This is a major contribution to our understanding of one of the monumental works of Malay literature, the encyclopaedic Bustan al-Salatin by Nuruddin ar-Raniri (d. 1658). In this book, Paul Wormser also sheds new light on early seventeenth-century Aceh more generally, which was then a major cultural centre for the Malay-speaking world and the scene of deadly controversy over what constituted orthodoxy or heresy within Sufism. Wormser keeps a central — and illuminating — focus on his theme of the cultural role of the foreigner in the Malay world. For this is what Raniri was — an Indian-born writer of Arab descent who was in Aceh for only a few years (1637–44), during which time he instigated violent and bloody suppression of the works and followers of writers in whose ideas he sniffed out heresy, Hamzah Pansuri (d. 1527) and Syamsuddin of Pasai (d. 1630).
Wormser has a command of the massive Bustan text in Malay as represented in MSS held in European, South African, Malaysian and Indonesian collections, of other relevant works in Malay and of the Arabic sources which Raniri used. He also writes authoritatively with regard to Persian sources from which Raniri might have taken material, but he shows that in such cases in fact it was the Arabic translations of Persian material upon which Raniri relied.
Wormser convincingly shows that the Bustan (compiled c. 1640) is to be understood as a very Arabic work, in which Arabic sources are translated — not paraphrased, but translated — into Malay so as to instruct the imperfect Muslims of the Malay world how to be better believers. Raniri's viewpoint was that of an Arab from the Hadramaut (whence his ancestors had come) and neither his birth and upbringing in India nor his sojourn in Aceh much influenced that. In most of the Bustan, the Malay world is invisible as the text depicts a world seen from the holy lands of the Middle East, with its boundaries to be found in Africa, South Asia and China. The Malay world does not figure in such parts of the work. The chapters in which the Malay world does appear are shown to be by someone other than the author (or authors) of the rest of the work. Here Wormser follows the work of Anne Grinter, whose 1979 SOAS Ph.D. thesis on the Bustan has unfortunately never been published. Wormser believes that this distinction within the Bustan arose because the sponsoring ruler, Sultan Iskandar Thani (r. 1637–41), wanted a book that extolled his excellence, whereas Raniri wanted one that set out Arab views and culture for Malays. Raniri dealt with this difference by putting together his Bustan from Arabic works and having someone else do the royal extolling in separate chapters (p. 208), making no effort to integrate the Malay story into his universal history.
In fact, the extent to which Raniri himself should be thought of as the author, in a modern sense, of the Bustan is called into doubt. Inconsistencies of style and errors in translations from Arabic sources (particularly errors in Arabic and Persian proper nouns) lead Wormser to picture the existence of an atelier where literary artisans worked under Raniri's direction, translating into Malay from Arabic what he told them to translate, compiling the bits together as he wanted them compiled, so as to produce this major work. Raniri would have been in charge, but would not have been doing the translating himself. ‘N'oublions pas que pour un auteur orthodoxe comme Raniri, ce n'est pas l'originalité qui est valorisée mais la conformité à des idées déjà énoncées’ (p. 85), Wormser correctly reminds us. Further indication of the work's origin from hands other than Raniri's is found in sections that recount events occurring after Raniri's departure from Aceh in 1644 and even after his death in India in 1658. A remarkable passage that could hardly have been composed by Raniri is the reference in Book III chap. 4 to Syamsuddin of Pasai — whose teachings Raniri condemned as heretical — as ‘the perfect syaikh’ (p. 84). The product of this atelier appears to be in parts incomplete. Wormser points out, for example, that Book II chap. 10 says in its introduction that it will cover the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), but in fact it only goes as far as 922 (p. 206).
Thus we end with a picture of the Bustan as one of the monuments of earlier literature in the Malay language, put together by a group of translators under the direction of Raniri, to whom the Malay world and its cultures were foreign. The Bustan was a monument with a limited impact in the Malay world, without successors who sought to emulate its style, unlike other works by Raniri which seem to have been more widely circulated and which were turned into versions in other Indonesian languages.
Wormser's important study is supplied with 14 appendices totalling over 200 pages covering such matters as the sources cited in the Bustan, its geography, various indices to references in Bustan, and so on, all facilitating scholarly access to the work.
I found only one minor point where I take issue with the author. On p. 20 he refers to the Cambridge University MS (Ll.6.25 [A]) of a Malay translation of the Arabic Qaṣīḍat al-Burda as having come from Aceh, following the view of Drewes, who published the work. But as Voorhoeve and I pointed out in our catalogue entry for this MS (Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain, p. 112), there is no evidence in the MS itself to support Drewes's assumption that it had been acquired by Peter Floris in Aceh c. 1604. There is an unfortunate printing error on pp. 187–9, where a passage of two paragraphs is printed twice.
This is a truly major contribution for which Paul Wormser is to be congratulated. It is a work which will need to be studied by all students of earlier Malay literature.
