The Badʾ khalq as-samāwāt wal-arwāḥ (“The Beginning of the Creation of the Heavens and the Spirits”) is a Malay cosmological treatise by Nuruddin ar-Raniri, composed at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani of Acheh in the first year of his reign. The work is named by Snouck Hurgronje in The Achehnese alongside the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm* as one of the two works whose composition at the sultan’s command marks the beginning of Raniri’s activity at the Achehnese court in 1637–1638.
Composition and date
The Badʾ khalq as-samāwāt wal-arwāḥ is to be dated, with the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm*, to the very beginning of Raniri’s Achehnese period. Snouck Hurgronje records that Raniri “at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani wrote the Sirat al-mustaqim in March 1638, as well as the Badʾ khalq as-samāwāt wal-arwāḥ.” The composition of two such works in the first year of Iskandar Thani’s reign — at the very moment of the public disputation against the Wujudiyyah — indicates the scale and ambition of the project of orthodox reform that the new sultan had set in motion.
Content and character
The very title of the work indicates its subject: the beginning of God’s creation, the heavens and the spirits. The treatise belongs to the genre of Islamic cosmological literature — the literature of the badʾ al-khalq — that sets out, from the Quran and the Sunna and from the inherited cosmological traditions of late-antique and early-Islamic civilization, the order of the created world: the throne and the footstool, the seven heavens and the seven earths, the angels and the jinn, the genesis of Adam and the physiology of the human microcosm. The work is in Malay, in the Bahasa Djawi of the Achehnese court, and forms part of the same body of orthodox Malay prose as the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm*, the *Tibjān*, the *Bustān as-Salāṭīn*, the *Ḥall aẓ-ẓill*, the *Jawāhir al-ʿulūm*, and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq*.
Significance
The Badʾ khalq as-samāwāt wal-arwāḥ is the earliest of the works composed by Raniri in Acheh at the command of the sultan. Its composition in the same year as the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm* and at the very moment of the public disputation against the Wujūdiyyah places it at the head of the literary output by which Raniri carried the orthodox reaction into every department of Achehnese religious writing: cosmology, law, sects, and the polemic of mysticism.
See Also
- Acheh
- Bahasa Djawi
- Bustan al-Salatin
- Djawahir al-‘ulum
- Hall al-zill
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Iskandar Thani
- Raniri
- Raniri’s arrival in Acheh (1637)
- Raniri’s public debate against the Wujudiyyah in Acheh
- Sirat al-mustaqim
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Sultan Tajul-alam
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
Source
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.