Aḥmad ar-Rifāʿī (d. 1182 CE) was the great mystic saint and founder of the Rifāʿiyya Sufi order — one of the principal ṭuruq (mystic orders) of orthodox Sunni mysticism — a younger contemporary of ʿAbdul-Qādir Jīlānī. His tomb at Mocha — the coffee port of Yemen on the Red Sea — is reverenced, and his order was the silsila (spiritual genealogy) into which Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī was initiated by his shaikh Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān. The Rifāʿiyya was the spiritual genealogy by which Raniri, on his arrival in Acheh in 1637, claimed the authority of an orthodox mystic against the Wujudiyyah of Hamzah Pansuri and Shamsuddin of Pasai. In Acheh itself, Ahmad Rifaʿī is reverenced as the eponym of the Rapa’i religious performances, in which his name is “of course always invoked.”
The Rifāʿiyya
The Rifāʿiyya — also called the Baṭāʾiḥiyya — was founded in the marshlands of southern Iraq in the twelfth century CE and spread rapidly through the Muslim world. The disciples of the Rifāʿiyya are famous in many lands for their fire-handling and self-wounding demonstrations, feats that they perform as part of their devotional dhikr (remembrance) exercises. By the sixteenth century the order had reached Gujarat, where it was transmitted to Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān by Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs at Surat. From Bā Shaybān the silsila was transmitted to two of the principal Malay-Indonesian Sufis of the seventeenth century — Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī and Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — and so reached the Malay-Indonesian archipelago.
The Tomb at Mocha
Voorhoeve records, in the introduction to the 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises, that Raniri “was initiated into the Rifāʿiyya, founded by the saint Aḥmad Rifāʿī, whose tomb at Mocha is reverenced.” The association of the founder’s tomb with Mocha — rather than with the marshlands of southern Iraq where the order was actually founded — is itself a document of the devotional geography of the Rifāʿiyya as it was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian world: a geography in which the founder’s sanctity was located at a Red Sea port frequented by Indian and Indonesian pilgrims and traders, and so made accessible to the Malay-Indonesian devotees of the order.
The Rapa’i Performances in Acheh
In Acheh, Ahmad Rifaʿī is revered as a “master of mysticism” (tasawwuf) from whom the Achehnese religious performances called Rapa’i take their name, and who is “of course always invoked” at those performances. He is named by C. Snouck Hurgronje alongside the great founders of mystic orders, of whom the most celebrated in Acheh is Abdul-Qadir Jilani.
The Rapa’i (the Achehnese form of the Arabic rabāʿī, the “fourth” [of the mystic recitations]) are religious performances in which the performers wound themselves with knives, sear their bodies with red-hot chains, and similar feats, while the bystanders chant religious formulas. They belong to the same class of Achehnese religious phenomena as the liké and rateb (the Achehnese equivalents of the Arabic dhikr and ratib) and the sadati-pantons (chanted love-stories). Snouck Hurgronje groups them with those “curious proceedings which in Acheh are included under the terms liké and rateb,” at which “the help of these holy men and especially of Abdul-Qadir Jilani is invoked.” The performers of the Rapa’i claim descent from Ahmad Rifaʿī, though the performance has in Snouck’s judgement “degenerated into theatrical conjuring.” The Achehnese Rapa’i performances — in which the performers “wound themselves with knives” and “sear their bodies with red-hot chains” — strongly suggest an Achehnese survival or adaptation of the Rifāʿī dhikr.
Ahmad Rifaʿī is described as a “master of mysticism” — that is, a teacher or eponym of a tariqah (mystic order) — rather than as a departed wali (saint) in the strict Achehnese sense. The tariqahs, as Snouck Hurgronje observes, “so popular in other parts of Sumatra do not flourish in Acheh, though sundry Achehnese hajis have enrolled themselves as members of a tariqah in Mecca.” The spiritual successors of the founders of mystic orders in Acheh, who teach mystic practices and formulas, “also enjoy much respect, but are not very numerous.” The invocation of Ahmad Rifaʿī at the Rapa’i performances is thus one of the comparatively rare survivals of organised mystic practice in Achehnese religious life.
Significance
Ahmad ar-Rifāʿī is, through his order, one of the principal spiritual ancestors of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar. The Rifāʿiyya gave both Malay-Indonesian Sufis the authority of an orthodox silsila by which they were able to confront the Wujudiyyah mystics of the Malay-Indonesian courts — in Acheh in the case of Raniri, in Makassar in the case of Shaikh Yūsuf — and to claim for their own teaching the sanction of a ṭarīqa that had its origin in the heartlands of Sunni Islam. The transmission of the Rifāʿiyya from the marshlands of Iraq to the harbours of Gujarat and the courts of Acheh and Makassar is one of the principal channels by which the orthodox Sufi scholasticism of the Arab and Persian worlds was carried to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago in the seventeenth century.
At the same time, the Achehnese Rapa’i performances document a separate, popular-level survival of the founder’s name and of the self-wounding Rifāʿī dhikr in the ritual life of Achehnese villages — a survival continuous with, though distinct from, the scholastic silsila transmitted to Raniri through Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān.
See Also
- Abdul-Qadir Jilani
- Abdul-qadir Jilani
- Acheh
- Cheh Saman (Shaikh Samman)
- Gudjarat
- Makassar
- Mocha
- Muhammad al-Addars
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Rapa’i
- Kuluhut)
- Sajjid Abu Hafs Umar Ba Sjaiban
- Yusuf Makasar
- Hamzah Pansuri
- Shaikh Shamsuddin of Sumatra
- Wujudiyyah
- Mecca
Sources
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. 5.
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
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.