Traditional Islamic Literature
Although the relationship between Middle Eastern masters and Indonesian pupils can rarely be traced with exactness, we are fortunate to have a fairly large corpus of texts which is able to show some of the issues of concern to Indonesian Muslims.
Here too, however, the distribution of documentary evidence is uneven. Moreover, research on the many theological manuscripts preserved in the archipelago and in European libraries has never been intensive. Some of the texts have been studied by scholars, but our knowledge of religious literature as a whole is still incomplete. Most literary texts which have survived the passage of time do not go back further than the sixteenth century and in fact most manuscripts in our possession are copies dating from the nineteenth century when European interest in indigenous writings began to increase and scores of manuscripts were acquired to be preserved mainly in what was then Batavia and in European public collections. This is not to say that there are no local and private collections but in general we know even less about the contents of those private collections than we do about the actual holdings of the National Library in Jakarta and of the European libraries. A large private library of religious manuscripts kept at a madrasah at Tanah Abee in Aceh is one such example.The literatures of the archipelago most studied until now are probably those of the Malays and Javanese. It is regrettable that there has been little research pertaining to Islamic literature in other Indonesian languages; however, we know that many of the Islamic texts in regional languages including Javanese appear to derive from Malay sources. The comparatively small volume of Islamic texts in regional languages also indicates that most Muslims were able to understand and read Malay, the lingua franca of the archipelago, and it illustrates clearly the importance of Malay in the spread of Islam among the peoples at large.
Literature in Javanese of course is of particular relevance since the Javanese form the largest ethnic group in the archipelago. (It goes without saying that the true Islamic scholar would frown upon the use of Malay and Javanese for reading and writing, a disdain which has been preserved into this century, and which is also reflected in the attitude of many theologians towards modem fiction.)Whereas in Java there is obvious proof of a pre- Islamic literary tradition, the evidence with regard to Malay literature is less conclusive. This has given rise to the claim that traditional Malay literature as we know it today is probably not older than Islam itself and that in fact Malay literature is an Islamic literature which developed almost exclusively within the framework of an Islamic concept of the arts as it is manifested in Persian and Arabic literature. The apparent lack of any manifestly pre-Islamic literary texts is taken as clear evidence to support this contention. This is not the place to argue the point; it should be said, however, that the lack of earlier materials does not necessarily imply their previous non-existence. Just as in Java the development of the figurative arts appears to have been brought to an end with the consolidation of Islam, one could imagine that earlier literary traditions had similarly disappeared in the Malay world. Even the works of the heterodox mystical writer Hamzah Fansuri have not come to us in their totality as some seem to have been destroyed already in the seventeenth century by the opponents of his theology. Thus, if today traditional Malay literature, which is written exclusively inJawi, is seen as an Islamic literature, it does not follow that this Islamic literature has not superseded an earlier literature and that in this present literature there are no elements of an earlier literature which only for lack of comparative material is difficult for us to distinguish from its more recent manifestations.
A large part of the Islamic literature in Malay and Javanese is anonymous.
It is frequently undated and the age of a manuscript is no indication of the age of a text. The exact place of origin of a text and manuscript too is often difficult to establish. A major part of this literature is theological and didactic in nature and pertains to the study of the traditional disciplines of Islamic learning. Another part is devoted to the study of Arabic as a language. Adah literature, i.e. non-religious prose fiction and poetry, is rare prior to the twentieth century.Roolvink distinguishes the following types of Islamic literature (Roolvink, 1971):
1. Qur’anic tales, or stories about prophets and other persons whose names are mentioned in the Qur’an. These extremely popular tales are of an edifying nature and serve to complement and explain certain stories found in the Qur’an. Of the Qur’anic stories the Hikayat anbia was and still is among the most popular. The stories generally agree with Arabic traditions.
2. Tales about the Prophet Muhammad himself. The stories are centred around the life of the Prophet and concentrate on the miracles he performed. Most of these stories seem to have become known in the archipelago through Persian versions.
3. Tales about contemporaries of the Prophet, both his companions and his adversaries. Most famous of the stories in this category is probably the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah which has been traced back to its Persian original. Just as the reading of many of the stories related to the life of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed to award protection against various evils, reading of the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah was considered to increase the courage and fighting spirit of the Muslim warrior. In fact, at one time its powers were considered to be so strong, that on the eve of the Portuguese attack against Malacca in 1511 the Sultan of Malacca initially refused the request of his soldiers to have this hikayat read to them and offered the Hikayat Amir Hamzah instead. It has been argued that this particular text, the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah, is the prototype of the Malay hikayat per se.
4. Heroes of Islam. Beginning with the story of Alexander the Great (Hikayat Iskandar Dzulkarnain) which seems to have been modelled on some Arabic-Persian version, this group includes what seems to be the original Malay creation of the story of the eighth-century Sufi Ibrahim ibn Adham, the Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim.
5. A special group can be classified as kitab literature, i.e. theological literature in the stricter sense written by and for theologians and religious teachers and not for the faithful at large. In this group too fall theJavanesepnmfeoH which are sometimes no more than scrap-books kept by pupils of a pesantren (a school of Islamic learning). The kitab literature is very comprehensive and, as can be expected from a literature where faithfulness, accuracy and above all legitimacy are all important, here we find the names of authors, translators, editors and adaptors mentioned more frequently. A large number of texts in the kitab tradition stem from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Given the didactic purpose of this literature and considering the spiritual traditions in which the writers saw themselves, most of the works in this category do not strive for originality. However, there are exceptions and again we have to turn to seventeenth-century Aceh and the Islamic literature written there in Malay, leaving aside the considerable literature in Acehnese itself which has been discussed at length by Snouck Hurgronje.
Four outstanding theologians, writers and thinkers each in his own way made their presence felt in the Aceh of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reference has been made already to Hamzah Fansuri (d. c. 1600). However, Hamzah’s reputation does not rest just on his heterodox views. He is considered the first original and creative poet with an individuality of his own known to us from Malay literature. Hamzah is credited with the ‘invention’ of a particular form of quatrain called syair and its introduction into Malay literature.
Echoing traditional Malay as well as specifically Islamic, i.e. Perso-Arabic, forms of poetry, Hamzah created a poetic form of his own which was to leave a lasting stamp on Malay poetry by pushing other forms into the background. Only in this century and with the development of a more modern literature did the syair begin to lose its importance as it was no longer able to serve as a creative means of expression. Originally employed by Hamzah to express his own mystical emotions, experiences and thoughts, thesyair developed into the most common form of poetry and came to be employed in a religious and non-religious context. With Hamzah, too, for the first time we see the attempt made to express mystical, religious thought in a language accessible to those who did not know Arabic and Persian sufficiently well.Hamzah not only wrote poetry. In a number of prose works he set out his own concept of Wujudiya which was so vigorously opposed a few decades after his death by a native of Rander in India, Nuruddin ar-Raniri. Nuruddin stayed only a few years in Aceh (1637-44) during which time he wrote a number of books in both Arabic and Malay. Today perhaps best known is his Bustan as-Salatin, a compendium ofknow- ledge with original chapters on the history of Aceh and the genealogy of its rulers. If Hamzah had a follower in Syamsuddin al-Sumatrani, or Syamsud- din ofPasai, who diedin 1631, then AbdurraufofSingkel (c. 1615-93) stood in the orthodox tradition of Nuruddin. Abdurrauf is credited with the first full commentary on the Qur’an in Malay, the Tarjuman al-Mustafid which, in its present form has recently been identified as a composite text enlarged by his pupil Daud Rumi, according to P. Riddell. Abdurrauf, who had spent about 20 years of study in Arabia before returning to his home country of Aceh in 1661, had among his teachers Burhan al-Din who authorised him to set up the Syattariah order in Aceh.
According to Roolvink, Nuruddin’s Bustan falls already into the category of adab literature to which another seventeenthcentury text can be added, the Tajj us-Salatin by Bukhari Djohori, a mirror of conduct written in 1603 and based on Persian models.
The nineteenth century saw the creation of what is probably the most remarkable indigenous Islamic work in thedddfc tradition, the Tuhfat al-Nafis by Raja AH Haji. The work is outstanding for several reasons. Normally it does not seem to have been common for members of the aristocracy to be literate (let along devoutly religious), and, although there have been rulers and aristocrats of high learning throughout the history of the archipelago, it would seem that the majority of aristocrats would have acted as patrons only, leaving the actual writing to court scribes who were often of lowly rank. One of the exceptions to this pattern was the family of the deputy ruler of Riau which was of Bugis descent and, although there are few words of Buginese in the Tuhfat it is worth remembering that the Buginese had a well estabhshed literary tradition of their own. Apart from Raja AH Haji, his father and a sister are also known to have been actively engaged in Hterary work. Raja AH Haji and his father, incidentally, were said to have been the first nobles from the Riau court to have made the pilgrimage. Raja AH Haji himself wrote theological and didactic prose and poetry. A ‘linguistic’ study of Malay also stands to his credit. However, his most famous work, the Tuhfat al-Nafis, is the first historical work in Malay which not only sets out its sources with previously unknown precision but also covers a world much larger than the one known from most Malay historical texts, as it encompasses most of the Malay world and not just the world of one state. This is understandable historically as the work aims to describe and justify the advance of five Buginese brothers, of whom Raja AH Haji is a descendant, into the western Malay world, and their current military and political strength. But the book also has a strong moral and, according to B. Andaya and V. Matheson, ethical undertone and Raja Ali appears to have been influenced in particular by al-Ghazah and his Nasihat al-Muluk. In the Tuhfat al-Nafis he strives to show how the course of history and the well-being of a state and internal harmony are determined by the proper conduct of subjects and ruler who do not foUow their desires, hawa nafsu, but logic and reason, akal and ilm.
Generally speaking, in the nineteenth century, apart from the increase in the kitab literature already mentioned, we also find a larger number of texts whose ‘subject matter... derived from international Islamic literature, their surroundings set in the central lands of Islam’ (Rool- vink, 1971:1234). It should be noted, too, that the late nineteenth century saw, hand in hand with the development of the press, the development of a more secular non-Islamic literature.
Of religious literature in Javanese which differs from that in Malay, mention perhaps should be made of the so-called suluk literature, i.e. anonymous, mystical songs whose creation has been attributed in part to the nine wali, the cultural heroes who are said to have brought Islam to Java. Despite their lyrical form the suluk songs are of a didactic nature. Popular too is the so-called Menak cycle of prose stories centred around Hamzah which is most directly related to the Malay version of the Hikayat Amir Hamzah.