The Kitāb al-Muntahī (“The Book of the Ultimate”) is a Malay Sufi treatise by Hamzah Pansuri, the celebrated pantheistic mystic of Acheh. It is the principal work of the school of Wujūdiyyah mysticism against which Nuruddin ar-Raniri directed his polemic in the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān* and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq li-dafʿ az-zindīq*. The Kitāb al-Muntahī is one of the few works of Hamzah Pansuri to survive in Malay manuscripts, in Malay fragments, and in a Javanese translation; its text and refutation are the subject of an extended collation in the apparatus of Voorhoeve’s 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises.
Content and character
The Kitāb al-Muntahī sets out, in the form of a Sufi commentary on the stages of the mystical path, the doctrine of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) in its most extreme Achehnese form. The very title — “the book of the ultimate” — points to the doctrine of the fanaʾ (passing-away) and the baqāʾ (subsistence) by which the gnostic attains the ultimate state in which the mystic declares, with al-Ḥallāj, anā al-ḥaqq (“I am the Truth”). The treatise develops the metaphysics of the maqāmāt (stations) and aḥwāl (states) in a Malay of considerable poetic density, drawing on the technical vocabulary of Arabic Sufism and on Persian Sufi verse.
Raniri’s refutation
The longest and most detailed of Raniri’s polemical engagements with the Wujūdiyyah is his refutation of the Kitāb al-Muntahī. In the *Tibjān* (pp. 97–112 of the Voorhoeve facsimile) Raniri cites the Kitāb al-Muntahī literally — section by section — and refutes each citation in turn. Voorhoeve’s apparatus to this section (pp. 35–36 of the introduction, and notes ad pp. 97–105 of the facsimile) collates Raniri’s citations with the surviving manuscripts of the Kitāb al-Muntahī itself, and so provides, in effect, a critical edition of those portions of Hamzah’s treatise that Raniri chose to refute.
Notable in Raniri’s refutation is his attention to a passage in which Hamzah, in the language of Pasai — that is, in the Achehnese Malay of Pasai — plays on the words kuphō (Arabic kufr, “unbelief”) and kuphu (Arabic kufʾ, “equal, like”). The play, Voorhoeve notes, turns on the fact that pada in Achehnese means both “equal” (Javanese pepada) and “sufficient” (Malay pada). Hamzah’s utterance — “if there is no kuphō, there is no meeting with kuphu” — Raniri takes as a covert profession of unbelief; Voorhoeve suggests that Hamzah’s saying hangs together with a Persian verse in the Kitāb al-Muntahī on “the gate of the perishable world,” and that Hamzah’s intended meaning was that the highest mystical state is not attained so long as the gate of the perishable world is not closed. The word kufʾ, Voorhoeve drily notes, was naturally a tempting target for Raniri’s attack.
Manuscripts and editions
Voorhoeve collated the following manuscripts of the Kitāb al-Muntahī:
- F — Cod. Or. 7291(3), the Malay text.
- G — Cod. Or. 1952, a Malay fragment of the same text.
- J — Cod. Or. 5716(2) and 7736(1), the Javanese translation (cf. BKI 107, p. 358).
These manuscripts make it possible to recover the text of the Kitāb al-Muntahī in those passages that Raniri chose to cite, and in some further passages that are transmitted in F alone.
Significance
The Kitāb al-Muntahī is the most considerable surviving work of Hamzah Pansuri and the principal monument of the Wujudiyyah mysticism of Acheh in its golden age. Its refutation by Raniri in the *Tibjān* is the longest single polemical engagement in Raniri’s Achehnese writings; and the collation of the surviving manuscripts of the Kitāb al-Muntahī with Raniri’s citations — effected by Voorhoeve in his apparatus — is the most exact reconstruction of a lost work of Malay Sufism that the sources permit. The work, in its survival and in its refutation, is the central document of the religious controversy that defined the transition from the age of Iskandar Muda to that of Iskandar Thani and Taj al-Ālam.
See Also
- Acheh
- Asrar al-‘arifin
- Bahasa Djawi
- Chirkah
- Hamzah Pansuri
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Mir’at al-muhakkikin
- P. Voorhoeve
- Pasai
- Raniri
- Raniri’s public debate against the Wujudiyyah in Acheh
- Shaikh Shamsuddin of Sumatra
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- 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”), pp. 9–10; §2c (“De secten”), p. 16 (note 6); apparatus criticus ad pp. 97–105 of the Tibjān facsimile, pp. 35–36 of the introduction; and notes to pp. 99–102, 104, 105.
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.