Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — in Dutch scholarship Sjaich Jusul Makasar — was a Makassarese Sufi who in 1644 left Celebes for Mecca, where he became — like Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī before him — a disciple of Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān in the Rifāʿiyya. He is named by Voorhoeve in the introduction to the 1955 edition of Raniri’s two Malay treatises as one of the two principal Malay-Indonesian Sufis of the seventeenth century who were formed in the Gujarati-Ḥadramī network of the Rifāʿiyya; he also numbers Raniri himself among his teachers.
The journey to Mecca
In 1644 — the very year in which Raniri completed the *Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm* and returned from Acheh to Ranir — Shaikh Yūsuf left Celebes for Mecca. The journey brought him, like Raniri before him, to the discipleship of Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān — the Ḥadramī-Indian shaikh of the Rifāʿiyya who lived chiefly at Bījāpūr and died in 1656 at Bilgrām. Yūsuf al-Makassar also numbers Raniri himself among his teachers — a remarkable fact, since it implies either that the two met during Raniri’s Achehnese period (which would require Yūsuf to have passed through Acheh on his way to Mecca in 1644) or that they met after Raniri’s return to Ranir in 1644, possibly during Yūsuf’s transit through India on his way to or from Mecca.
The Ḥadramī-Indian-Malay-Indonesian network
Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar belongs, with Raniri, to the small group of Malay-Indonesian Sufis of the seventeenth century who were formed in the Ḥadramī-Indian network of the Rifāʿiyya through the discipleship of Bā Shaybān and al-ʿAddārs. This network was the principal vehicle by which the orthodox Sufi scholasticism of the Arab and Persian worlds was transmitted to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago in the seventeenth century; and the fact that two of its principal Malay-Indonesian disciples — Raniri in Acheh and Yūsuf in Makassar — were to play leading roles in the religious and political history of their respective sultanates is a measure of the network’s importance for the Islamic history of the region.
Significance
Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar is, with Raniri, one of the two principal Malay-Indonesian disciples of Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān in the Rifāʿiyya. His journey to Mecca in 1644 — the year of Raniri’s return from Acheh to Ranir — is one of the principal chronological coincidences in the religious history of the Malay-Indonesian world in the seventeenth century, and his numbering of Raniri among his teachers establishes a direct link between the orthodox reaction of Acheh and the religious history of Makassar in the second half of the seventeenth century.
See Also
- Bilgram
- Bijapur
- Mecca
- Makassar
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Sajjid Abu Hafs Umar Ba Sjaiban
- Sirat al-mustaqim
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”), pp. 5–6.