-moestakim. All forms denote the same Malay treatise by Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī, composed at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani of Aceh. The title translates from Arabic as “The Straight Path.”
The Sirat al-Mustaqim — Arabic Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, “The Straight Path” — is a Malay-language handbook of Islamic religious duties (fiqh) begun by Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī in 1634 and completed in 1644 at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani of Aceh. It is the first systematic Malay handbook of Shāfiʿite fiqh — what the Dutch scholarly tradition calls a plichtenleer (“handbook of religious duties”) — and a foundational text of Malay religious prose. The work is repeatedly attested in Hooykaas’s survey of Malay literature as a key vehicle for the diffusion of the fiqh of the Shāfiʿite school into the Malay-Indonesian world from its Acehnese point of composition.
Composition and Chronology
The composition of the Sirat al-Mustaqim was begun by ar-Rānīrī in 1634 — three years before his formal arrival in Aceh in 1637 — and was completed only ten years later, in 1644. The earlier date of 1634 was established by Djajadiningrat in TBG 69, pp. 109–111; it corrects the earlier assumption of Voorhoeve — later confessed candidly by Voorhoeve in his introduction to the Twee Maleise geschriften — that the Sirāṭ had been composed before ar-Rānīrī’s arrival in Aceh. Voorhoeve had overlooked Djajadiningrat’s article in BKI 107, p. 357, where the chronology had already been set out.
Snouck Hurgronje noted that the work was written in March 1638 — the same year in which ar-Rānīrī also composed the Bustān as-Salāṭīn and the Bad’ khalq as-samawat wal-arwah — a date which provides one of the firm chronological anchor-points in the early history of the Acehnese Sultanate. The work was completed at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani as part of ar-Rānīrī’s project of providing the Acehnese faithful with the literary apparatus of a Shāfiʿite sultanate. The date of completion in 1644 — the very year in which Raniri returned to Ranir — makes the Sirāṭ one of the last works Raniri composed in Aceh before his departure. The knowledge of Malay letters displayed in the Sirāṭ need not, therefore, have been acquired before 1637.
Purpose and Content
The Sirat al-Mustaqim is, in genre, a Malay handbook of religious duties — a Shāfiʿite fiqh of the ʿibādāt adapted for Malay-speaking Muslims. It was composed, like the *Tibjān* and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq*, at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani and as part of the same project of orthodox reform: to provide the Acehnese faithful with a reliable guide to the practical observances of Islam according to the Shāfiʿite school, in the Bahasa Djawi that was the language of the Acehnese court. Its composition at the very moment of ar-Rānīrī’s public disputation against the Wujudiyyah mystics of Hamzah Pansuri and Shamsuddin of Pasai places it at the centre of the project of orthodox reform that produced the suppression of the Wujudiyyah mysticism: it provided, for the new dispensation, the manual of observances by which the faithful were to regulate their daily conduct.
The treatise survives in an edition printed at Mecca in 1316 Hegira on the margin of an edition of the Fatḥ al-muʿīn. The Mecca edition preserved the work in a form free from the local Acehnese tendency to idealise or rearrange the past, and it is from this edition that Snouck Hurgronje drew Raniri’s testimony fixing the death of Meukuta Alam in 1636.
Diffusion: The Kedah Episode
Hooykaas records one of the key episodes in the early diffusion of the Sirat al-Mustaqim in his chapter on historiography. In his account of the Hikajat Marong Mahawangsa (the Kedah chronicle), Hooykaas notes that, when the king of Kedah converted to Islam under the influence of Sjaich ‘Abdoellāh Jamani and was given the throne-name Sultan Moezaffar Sjah, “Toen men dit in Atjéh vernam, liet de Moslim geworden vorst aldaar Sjaich Noeroddin diens boek Sirāṭ al-moestakīm naar Kēdah brengen ter onderrichting in de Wet” — “When this was heard in Aceh, the Muslim ruler there had Sjaich Noeroddin’s book Sirāṭ al-mustaqīm brought to Kedah for instruction in the Law.”
The episode illustrates the role of the Sirat al-Mustaqim — composed in Aceh by a Gujarati-born scholar — as the principal vehicle by which the fiqh of the Shāfiʿite school was transmitted from Aceh to the Malay Peninsula in the early seventeenth century.
Place in the Acehnese Literary Tradition
The Sirat al-Mustaqim belongs to the cluster of ar-Rānīrī’s Acehnese compositions — the Bustān as-Salāṭīn of 1638, the Bad’ khalq as-samawat wal-arwah of 1638, the Tibjān fi ma’rifat al-adyān, and the Sirat al-Mustaqim itself — that together constitute the literary apparatus of ar-Rānīrī’s orthodox reform in Aceh. The composition of the Sirāṭ in 1638 — at the very moment of ar-Rānīrī’s public disputation against the Wujudiyyah mystics — marks the beginning of his project to provide the Acehnese faithful with the literary apparatus of a Shāfiʿite sultanate.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the Sirat al-Mustaqim is significant as the principal Malay-language fiqh handbook produced at the Acehnese court in the seventeenth century. Its composition by ar-Rānīrī in 1634–1644 — at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani — places it at the heart of the orthodox reform of the Acehnese court in the 1630s and 1640s, and its diffusion to Kedah in the early seventeenth century (recorded by Hooykaas) illustrates the role of the Sirāṭ as the principal vehicle by which the Shāfiʿite fiqh of the Acehnese court was transmitted to the Malay Peninsula.
See Also
- Nur al-Din al-Raniri
- Bustanu’s-Salatin
- Sultan Iskandar Thani
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Sjaich Noeroddin
- Over Maleise Literatuur (1947)
- H. Djajadiningrat
- P. Voorhoeve
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- C. Hooykaas
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Bahasa Djawi
- Wujudiyyah
- Hamzah Pansuri
- Shaikh Shamsuddin of Sumatra
- Mecca
- Aceh
- Malay Peninsula
- 1634
- 1636
- 1637
- 1638
- 1644
Source
Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947), chapter 11 (“Geschiedschrijving in het Maleis”), p. 94 (the Kedah episode).
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
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”), p. 5, with note (4).
H. Djajadiningrat, in Tijdschrift van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen 69, pp. 109–111.