The Ḥall aẓ-ẓill (“The Solution of the Shadow”) is a Malay Sufi treatise by Nuruddin ar-Raniri, composed in Acheh during the period of Raniri’s activity at the court of Sultan Iskandar Thani and his successor Taj al-Ālam (1637–1644). The work is named in Voorhoeve’s introduction to the 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises among the writings in which Raniri’s polemical and mystical teaching is set forth; the Ḥall aẓ-ẓill cites the *al-Insān al-kāmil* of ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī — as does the *Jawāhir al-ʿulūm* — and names the Indian mystic ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Mahāʾimī among “the great mystics.”
Content and character
The Ḥall aẓ-ẓill belongs to that part of Raniri’s oeuvre which Voorhoeve describes as “directed against the Wujudiyyah” — that is, the part in which Raniri, as an orthodox mystic of the Rifāʿiyya who had been initiated by Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān, set out the orthodox Sufi position on the relation of God’s being to the world in contradistinction to the pantheistic mysticism of Hamzah Pansuri and Shamsuddin of Pasai. The title, “The Solution of the Shadow,” refers to the central Sufi metaphor — used by Raniri also in the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* — by which the world is the shadow (ẓill) of God’s being, a mere place of manifestation (maẓhar) without reality of its own. Where the Wujudiyyah conflated shadow and substance, Raniri distinguishes them; the Ḥall aẓ-ẓill is the working-out of this distinction in the form of a sustained Sufi treatise.
Sources and citations
The Ḥall aẓ-ẓill is cited in Voorhoeve’s apparatus to the *Tibjān* (p. 9, note 2; and pp. 15, 16 of the introduction) and in his notes to the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* (p. 6 of the introduction to that work). It cites the *al-Insān al-kāmil* of ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī twice — a fact which Voorhoeve notes alongside the repeated citation of the same work in the *Jawāhir al-ʿulūm*. On p. 6 of the Ḥall aẓ-ẓill, Raniri names ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Mahāʾimī — the Indian Wujūdī mystic of the early fifteenth century — among “the great mystics” (al-ʿārifīn), a notable act of discrimination: al-Mahāʾimī, though a Wujūdī, was in Raniri’s view an orthodox one, and was cited by him as an authority against the heretical Wujūdiyyah of Acheh.
Significance
The Ḥall aẓ-ẓill is one of several treatises in which Raniri developed the orthodox Sufi position set out programmatically in the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq*. It belongs to the same body of Achehnese Malay religious prose as the *Tibjān*, the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm*, the *Jawāhir al-ʿulūm*, and the *Bustān as-Salāṭīn* — the literary output of Raniri’s Achehnese period, by which the orthodox reaction against the Wujudiyyah was carried into every department of religious writing.
See Also
- Abd al-Karim al-Jili
- Acheh
- Ahmad al-Mahaimi
- Bahasa Djawi
- Bustan al-Salatin
- Djawahir al-‘ulum
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Iskandar Thani
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Sajjid Abu Hafs Umar Ba Sjaiban
- Shaikh Shamsuddin of Sumatra
- Sultan Tajul-alam
- 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 §1 (“De auteur”) and §2c (“De secten”), where the Ḥall aẓ-ẓill is cited.