The Bidāyat al-mubtadi bi-faḍl Allāh al-muhdī (“The Beginning of the Beginner, by the Grace of God the Guide”) is a Malay handbook of faith and the principal religious duties — the ʿibādāt of the Shāfiʿite fiqh — that occupies the first part of the Maxwell manuscript no. 93 in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. The second part of the same codex (pp. 119–145) contains the only known complete manuscript of the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq li-dafʿ az-zindīq* of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī, reproduced in facsimile by Voorhoeve in the 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises.
Content and character
The Bidāyat al-mubtadi bi-faḍl Allāh al-muhdī is, as Voorhoeve records, “the well-known Malay handbook of faith and of some of the principal religious duties.” It belongs, in genre, to the same body of Malay religious prose as the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm* of Raniri — the Malay handbook of religious duties composed at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani in March 1638 — and to the wider genre of Malay kitab literature that transmitted the practical observances of the Shāfiʿite school to the Malay-Indonesian world. The work is “well-known” — a characterisation that indicates its wide diffusion in the Malay manuscript tradition.
The Maxwell manuscript
The Maxwell manuscript no. 93 of the Royal Asiatic Society in London is the codex that contains both the Bidāyat al-mubtadi (in its first part) and the only known complete manuscript of the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* (in its second part, pp. 119–145). The colophon of the second part records that the manuscript was copied on Sunday 12 Shaʿbān 1186 (corresponding to late 1772/early 1773), the year Wāw, after the morning prayer, by Encik ʿAbdul ʿAzīz. The juxtaposition of a Malay handbook of religious duties and a Malay Sufi polemic against the Wujudiyyah in a single codex is itself a document of the canon of Malay religious prose in the eighteenth century.
Significance
The Bidāyat al-mubtadi bi-faḍl Allāh al-muhdī is the principal Malay handbook of faith and religious duties of the eighteenth-century Malay manuscript tradition, and the work that occupies the first part of the codex (Maxwell no. 93) that contains the only complete manuscript of the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* of Raniri. Its juxtaposition with the Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq in the same codex is a document of the canon of Malay religious prose in the eighteenth century, in which the practical observances of the Shāfiʿite fiqh and the polemic against the Wujudiyyah formed complementary parts of a single religious library.
See Also
- Bahasa Djawi
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Iskandar Thani
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Royal Asiatic Society
- Sirat al-mustaqim
- 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 §3a (“Inhoudsopgave”), p. 37, where the Bidāyat al-mubtadi is noted as the first part of the Maxwell manuscript.