Ḥamza Al-Fanṣūrī

Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī Alexander Wain Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī is the first identifiable Southeast Asian Islamic scholar to leave behind a substantial and systematic body of work. Very little, however, is known about his life; although his nisba suggests he came from Fansur (modern-day Barus, in north Sumatra), little else is certain. As outlined below, however, he apparently travelled to the Middle East (notably Makkah and Baghdad) and subscribed to the Wujūdī brand of Sufism – that is, to the controversial Neo-Platonist brand of mystical philosophy which argues for a unity between God and His creation.1 Besides this intellectual pre-occupation, however, most other aspects of Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī’s biography remain unresolved – including when he lived. Traditionally, scholars have dated Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī’s death to the reign of Aceh’s Sultan ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Ri‘āyat Shāh (r.1588-1604). This conclusion is based on a number of considerations. First, Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī appears to have dedicated a poem to this ruler, suggesting that, at the very least, he survived into this period.2 Second, in 1602 Aceh was visited by the British envoy, Sir James Lancaster. While there, Lancaster negotiated a treaty with two Acehnese nobles, one of whom he described as a “wise and temperate” man who held great favour with the king and knew Arabic fluently.3 Simply identified as Aceh’s “chiefe bishope,” it has been suggested that this was al-Fanṣūrī. Certainly, there is no other known Acehnese religious figure of this stature from this period. 4 Subsequent to 1602, however, or from the reign of Iskandar Muda (r.1607-1636) onwards, Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī disappears from the scene; if mentioned from this point on, such as by Iskandar Muda’s Shaykh al-Islam, Shams al-Dīn al-Sămaṭrānī (d.1630), it is only briefly and as a former 1 See Hamzah Fansuri, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, ed. and trans. G. W. J. Drewes and L. F. Brakel, Bibliotheca Indonesica 26 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986). 2 The relevant poem does not provide a name for the ruler, only calling him Shāh ‘Ālam. This, however, was a title applied to Sultan ‘Alā al-Dīn Ri‘āyat Shāh, see Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas, Rānīrī and the Wujūdiyyah of 17th Century Acheh, Monographs of the Malaysian Branch Royal Asiatic Society No. III (Singapore: Malaysian Printers Ltd., 1966), 44. 3 James Lancaster, The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster to Brazil and the East Indies, 1591-1603, ed. William Foster (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1940), 96. Another Englishman, John Davies, who visited the region between 1598 and 1603, also refers to the “archbishop” of Aceh; favoured by the king, the people called him a prophet and he was allowed to wear separate apparel from everyone else, see John Davies, The Voyages and Works of John Davies, ed. Albert Hastings Markham (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1880), 151. 4 Azymardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ‘Ulama’ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: Asian Studies Association of Australia, Allen & Unwin and University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 53. 1 presence in the kingdom.5 This strongly suggests that, although still alive in 1602, Ḥamza al- Fanṣūrī died before Iskandar Muda’s ascent to the throne. Despite the strength of this argument, however, in 2000 an alternative hypothesis was suggested. In that year, C. Guillot and L. Kalus published an article detailing a discovery made in 1930’s Makkah.6 Throughout that decade, the then director of Cairo’s Museum of Arab Art, Gaston Wiet, had attempted to compile a complete record of Makkah’s early epigraphy. His ultimate aim was to publish the collected material as a book, entitled Corpus d’Inscriptions de la Mecque. He died, however, before being able to complete his task and, as a result, his research never appeared. Nevertheless, in the 1990’s Guillot and Kalus gained access to his notes, amongst which they discovered a copy of an inscription made by Wiet’s assistant, Hassan Mohammad el-Hawary. In 1934 el-Hawary had visited Makkah and, in the city’s Bāb al-Ma‘lā cemetery, copied and photographed a gravestone dated the 9th Rajab 933AH/11th April 1527. Significantly, el-Hawary claimed this gravestone bore the name Ḥamza bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fanṣūrī.7 According to the accompanying epitaph, this Ḥamza bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fanṣūrī was ‘al-Shaykh al-ṣāliḥ [i.e. the devoted Shaykh], a servant of God, [and] a zāhid [i.e. ascetic]’ who bore the title Sayyidinā. All this clearly identifies him as a high ranking Sufi. Moreover, the inscription also called Ḥamza bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fanṣūrī al- shaykh al-murābiṭ, which Guillot and Kalus interpreted to mean a ‘combattant de la frontière,’8 thereby implying that Ḥamza bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fanṣūrī came from the very edge of the Islamic world. As a result, and despite their record of the inscription being Wiet’s copy of el-Hawary’s own copy (the latter’s photograph had disappeared, and no rubbing was ever made), Guillot and Kalus argued that this grave almost certainly belonged to Southeast Asia’s Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī, thereby pushing his lifetime back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although Guillot and Kalus have attempted to bolster their argument with a range of other factors,9 ultimately they fail to convince. To begin with, Acehnese tradition locates Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī’s grave at the southernmost tip of Aceh, in Kampung Oboh (in Simpang Kiri, Rudeng).10 If this is correct, it would refute any possibility that Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī was 5 Azra, Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, 53. 6 There is also an Indonesian version of their article, Claude Guillot and Ludvik Kalus, ‘Batu Nisan Hamzah Fansuri,’ Jurnal Terjemahan Alam dan Tamadun Melayu 1 (2009): 27-49. 7 Claude Guillot and Ludvik Kalus, ‘La stèle funéraire de Hamzah Fansuri,’ Archipel 60 (2000): 5-6. 8 Ibid, 6. 9 Ibid, 14. 10 Vladimir I. Braginsky, ‘On the Copy of Hamzah Fansuri's Epitaph Published by C. Guillot & L. Kalus,’ Archipel 62 (2001): 28. 2 buried in Makkah. Furthermore, the lesser-known Sumatran scholar, Ḥasan al-Fanṣūrī, names Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī as his teacher, who taught him dhikr (the Sufi’s ritualised remembrance of God). Although Ḥasan’s precise dates are unknown, his writings also utilise the work of the Gujarati Sufi, Muḥammad ibn Faḍlillāh al-Burhānpūrī, as expressed in the al-Tuḥfa al- mursala ilā rūḥ al-Nabī (1590).11 Consequently, Ḥasan must post-date the late sixteenth century. If, therefore, he was Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī’s pupil, it is unlikely that the latter died in 1527; if he did, Ḥasan must have lived into his nineties, only finalising his mystical philosophy at the very end of his life. Although this is technically possible, it is unlikely: few lived that long during this period. Rather, it is far more probable that Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī lived closer to 1590, thereby allowing (the therefore much younger) Ḥasan to be both his pupil and, a few years later, able to absorb influences from al-Burhānpūrī. Perhaps most conclusively, however, although Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī does not explicitly date his writings, he does claims he was writing during the “season of the white man [orang putih].” Malay writers did not use the term orang putih until after the arrival of the Dutch and the English in the late sixteenth century. Any earlier than this, and they would refer to Europeans as either pertugan or peringgi (from the Arabic faranjī, meaning “Franks”).12 As such, this strongly suggests that Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī was writing at the end of the sixteenth/beginning of the seventeenth century, just as has traditionally been thought.13 Returning to Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī’s teachings, in essence they can be characterised as a brand of Wujūdī-orientated Sufism with close links to the Qādirī ṭarīqa. They also draw from both the Persian and Arabic literate traditions. The precise nature of Ḥamza al-Fanṣūrī’s 11 Azra, Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, 41. 12 Al-Attas, Rānīrī and the Wujūdiyyah, 9. 13 If this means Guillot’s and Kalus’s argument can be dismissed, how is “Ḥamza bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fanṣūrī” to be explained? In short, this name could be a misreading. As noted by Braginsky, the article by Guillot and Kalus analyses this object’s inscription using only a copy of a copy, with no further research (such as someone going to Makkah to find the grave) to determine whether el-Hawary and/or Wiet copied the inscription correctly, Braginsky, ‘Hamzah Fansuri's Epitaph,’ 22-24. Indeed, even if little reason exists to suppose Wiet made a copyist’s error, el-Hawary could easily have done so; he was, after all, working quickly in the midst of a busy cemetery. Certainly, and as Braginsky also notes, many other nisba could, with the misplacement of a diacritical mark or reproduction of a wrong letter, be mistaken for “al-Fanṣūrī”. In particular, during this period North Africa’s premier Sufi centre was Manṣūra. This gives the nisba al-Manṣūrī which, when written in Arabic, potentially needs just a single misplaced dot to be transformed into al-Fanṣūrī. Indeed, consideration of Manṣūra in this context is significant because Ḥamza bin ‘Abd Allāh is also described as an al-shaykh al-murābiṭ. As Guillot and Kalus note, murābiṭ at one time referred to a person who, while being dedicated to the defence of Islam, lived on the edge of the Islamic world.

Load more