Cosmopolitan Islam in South Sulawesi, 1640–1705

Abstract

In the1980s Abdul Hakim provided me with copies of several old manuscripts that turned out to be Makassar translations of writings by Nur al-Din al-Raniri (Nuruddin ar-Raniri [1642] 1983). Nur al-Din al-Raniri was a scholar of Hadrami descent who was born in Gujarat, probably to a Malay mother. He may have been trained from birth to serve as a missionary in the East Indies. He was the author of the most extensive body of Islamic writings ever produced in the Malay language. He made it his business to replace the pantheistic teachings of Hamzah Fansuri in the royal courts of Southeast Asia with the synthesis of tariga’ and hadith studies that had developed in Mecca and Medina during the sixteenth century.