ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Aydārūs — in Dutch scholarship Abdalkādir al-Aidarrs — was a prolific Indian-Arab author of the al-Aydārūs family, who died at Ahmadabad in 1628. He was the uncle by marriage of Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs and so a kinsman of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī. His many writings are preserved, including correspondence exchanged with a scholar at Mocha. His father had come from South Arabia to India in 1551; his mother was an Indian. He is one of the figures of the Gujarati milieu from which Raniri himself sprang.
The al-Aydārūs family
The al-Aydārūs family was one of the principal Ḥadramī-Indian religious families of the early modern period. The father of ʿAbd al-Qādir had come from South Arabia to India in 1551, and the family maintained — by correspondence and by study-journeys — the contact with the motherland that was characteristic of the Indian Arabs of mixed blood. The mother of ʿAbd al-Qādir was an Indian: a fact that places him, with al-ʿAddārs and Raniri himself, among the Indian Arabs of mixed blood who formed the Gujarati religious milieu from which the orthodox reaction of Acheh was to draw its principal Malay-Indonesian agent.
Writings and correspondence
Many of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s writings are preserved. They include correspondence exchanged with a scholar at Mocha — a fact that documents the Indian-Arab religious network that linked the coffee port of Yemen with the religious scholarship of Gujarat, and through Gujarat with the Malay-Indonesian world. The correspondence is one of the principal witnesses to the means by which the orthodox Sufi scholasticism of the Arab and Persian worlds was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Significance
ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Aydārūs is one of the figures of the Gujarati milieu from which Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī himself sprang. The Indian-Arab religious families of mixed blood — the al-Aydārūs family, the family of al-ʿAddārs, and the family of Raniri himself — formed the network by which the orthodox Sufi scholasticism of the Arab and Persian worlds was carried to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the writings of ʿAbd al-Qādir, including his correspondence with a scholar at Mocha, are among the principal witnesses to this network in operation. The death of ʿAbd al-Qādir at Ahmadabad in 1628 falls in the very years in which his kinsman Raniri was beginning the composition of the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm* in Gujarat, before his departure for Acheh in 1637.
See Also
- Ahmad Rifa’i
- Ahmadabad
- Gudjarat
- Mocha
- Muhammad al-Addars
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Sajjid Abu Hafs Umar Ba Sjaiban
- Surat
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”), p. 6.
C. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (GAL) II, 418, cited by Voorhoeve.