Pulo Ai — also written Pulu Ai — is one of the islands of the Banda group in the Moluccas. Its destruction by a volcanic eruption on Monday 3 Rabīʿ I 1023 — that is, 14 April 1614 — is recorded in a note on f. 1v of Leiden Cod. Or. 1255, a Moluccan manuscript of the *Maʿrifat al-madhāhib* with interlinear Malay translation. The note is the earliest dated event in the manuscript history of the diffusion of Malay religious prose in the Indonesian archipelago before the arrival of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī in Acheh in 1637.
The eruption of 1614
The volcanic eruption that destroyed Pulo Ai on 14 April 1614 was an eruption of the Gunung Api — the “Fire Mountain” — of the Banda group. The eruption is recorded in the note on f. 1v of Leiden Cod. Or. 1255: Ini surat tatkala binasa Pulu Ai dalam bulan Rabiʿ al-awwal pada hari Senin dan pada hijrat Rasūl Allāh ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallam tūn sē ribu duapuluh tiga tahun dan tiga bulan — that is, “this writing [dates from] the time Pulu Ai was destroyed, in the month Rabīʿ I, on Monday, in the year of the Hijra of the Messenger of God — may God bless him and grant him salvation — one thousand twenty-three years and three months.”
The manuscript witness
Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 — a Moluccan Arabic manuscript of the *Maʿrifat al-madhāhib* with interlinear Malay translation — is written on paper bearing as watermark the arms of Thann in Alsace, which Voorhoeve identifies, on the authority of Churchill’s book on watermarks, as occurring in a document of 1612. The note on f. 1v — in the same hand as the text — gives the date of the destruction of Pulo Ai. The manuscript looks unused; it was probably a copy made on paper brought by a European, shortly after the eruption of the Gunung Api, from an original that was itself somewhat older.
Importance for the textual history of the Tibjān
The Moluccan manuscript of Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 is of exceptional importance for the textual history of the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān* of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī. Voorhoeve shows that the manuscript agrees with the *Tibjān* — not only, with small exceptions, in the names of the sects but also in the dogmas attributed to them — including, in the case of the Khaufiyya sect 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. The agreement is so great that one might suppose one had before one an Arabic preliminary study by Raniri for his Tibjān, or an Arabic excerpt from the Malay Tibjān; but this hypothesis is refuted by the manuscript itself, which on the evidence of the paper and the note on f. 1v must have been copied shortly after the eruption of Pulo Ai in 1614 — that is, more than two decades before Raniri’s arrival in Acheh in 1637.
See Also
- Acheh
- Iskandar Thani
- Ma’rifat al-madhahib
- Pulo Ai volcanic eruption (1614)
- P. Voorhoeve
- Raniri
- Raniri’s arrival in Acheh (1637)
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
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 §2b (“De bronnen van de Tibjān”), pp. 14–15.