The volcanic eruption that destroyed Pulo Ai 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 — 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 — gives the date of the destruction of Pulo Ai, one of the islands of the Banda group, by an eruption of the Gunung Api. The eruption 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 manuscript witness
Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 f. 3v–15v (Catalogus Codicum Orientalium IV, p. 293) is a Moluccan Arabic manuscript of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib — a popular schematic overview of the seventy-two Islamic sects — with interlinear Malay translation. The paper bears 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 as Monday 3 Rabīʿ I 1023, that is, 14 April 1614. 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.
Significance
The eruption of Pulo Ai in 1614 is a volcanic event of the Banda Islands whose principal historical witness is a Malay manuscript of an Arabic scholastic text. The note on f. 1v of Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 — written in the same hand as the text — is the earliest dated trace of the diffusion of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib in the Indonesian archipelago; and the manuscript of which it forms a part is the principal witness to the textual tradition from which Raniri was to draw, more than two decades later, in composing the *Tibjān* at the court of Iskandar Thani in Acheh. The eruption thus stands at one of the most remarkable conjunctions in the textual history of Malay religious literature: a volcanic event of the Banda Islands, recorded in a Malay note on a European-paper manuscript of an Arabic tract, which preserves the very text from which the principal Malay encyclopaedia of Islamic sects was later to be translated in Acheh.
See Also
- Acheh
- Iskandar Thani
- Ma’rifat al-madhahib
- Pulo Ai
- 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, where the Moluccan manuscript of Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 and its note on the destruction of Pulu Ai are discussed.