The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn (“The Mirror of the Verifiers”) is a Malay Sufi treatise by Shamsuddin of Pasai, the pantheistic mystic who dominated the religious life of the court of Iskandar Muda of Acheh until his death in 1630. The work is one of the principal sources for the Wujudiyyah mysticism against which Nuruddin ar-Raniri directed his polemic after his arrival in Acheh in 1637; it is cited and refuted in the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān*.
Content and character
The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn sets out the doctrine of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) in the form developed by Shamsuddin of Pasai from the heritage of Hamzah Pansuri. The title — “the mirror of the verifiers” — indicates the Sufi genre to which the work belongs: a manual of taḥqīq (“verification”), the highest station of the gnostic (ʿārif) in which the mystic, having traversed the stations of the path, attains to a direct vision of the divine reality. The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn is, in genre, a systematic exposition of the metaphysics of the unity of being, drawing on the technical vocabulary of Ibn ʿArabian Sufism and on the Malay poetic tradition of Hamzah Pansuri’s school.
Raniri’s refutation
The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn is named, together with Shamsuddin’s Chirkah (or Harakah, as Van Nieuwenhuijze prefers to read it), among the works of Shamsuddin of Pasai that Raniri refutes in the *Tibjān* (p. 108 of the Voorhoeve facsimile). Raniri’s refutation is part of the central section of the Tibjān on the Wujūdiyyah, which also contains his refutation of the Asrār al-ʿārifīn and the Kitāb al-Muntahī of Hamzah Pansuri. The juxtaposition is significant: Raniri treats Shamsuddin of Pasai as the direct continuator of Hamzah Pansuri, and his works as forming, with those of Hamzah, the canon of the Wujūdiyyah mysticism against which the orthodox reaction of Iskandar Thani was directed.
Place in Shamsuddin’s oeuvre
The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn is, with the Chirkah, one of the two works of Shamsuddin of Pasai named by Raniri in the *Tibjān*. Both works belong to Shamsuddin’s activity at the court of Iskandar Muda in the first three decades of the seventeenth century. The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn was composed in the Bahasa Djawi of the Achehnese court and forms, with the works of Hamzah Pansuri, the principal surviving corpus of the Wujūdiyyah mysticism of Acheh’s golden age.
Significance
The Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn is one of the principal monuments of the Wujūdiyyah mysticism of Acheh and one of the principal sources for the doctrines against which Raniri’s orthodox reaction was directed. Its refutation in the *Tibjān* is one of the chief documents of the religious controversy that defined the transition from the age of Iskandar Muda to that of Iskandar Thani and Taj al-Ālam, and its citations by Raniri preserve the only extended fragments of Shamsuddin’s text that survive in polemical sources.
See Also
- Acheh
- Asrar al-‘arifin
- Bahasa Djawi
- C.A.O. van Nieuwenhuijze
- Chirkah
- Hamzah Pansuri
- Hudjdjat as-siddiq li-daf az-zindiq
- Kitab al-Muntahi
- 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; apparatus criticus ad p. 108 of the Tibjān facsimile.
C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze, Sjamsu’l-Dīn van Pasai: bijdrage tot de kennis van de Sumatraansche mystiek. Leiden, 1945, pp. 206–213.
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.