Tibjan fi ma'rifat al-adyan

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tagsdocument, religious-work, manuscript, islamic-scholarship, sects, polemic, precolonial, 17th-century, aceh, malay, gujarati, religious, acehnese, seventeenth-century
aliasesTibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān, Tibjan, Tibyān al-madhāhib, Tibyān fi ma'rifat al-adyan, Tibyān, Raniri's book of sects, Exposé der religies, Book of sects by Raniri, Tibyan fi Ma'rifat al-Adyan, Kitab Tibyan, Tibjān

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The Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān (“Elucidation concerning the knowledge of religions”) is the first of the two Malay treatises of Nuruddin ar-Raniri edited in facsimile by P. Voorhoeve in the 1955 volume of the Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje. Composed before Raniri’s arrival in Acheh in 1637 and probably completed in 1637 or shortly thereafter, it enumerates the pre-Islamic religions and the sects within Islam with the avowed aim of warning the faithful against these aberrations and — above all — against the doctrine of the heretical Wujudiyyah that flourished at the Achehnese court of Iskandar Muda under the influence of Shamsuddin of Pasai and the school of Hamzah Pansuri. The Voorhoeve edition reproduces the Leiden manuscript Cod. Or. 3291 from the legacy of Van der Tuuk, a copy made about 1855 for Van der Tuuk from a good older exemplair of Achehnese provenance.

Background and purpose

Voorhoeve’s introduction to the 1955 edition places the Tibjān in the context of Raniri’s polemical mission in Acheh. As an orthodox mystic of the Rifāʿiyya who had absorbed from his teacher Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān and his spiritual grandfather Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs the scholastic apparatus of Gujarati Arabian Islam, Raniri came to Acheh with a text already in hand by which the doctrines of the Wujūdiyyah could be set within the wider catalog of heresies — Muslim and pre-Muslim — against which a faithful Shāfiʿite must defend himself. The Tibjān is, in this sense, the manifesto of the public disputation that won Raniri the favour of Iskandar Thani in the first year of his reign.

The work is divided into two great divisions. Part I treats the pre-Muslim religions from Adam down to ʿĪsā. Part II treats the sects of Islam — the seventy-two sects (over and against the one saved sect) said by tradition to have sprung from six original groups, each subdivided into twelve.

Part I — The pre-Muslim religions

The first part of the Tibjān opens with Adam and the beginning of idol-worship after his death, the five idols of the people of Idrīs, the deluge in the time of Nūḥ, the re-excavation of the idols in the time of Ismāʿīl and their veneration by the Banū Ghatafān, and the three classes of mushrikūn. It treats the distinction between kāfir and mushrik; the Tabiʿūn (or Ṭabāʿ) who worshipped the four elemental qualities; the ḥukamāʾ munajjimūn or Falakīyah, who worshipped the planets; the Thanāwiyyah (dualists), Zamzamiyyah, Shamsāniyyah, and Sāmaniyyah; and — notably — Hamzah Pansuri, of whose teaching Raniri says “their doctrine resembles that of the Tanāsuḥiyyah, the Falāsifa, the Barāhima-Wathaniyya, the Sāmaniyya in Tibet, and the Ḥulūliyya.” The Madjus (Zoroastrians) are treated with their sub-divisions, and the Dahriyya or Mulhid (atheists) who believe in metempsychosis, some of whom dwell in Gujarat and are called the Śrāwaka — a Sanskrit term meaning Buddhist, as Professor Drewes identified. The Ḥukamāʾ Falāsifa (philosophers) are refuted for their inappropriate comparison of God with the sun. The “Copts” (in fact the al-Muʿattila, the sect that denies all divine attributes, misnamed in Raniri’s source) and the Sophists are surveyed, and the Tanāsuḥiyyah — metempsychosists — are subdivided into four groups; the Barāhima in India in the first; groups akin to the Manawiyya, Ḥulūliyya, and Ghālibiyya among the Rāfiḍīs in the second; reincarnationists in the third; the fourth group is silently omitted by reason of a lacuna in Raniri’s exemplar of the Tamhīd. Tanāsuḥiyyah are even found, Raniri notes, on Java, on the slopes of Mount Merapi. The first part closes with the “ten scriptuary groups,” of which the first is the Barāhima (so-called followers of Ibrāhīm), the second the Jews (ʿUzairiyya and Sāmiriyya), and the third the Christians (Malkāniyya, Mastūriyya, Mār Yaʿqūbiyya).

Part II — The sects of Islam

The second part of the Tibjān opens with the tradition of the seventy-three sects — that is, the seventy-two doomed plus one saved. The seventy-two have sprung from six sects, each again divided into twelve: (1) the Rāfiḍiyya or Sabāʾiyya; (2) the Khārijīyya or Ḥarūriyya; (3) the Jabriyya; (4) the Qadariyya; (5) the Jahmiyya; and (6) the Murjiʾa. The sects are then surveyed sect by sect, each with a brief statement of its dogma followed by Raniri’s refutation. The survey closes with the heretical Ṣūfīs — thirteen sects enumerated according to Imām Ghazālī, Abū ‘n-Najīb Suhrawardī, and Najmuddīn ʿUmar an-Nasafī — the Musjabbiha or Mujassima, the doctrine of anthropomorphic traditions, and the bidʿa (innovation) divided into five kinds according to ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Mahāʾimī’s Ithbād an-naṣīḥa, into two according to Ghazālī, and into five according to Abū Shakūr as-Sālimī. The work closes with the true Ṣūfīs, with renewed warnings against the bidʿa, and with a closing prayer.

The longest and most historically important section is the survey of the Wujūdiyyah — that is, the Ittiḥādiyya or Mulhid or Zindīq, divided into the upper-wind (bovenwindse) and lower-wind (benedenwindse) Wujūdiyya. To the lower-wind Wujūdiyya belongs Hamzah Pansuri, whose Kitāb al-Muntahī Raniri refutes sect by sect; and Sjamsuddin of Pasai, whose Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn and Chirkah (Van Nieuwenhuijze prefers the reading Harakah) are likewise taken to task. Raniri explicitly refers to his own lost *Laṭāʾif al-asrār* for a fuller refutation. This portion of the Tibjān was edited in part by C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze in BKI 104 (1948), pp. 326–370, with a brief translation in his dissertation Sjamsu’l-Dīn van Pasai (Leiden, 1945), pp. 206–213.

Sources of the Tibjān

Voorhoeve’s examination of the Tibjān’s sources is the most original contribution of his edition. Four sources are identified:

  1. The at-Tamhīd fī bayān at-tawḥīd of Abū Shakūr as-Sālimī — a Persian Shāfiʿite of the second half of the fifth century H. (Brockelmann GAL I, 419). More than a quarter of the Tibjān is translated literally from the Tamhīd, especially its last chapter on orthodoxy and the rejection of innovation. Raniri used a manuscript practically identical with the Leiden Cod. Or. 5664 — a Banten manuscript sent to Leiden by Snouck Hurgronje in 1906 — sharing with it the strange error “Kubtiya” (Copts) for al-Muʿattila and a lacuna that caused Raniri to announce four groups of the Tanāsuḥiyya while treating only three. Voorhoeve collated this Leiden manuscript with three Indian copies (India Office Library Loth 384, Levy 1888 and 1890) and with KBG Arab. CCCXI in Jakarta, and was able to recover almost the entire Tamhīd substrate of the Tibjān.
  2. The al-Insān al-kāmil of ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī — from which Raniri drew, in particular, his account of the Barāhima (which al-Jīlī, uniquely among the sect-writers, classes among the scriptuaries). Raniri’s notice on the Barāhima (Tibjān, p. 31 r. 4–5) is a literal translation of al-Insān al-kāmil, ed. Cairo 1293, II, p. 81 r. 33–82 r. 1.
  3. The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib — a popular schematic overview of the seventy-two sects, with the six groups of the Tibjān in the same order, each in twelves, widely diffused in Arabic and Persian manuscripts (sometimes attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa), of which Voorhoeve identified nine Arabic and five Persian exemplars. The most striking witness is Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 f. 3v–15v, a Moluccan manuscript with interlinear Malay translation — written on paper watermarked with the arms of Thann in Alsace (in use from 1612), and bearing on f. 1v the note that Pulo Ai was destroyed on Monday 3 Rabīʿ I 1023 / 14 April 1614. The Moluccan manuscript agrees with the Tibjān not only in the names of the sects but in the dogmas attributed to them — including, in the case of the Khaufiyya of the Jabriyya, the bizarre doctrine that “there are two gods, one on land and one at sea,” which Voorhoeve finds in no other witness.
  4. The Kitāb fī bayān madhāhib al-mutaṣawwifa of Najm ad-Dīn ʿUmar an-Nasafī — a small tract of seven folios in a manuscript at Rome (Vatican, Borg. Arab. 254, f. 56), from which Raniri took the first eleven of his thirteen heretical Ṣūfī sects in the same order. The Persian verse of the Wākiʿiyya quoted in the Tibjān is found in this same tract.

Manuscripts and apparatus criticus

The facsimile in the Voorhoeve edition is taken from the only complete manuscript, Leiden Cod. Or. 3291 from the legacy of Van der Tuuk — here designated B — a not-very-careful copy, probably made about 1855 for Van der Tuuk from a good older exemplar that came from Acheh. Its Achehnese provenance is betrayed, Voorhoeve notes, by such forms as sidjuk (Ach. sidjueʾ) for sedjuk, and by the consistent replacement of kesembilan with kesemilan (cf. Ach. seumah, Mal. sembah). Voorhoeve collated B with three other manuscripts:

  • A — Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Amsterdam, Anthropol. Afd. no. 0/271, catalogued by Van Ronkel in Meded. Afd. Volkenkunde no. 7 (1935), p. 158; on paper watermarked Leveratto (Churchill no. 573: 1794); a slightly more careful copy ending at p. 105 r. 7 of B.
  • C — from the collection of William Marsden, now in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, no. 12210 (microfilm at Leiden Or. A. 18); probably the oldest manuscript, more closely related to B than to A; ends at p. 92 r. 14 of B; the later pages added by a later hand; the Arabic fully vocalised, unlike A and B; carries Achehnese marginal glosses.
  • D — the Achehnese manuscript of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde at The Hague, mentioned by Van Ronkel in BKI 103, p. 599. The author of this adaptation, Teungku Harõn, composed about 1929 — using a manuscript of the Tibjān — an Achehnese treatise on the history of Islam in Acheh. An extensive summary, almost a translation, was made by H. T. Damsté. With the help of this reliable guide it was possible to recover the passages of the Tibjān in Achehnese; but the Achehnese author did not carry his Tibjān beyond the first sect of the Jabriyya (p. 57 of the Voorhoeve text). He did not accept the text uncritically: he used, among other things, the al-Farq baina al-firaq of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Baghdādī (probably in the printed edition) to correct corrupt names of sects.

For the section in which Raniri refutes the Kitāb al-Muttahī of Hamzah Pansuri, Voorhoeve also collated: F — the Malay text (Cod. Or. 7291(3)); G — a fragment of the same text (Cod. Or. 1952); J — the Javanese translation (Cod. Or. 5716(2) and 7736(1)).

Significance

The Tibjān is, after the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm* and alongside the *Bustan al-Salāṭīn*, one of the foundational works of Malay scholastic prose. It preserves, in its polemic, the only extended quotations from the *Kitāb al-Muntahī* of Hamzah Pansuri and the *Mirʾāt al-muḥaqqiqīn* of Shamsuddin of Pasai — works whose own manuscripts have survived only in fragments. Its catalog of sects is the chief vehicle by which the scholastic classification of Muslim heresies was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian world. And it is the principal witness to the religious and intellectual constellation of Acheh in the years 1636–1641: a court in transition from the Wujudiyyah mysticism of the age of Iskandar Muda to the orthodox reaction of Iskandar Thani and Taj al-Ālam, a transition in which Raniri himself was the principal actor.

Sources

Voorhoeve proved more than a quarter of the Tibjan is a literal Malay translation, rearranged, of chapter 11 of Abu Shakur al-Salimi’s al-Tamhid fi bayan al-tawhid (5th century H). The Leiden manuscript Or. 5664, copied in Banten on Javanese paper, contains the same scribal errors found in Raniri’s exemplar — notably the corruption of Mu’attila to Kubtijah and a lacuna omitting the fourth Tanasukhiyah group.

For the Barahima section and the list of ten religions, Raniri used Abd al-Karim al-Jili’s al-Insan al-kamil (Cairo ed., II, p. 81).

For the names and dogmas of the 72 sects he used a popular handbook Ma’rifat al-madhahib (attributed to Abu Hanifa), as preserved in the early 1614 Malay-Arabic manuscript Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 from Pulo Ai in the Banda Islands.

See Also

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 §2 (“Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān”), pp. 7–36 (pp. 7–9: inhoudsoverzicht; pp. 9–24: de bronnen; pp. 15–24: de secten; pp. 24–36: apparatus criticus).

Ph. S. van Ronkel, “Rānīrī’s Maleische geschrift: Exposé der religies,” Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 102 (1944), pp. 461 ff.

C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze, Sjamsu’l-Dīn van Pasai: bijdrage tot de kennis van de Sumatraansche mystiek. Leiden, 1945.

C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze, “Sjamsu’l-Dīn van Pasai,” Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 104 (1948), pp. 326–370.

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