Vincent Monteil

Syed Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas, The Mysticism of HamzahFansuriIn: Archipel. Volume 4, 1972. pp. 244-248.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Monteil Vincent. Syed Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri . In: Archipel. Volume 4, 1972. pp. 244-248.

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/arch_0044-8613_1972_num_4_1_1028

244

Les notices sont généralement assez précises et donnent les références bibliographiques nécessaires. On remarquera que la statue quadricéphale de Gurah que M. Soekmono avait identifiée comme Brahma dans une précédente publication (3), est identifiée ici (n° 16) comme une forme de Si va (Bhalàra Guru ou Agastya ?) et qu'une statue considérée, depuis Stuter- heim, comme une représentation de Bhïma (ongle du pouce long, nudité) est présentée ici (n° 20) comme une effigie de Kertolo, un des suivants de Panji. L'une et l'autre interprétation mériteraient un commentaire plus circonstancié.

On saura gré aux éditeurs — et à la Caltex Pacific Indonesia qui a financé l'édition anglaise et l'édition indonésienne de ce catalogue — d'avoir ainsi mis à la disposition d'un large public les reproductions de bronzes et d'objets en or qui étaient restés jusqu'alors peu connus.

D.L.

Syed Muhammad Naguib AL-ATTAS, The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansûrî, University of Malaya Press, 1970, XVII-556 p., including an annotated romanized Malay edition of Hamzah's three prose works and an annotated English translation of the texts, followed by appendices, a facsimile of the manuscript of Al-Muntahî in Arabic script, a bibliography and an alphabetical index of the semantic vocabulary in Hamzah's mystical system.

This book is a Doctoral thesis, presented in 1966 to the University of London. It deals with the mystical ideas and teachings of Hamzah Fansuri, a Malay Sufi poet of the 16th century who lived in Barus (Fansûr, in Arabic) on the west coast of North Sumatra, the country of camphor (kapur), had been born in Siam (in Shahr Nawi, which means New Town in Persian), and was most likely dead before 1607. Hamzah travelled in the Middle East and in Java, he had been in Siam and in Malaya ha spoke and wrote fluently Malay and apparently also Arabic and Persin e He belonged to the Qâdirî Order and his writings reveal the paramount influence of Ibn 'Arabi from Cordoba (who died in 1240) and of Al Insân al-Kâmil by 'Abd-al-Karîm Jîlî from Baghdad (who died in 1428). In fact, Hamzah Fansuri was not unknown to the specialists, since the dissertation on De Gesch riften van Hamzah Fansoeri, published in 1933, in Leiden, by J. Doorenbos. But the aim of Professor Al-Attas is different. He uses here a general linguistic and semantic approach. According to him, "in Hamzah's system the voca-

3) R. Soekmono, Gurah the link between the central and the east-javanese arts, Bulletin of the Archaeological Institute of the Republic of Indonesia, Djakarta, 1969.

245

bulary employed does not mainly consist of new words; they are Malay words that were all in existen e even perhaps in pre-Islamic times. But it will be demonstrated that the conceptual network imposed upon these already existing words is new and significant". More than that, "this book represents the first undertaking of such a task". Nobody, so far, has succeeded in placing Hamzah Fansuri in his rightful position. It is from the point of view of tafstr, in addition to the point of view of the history of ideas, that Professor al-Attas's works should be evaluated: the Hamzah Fansuri he knows was never known and never even revealed himself.

The author, Professor Dr. Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas, is currently Professor of Malay Languange and Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, The National University of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur). As for every outstanding personality, his opinions may be discussed eagerly and even sometimes frowned upon. But one cannot ignore them and one has to weigh them, to consider and finally to decide that this book is important and stimulating, because facts and concepts are studied from a new angle, by a Malay philosopher and linguist, who is himself from a family of well known Sufis, both from his father's and mother's side — and even a master in the difficult art of Arabic calligraphy (the cover design represents the Basmalah, in the form of a kingfisher). For him, "Sufism is the true light of Islam". And once I heard him say that the purpose of any secular State is to form good citizens, whereas the ideal of Islam is the Perfect or Universal Man (in Arabic: al-insân al-kâmil; in Malay: orang kamil or manusia sempurna). Maybe it is necessary to be a genuine Malay Sufi to see through Malay mysticism, a perequisite somewhat discouraging and even crippling for foreign scholars — if they are unaware of the influence of Browne, Nicholson and Arberry and even of Professor T. Izutsu (Keio University, Tokyo) whose lectures Syed M.N. Al-Attas attended in Mc-Gill University (Montréal, Canada).

In Chapter II, allegations concerning the "heresy" levelled against Hamzah by Nûr ad-Dîn Rânîrî are critically examined. Raniri, who died in 1666, came in 1637, from Gujerat (India) to Atjeh in North Sumatra. Rânîrï, who branded Hamzah with "infidelity", is famous and celebrated to-day in Atjeh, but Hamzah Fansuri's writings are nowhere to be found (let us seize this opportunity to praise here the excellent Ph.D. presented by Miss Tudjimah, in 1961, in the University of Jakarta, on the manuscript of Asrâr al-Insan, whose author is Rânîri himself). Syed M.N. Al-Attas insists on Rânîrï's point about Hamzah's "materialistic pantheism". It appears to him that "the fundamental issue which lies at the bottom of Rânîrï's distortion or misconception is the question of the definition of Being". In short, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that "Râmn is in fact saying the same thing as what Hamzah has more clearly said".

As the author remarks in Chapter III, "all Western scholars who in some

246

way or other studied Hamzah's mysticism have never failed to label it pantheistic" (p. 66). Discussing Hamzah's metaphysics and teachings, Professor Al-Attas makes it clear that "Hamzah's rejection of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the sense he means is not an affirmation of the doctrine of the World": for him, in fact, God is eternal, He exists in all things that He brought into being, and the Universe — Creation — is not an illusion. Hamzah says that the things God knows exist "because of His knowledge of them — the condition of the waves is determined by the sea. "In deed, "in Hamzah the clear-cut distinction between gnosis and knowledge is vividly stressed in his crnsis'ent use of the Malay word kenal to translate macrifah and tahu to translate Him throughout his writings" (for this, see the often quoted saying of the Prophet: Man carafanofsahu,fa-qad carafa Rabbahu — "Whosoe\er knows his self knows his Lord"). "One of the most important concepts ... is that of human freedom {ikhtiyâr) . . . Man, in Hamzah's analogy, is the keris (Malay dagger) whose "action" ... is non-voluntary. God is the wielder of the keris" (p. 100-102). And Syed M.N. Al-Attas remarks how "it is unfortunate that many scholars of Sûfism, particularly the Western orientalists, have tended to regard the Sûfi account of the vexed question of determination and freedom in a rather naive manner, posing philosophical problems and exposing contradictions out of the formulation of Sûfi concepts which they themselves have constructed" (p. 102). "Finally, it is consistent with the cosmologicalandon- tological pattern set forth in Hamzah's mysticism that the key word kehen- dak, when applied to human will and desire in relation to the Divine, does not convey a real meaning, but a metaphorical one, since man as "phenomenon" does not have himself as the determining ground of his will" (p. 140).

After this analysis revolving around the conceptual structure of the Malay word hendak (Chapter IV), the author deals in Chapter V with the key words in Hamzah's mystical concepts. In Hamzah's vocabulary, there are three major focus words: wujûd, ada and diri. "No suitable word presented itself in the Malay language, during the period of cultural change in the history of the Malays initiated by the coming of Islam among them, as an equivalent of the abstract concept of Being denoted by the Arabic wujûd. As a result of this, Malay Sûfi writers and translators have kept the word wujûd untranslated, and have adopted it into the vocabulary of the Malay language" (p. 148) In "Malay, ada conveys basically the meaning "to be" or "existing", with a very close semantic relationship with the Malay word m" (content). But "in Hamzah there are seven different uses of the word ûûto in the relational sense, each defining a particular concept". It is extremely interesting to note that "the development towards philosophical abstraction in the Malay conception of being or existence, as reflected in the Malay language, is first found in the writings

247

of Hamzah. Indeed, they are the earliest evidence in which the usage of ada reveals a semantic change reflecting a new world view — a Sûfi world view, which though no doubt introduced with the coming of Islam, achieved its full definite and systematic Malay expression in them" (p. 165). As for din, its basic meaning in Malay refers to both the visible being and the human individuality or ego. In other words, in Hamzah diri means as the Self as well as the Universal Soul.

In the last Chapter (VI), Professor Al-Attas brings out many important and stimulating conclusions. According to him, "Hamzah Fansûrî must be regarded as the first man to set in Malay all the fundamental aspects of Sûfi doctrines, and his writings must be regarded as the earliest of the kind in Malay, and, for that matter, in any other languages of the Malaysian Archipelago . . . The fact that Hamzah says he writes the (Sharâb) book in Malay so that those . . . who do not understand Arabic and Persian may be able to discourse upon the subject seems to me to show clearly that before Hamzah wrote such a book, all known books on the subject were written in Arabic and Persian" (p. 180). Hamzah's texts remain the best and most lucid texts on Sûfism, predominated as they are by the Persian influence. The methodological approach chosen by Dr. Syed M.N. al-Attas is a modern semantic analysis, which has opened "before our vision other horizons intimately connected with the historical problem of Islamization of the Malays At the outset I declare my agreement with van Leur that Hinduism, as the Malay Indonesian peoples practised it, was merely a superstructure maintained by the ruling group above an indifferent community The Malay-Indonesian society was therefore not a Hinduized society; rather the Malay-Indonesian ruling groups were legitimized sacrally by an Indian hierarcy. .."Professor Al-Attas suggests that "What (Hindu-Buddhist) philosophy they took they transformed into art at the expense of the rational and intellectual elements As far as I know there has been no Javanese translation of the Upanishads .... ,neither has there been any translation of works of Buddhist theology and philosophy in Malay. The Qur'ân, however, has been fully translated with commentary in Malay in the second half of the XVII th century" (p. 187). For the general public, "the philosophical-mystical world view envisaged by the poets of Old Javanese literature was glimpsed in the wayangs (theatres); filtered, as it were, again through the medium of art" (p.188). "Neither the Hindu-Malay nor the Buddhist-Malay, as far as we know, have produced any thinker or philosopher of note" (p. 190).

And here is the challenge: "the reputation spread abroad of the Malay- Indonesian peoples— particularly in Java — as being refiners of great cultures, who excelled in syncretizing the great pre-Islamic religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in the sense of fusing and blending them, has no firm basis . . Perhaps "parallelism" would better describe the fact" (p. 190). On the contrary, "unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam is traditionally linked with the

248

West. It carried on the traditions of Judaism and Christianity .... The Is- lamization of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago should therefore not be compared, it seems to me, with the earlier Hinduization, as has been traditionally done. It would be more relevant to compare the Islamization process with Western elements" (p. 191). The most important phase was the second one: from the fifteenth century up to the end of the eighteenth century, because it is then that, through Sufism, "the highly intellectual and rationalistic religious spirit entered the receptive mirds of the people, effecting a rise of rationalism and intellectualism not manifested in pre-Islamic times" and turning away the Malay-Indonesian world view from "a crumbling world of mythology to the world of intelligence" (p. 194), so that, "finally, it prepared the Malay-Indonesians, in a sense, for the modern world to come" (p. 195). "Sûfis were the disseminators of Islam in the Archipelago" (p.201) and the role of India and Indians has been magnified : in fact, "India was the springboard for the Middle-Eastern missionaries, large numbers of whan came from the Hadramaut in South Arabia". As for the spiritual Islamic influence, its sources were either Arab or Persian (p. 199).

"One of the most important single cultural phenomenon directly caused by the influence of Islamic culture, and especially effected during the second phase of the Islamization process, was the spread and development of the Malay language as a vehicle, not only for epic, romantic and historical literature, but even more so for philosophical discourse. The use of Malay as the language of Islamic philosophical literature in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago enriched its vocabulary and technical terminology considerably and was one of the paramount factors that displaced the hegemony of Javanese" (p. 197). New view-points, new angles are always interesting, but the thesis presented by Professor Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas, about "The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansûrî" is evidence of insight, sincerity and courage: three major virtues which nobody who knows him can deny him.

Vincent MONTEIL. Paris, 11th June 1972.

WIDJOJO NITISASTRO, Population Trends in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 1970; 266 p. , avec une carte administrative de Java à l'époque coloniale, 12 graphiques et 84 tableaux.

Le Professeur Widjojo Nitisastro est, dans l'Indonésie d'aujourd'hui, l'un des économistes les plus en vue. Il a fait ses études à l'Universitas Indonesia de Djakarta, puis à l'Université de Berkeley, où il a obtenu son doctorat, avec un mémoire intitulé Migration, Population growth and Econo-