Tarim — also written Tarīm — is the ancient capital of the Ḥaḍramawt valley in South Arabia, and one of the principal centres of Ḥadramī scholarship. It is the birthplace of Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs (1561–1620) — the spiritual grandfather of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — and one of the principal points of origin of the Ḥadramī diaspora that, from the late middle ages onwards, carried the scholars and saints of the Ḥaḍramawt to the ports of the Indian Ocean, including Surat and Acheh.
The birthplace of al-ʿAddārs
Muḥammad al-ʿAddārs — the spiritual grandfather of Raniri and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — was born at Tarim in 1561. He came to Gujarat at the age of nineteen — that is, in 1580 — and succeeded his famous grandfather as religious teacher, first at Ahmadabad and later at Surat, where he died in 1620. His migration from Tarim to Gujarat was part of the larger Ḥadramī diaspora that carried the scholars and saints of the Ḥaḍramawt to the ports of the Indian Ocean.
The Ḥadramī diaspora
The Ḥadramī diaspora — 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 early modern period — had one of its principal points of origin at Tarim. The Ḥadramī families of Tarim — the al-ʿAddārs family, the al-Aydārūs family, the Bā Shaybān family — were among the principal carriers of this diaspora, and their migrations from Tarim to Gujarat, and from Gujarat to Acheh and Makassar, are the principal channels of the transmission of the Rifāʿiyya to the Malay-Indonesian world.
Significance
Tarim is the birthplace of al-ʿAddārs — the spiritual grandfather of Raniri and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — and one of the principal points of origin of the Ḥadramī diaspora that linked the religious scholarship of South Arabia with the orthodox reaction of Acheh. The migration of al-ʿAddārs from Tarim to Gujarat in 1580 was the immediate antecedent of the formation of the Gujarati-Ḥadramī network from which Raniri himself was to draw, more than half a century later, the authority of an orthodox Sufi silsila against the Wujudiyyah of Hamzah Pansuri’s school.
See Also
- Abd al-Qadir al-Aidaros
- Ahmad Rifa’i
- Gudjarat
- Muhammad al-Addars
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Sajjid Abu Hafs Umar Ba Sjaiban
- Surat
- Yusuf Makasar
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.
Al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athār IV, pp. 26 ff., cited by Voorhoeve for the life of al-ʿAddārs.