Nūr ad-Dīn ar-Rānīrī

Nūr ad-Dīn ar-Rānīrī († 1658 ) was an Islamic religious scholar from Gujarat who worked at the court of the Sultanate of Aceh during the reign of Iskandar II (ruled 1636–1641) .

Ar-Rānīrī came from an Arab family from the Hadramaut , who lived in the city of Rander in Gujarat and already had contacts with the court in Aceh. His uncle had worked there as a teacher of logic, rhetoric, ethics and fiqh from 1580 to 1583 . Ar-Rānīrī himself belonged to the Rifai order . He reached the court of Aceh at the end of May 1637. There he placed himself in the service of Iskandar Thani and wrote for him from 1638 first the Malay work Bustān as-Salāṭīn ("Garden of the Rulers"), a seven-volume world chronicle based on from Arabic sources treated the story from creation to the prophets and Muslim rulers of the Middle East up to its immediate present.

In the period between 1641 and 1644, ar-Rānīrī wrote his book Tibyān fī maʿrifat al-adyān , a heresiographic work based on the model of Shahrastani's Kitāb al-Milal wa-n-Nihal , in which he describes both non-Islamic religions such as Judaism and Christianity discussed various Islamic groups. He used this work primarily to attack the teachings of the two Sumatran Sufis Hamza Fansūrī and Schams ad-Dīn as-Samatrānī , who were based on Ibn Arabi's panentheistic Wahdat-al-Wujūd theory and who at the time were many followers at the court of Aceh had. Ar-Rānīrī accused them of teaching the Jahmiyya, which is traced back to Jahm ibn Safwan , to teach the primordial eternity of the world, and rejected this on the basis of the Koranic statement that God is the Creator of all things (e.g. Sura 13:16 ), as disbelief returned.

Ar-Rānīrī had the books of Hamza Fansūrī and Samatrānī publicly burned and their disciples executed. After Iskandar II died in 1641 and his widow Safiyyat ad-Din took over the rule, he lost his favor at court and had to flee. He died in India in 1658.

supporting documents

1. ↑ Cf. on this work Azyumardi Azra: The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia. Honolulu 2004. p. 68.
2. ↑ See Attas 12-15.
3. ↑ See Attas 28–30

literature

• Muhammad Naquib al-Attas . Raniri and the Wujudiyyah of 17th century Aceh . Singapore 1966.
• GWJ Drewes. Nur al-Din al-Raniri's charge of heresy against Hamzah and Shamsuddin from an international point of view. in CD Grijns and SO Robson (eds.): Cultural contact and textual interpretation: Papers from the fourth European colloquium on Malay and Indonesian studies, held in Leiden in 1983 . Dordrecht and Cinnaminson 1986. pp. 54-9.
• Takeshi Ito. Why did Nuruddin ar-Raniri leave Aceh in 1054 AH? in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- and Volkenkunde 134 (1978), pp. 489-491.
• Ph. S. van Ronkel: Raniri's Maleische script: Exposé der religies in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 102 (1943) 461-480.