The Asrār al-ʿārifīn (“The Secrets of the Gnostics”) is a Malay Sufi treatise by Hamzah Pansuri, the celebrated pantheistic mystic of Acheh who flourished in the late sixteenth century and whose school dominated the religious life of the Achehnese court under Iskandar Muda (1607–1636). The work is one of the principal sources for the Wujudiyyah mysticism that Nuruddin ar-Raniri attacked after his arrival in Acheh in 1637; it is cited in the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān* and in the apparatus of Voorhoeve’s 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises. An edition of the Asrār al-ʿārifīn was published by Doorenbos.
Content and character
The Asrār al-ʿārifīn is a sustained exposition of the Wujūdiyyah mysticism that Hamzah Pansuri had brought to its highest development at the Achehnese court. The work develops the doctrine of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) in its Indonesian form, drawing on the Sufi tradition of Ibn ʿArabī and on Persian Sufi poetry, and setting out the stages of the mystical path by which the gnostic (ʿārif) advances from the outward forms of religion to the inner vision of the divine reality. In Voorhoeve’s analysis of the Tibjān, the Asrār al-ʿārifīn is cited in connection with Hamzah’s account of the fall of Iblīs from the light of God — an account that Raniri inserts, in the Tibjān, into his translation from the *Tamhīd* of Abū Shakūr as-Sālimī in order to refute it.
Raniri’s refutation
The Asrār al-ʿārifīn is one of the works whose refutation occupies the central section of the *Tibjān* — the section on the Wujūdiyyah — together with Hamzah’s Kitāb al-Muntahī and Shamsuddin of Pasai’s Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn and Chirkah. Raniri there charges Hamzah with teaching doctrines akin to those of the Tanāsuḥiyya (metempsychosists), the Falāsifa (philosophers), the Barāhima-Wathaniyya, the Sāmaniyya of Tibet, and the Ḥulūliyya (those who teach the indwelling of God in creation). Voorhoeve cites the Asrār al-ʿārifīn from the Doorenbos edition (p. 142) for the parallel passage; he notes that Raniri has inserted the quotation from Hamzah into his translation from the Tamhīd.
Survival and editions
The Asrār al-ʿārifīn survived the burning of Hamzah Pansuri’s books ordered by Sultan Iskandar Thani — the suppression of the Wujūdiyyah that followed Raniri’s public disputation at the Achehnese court — and is preserved in several Malay manuscripts. The edition of Doorenbos made the text available to European scholarship and is the form in which Voorhoeve cites it in his apparatus to the Tibjān.
Significance
The Asrār al-ʿārifīn is one of the principal monuments of the Wujūdiyyah mysticism of Acheh in its golden age, and one of the principal sources — together with the Kitāb al-Muntahī — for the doctrines against which Raniri’s orthodox reaction was directed. Its survival, in manuscripts and in Doorenbos’s edition, makes it possible to compare Raniri’s polemical citations with Hamzah’s own text, and so to follow the controversy over the unity of being in Acheh in the 1630s with a precision rare in the religious history of the early modern Malay world.
See Also
- Acheh
- Bahasa Djawi
- Chirkah
- Hamzah Pansuri
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- J. Doorenbos
- Kitab al-Muntahi
- Mir’at al-muhakkikin
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Raniri’s public debate against the Wujudiyyah in Acheh
- Shaikh Shamsuddin of Sumatra
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Tamhid fi bayan at-tawhid
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
- Wujudiyyah
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 §2a (“Inhoudsoverzicht”) and apparatus criticus ad p. 18 r. 3–5, where the Asrār al-ʿārifīn is cited.
J. Doorenbos, edition of the Asrār al-ʿārifīn of Hamzah Pansuri (cited by Voorhoeve at p. 142 of the Doorenbos edition).
The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.