Siraj al-Din Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Uthman al-Ushi

Properties3
descriptionA 12th-century Arab poet-theologian, author of the creed poem Bad' al-Amali (al-Lamiyya fil-tawhid), whose Malay translation reached Aceh by the 16th century.
tagsperson, poet, theologian, medieval, islamic, arabic, 12th-century, hanafi
aliasesal-Ushi, Al-Ushi, al-Ushi (poet), Siraj al-Din al-Ushi, al-Farghani al-Hafnafi

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Siraj al-Din Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Uthman al-Ushi (Arabic Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn ʿUthmān al-Ushī) was a 12th-century Arab poet‑theologian, author of the creed poem Bad’ al-Amali — also known as Kasīda al-Lāmiyya fil-tawḥīd (“the L‑poem on [divine] unity”) — composed circa 569 AH / 1173 CE. His versified creed spread throughout the Muslim world, reaching the Malay Archipelago where a 16th‑century Acehnese manuscript preserves an interlinear Malay translation of the poem alongside the contemporary Malay version of the Burda.

Composition and Title

The poem consists of fewer than seventy rhymed verses that end each line with the Arabic letter lam (ل), giving it the alternative name Kasīda al-Lāmiyya fil-tawḥīd (“the L‑poem on [divine] unity”). The opening line — yakūlu ‘l-ʿabdu fī badʾi ‘l-amālī (“the believer says at the start of the dictation”) — explains the alternative titles Bad’ al-Amali (“The Beginning of the Dictation”) and Amali. According to the commentary preserved in the manuscript (see Hādjdji Khalifa, ed. Flügel IV:558 no. 9524), the poem was compiled around 569/1173 by Siraj al-Din. Al-Ushi was a Hanafi jurist and theologian, and the Bad’ al-Amali is his best-known work, condensing the principal articles of Sunni creed into a verse form suitable for rote memorisation in the elementary curriculum of the madrasah.

Manuscript Transmission to the Malay World

The poem reached the Malay‑Indonesian world through at least two distinct manuscript witnesses:

  1. The Acehnese manuscript (DLP‑54, folios 31–35) contains an interlinear Malay translation of the poem, demonstrating the text’s diffusion into Aceh by the 16th century. The translation shows a higher density of Arabic lexical items than the contemporary Malay translation of the Burda preserved in the same codex — a feature reflecting the creed’s denser Arabic theological vocabulary and the translator’s strategy of retaining key technical terms rather than paraphrasing them.

  2. The Cambridge copy (catalogue no. 3116 (1) and 5823 (2)) contains al-Ushi’s work alongside the Burda and other devotional poems, evidencing the broader transmission of Arabic theological poetry to Southeast Asia through Malay scholarly networks. The Cambridge witness attests the regular pairing of credal (Bad’ al-Amali) and devotional (Burda) Arabic verse in the curriculum of Malay-speaking Muslims.

Significance

Al-Ushi’s creed poem became a staple of Islamic education throughout the Muslim world, valued for its memorability. Its presence in both the Acehnese and Cambridge Malay manuscripts illustrates the region’s integration into the broader Arabic‑Islamic literary sphere and the role of Malay translations in transmitting theological knowledge to the Indonesian archipelago. The poem was widely memorised and circulated across the Muslim world and was the subject of numerous commentaries in Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and other languages of the Islamic commonwealth (see Brockelmann for a catalogue of twenty-nine such commentaries).

See Also

Source

20260707_232246_DLP-54-Een_16de_eeuwse_Maleise_vertaling_van_de_Burda_van_al_Bu_s_i_ri_OCR.txt, pp. 20–22 and pp. 98–99 (digitised manuscript containing the sixteenth-century Malay translation of the Burda of al-Busiri, together with the interlinear Malay version of the Bad’ al-Amali on folios 31–35).

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