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ABSTRACT
This article examines the 16th-17th century Malay poet Hamzah Fansuri as a figure at the threshold between not only two religious traditions, but also two linguistic worlds. Hamzah Fansuri is well known for introducing the Sufi poetic tradition to Malay-speaking audiences, translating the Arabic thought of Ibn al-ʿArabī into Malay verse. Writing in Jawi, he frequently employed Arabic words and bilingual puns. This article explores how, through his puns, Hamzah made use of the incommensurabilities of the Arabic and Malay languages to draw attention to the infinite and incomprehensible difference between God and humans, while showing how everything that exists does so by virtue of its participation in the reality of wujūd, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s term for God’s being, which is identical to God’s being found. Hamzah’s practice of translation and his puns is then used to bridge a divide in western theories of translation represented by Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur’s work. Whereas Benjamin emphasises an ontological reality that opens up through the process of translation and Ricoeur emphasises an epistemological process, Hamzah collapses the distinction through wujūd, being and finding. Hamzah’s puns can be understood as a translation that allow the incomprehensible real to be gestured at through language, as in Benjamin, even as it involves the reader in an unending hermeneutical process, like Ricoeur.
Acknowledgements
This article has long been in the making and I have profited from funding agencies as well as many people's input. The research resulting in this article was carried out with the support of a collaborative research grant programme sponsored by Columbia University and PSL University (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02), as well as an International Collaborative Research Grant Program of the American Academy of Religion. I am also grateful to Rachel Fell McDermott and Katharina Ivanyi, who read very early versions of the draft. Katherine Pratt Ewing, as always, gave invaluable conceptual feedback, and Vladimir Braginsky corrected some points on Hamzah’s work. Many thanks also to Nancy Florida, who encouraged me to make my own translations and who, along with Willem van der Molen, helped me see ambiguities in Hamzah’s poetry that I had previously not seen. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers. All remaining mistakes are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on contributor
Verena Meyer is a PhD candidate at the Department of Religion, Columbia University. She holds an MSt in the study of religion from University of Oxford and studied philosophy at Universität Passau. Trained in Islamic studies, her primary areas of interest include processes of transmission and translation from Arabic into Malay and Javanese, and the role of coherence and paradox in Islamic theological discourse. In addition to her textual work, she explores these themes among traditionalist and modernist Islamic communities in Java through ethnographic fieldwork. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 For an overview over Hamzah’s status and his extensive influence on Malay and Indonesian literature, cf. Braginsky (Citation2009).
2 As the following example demonstrates, such silences only become apparent when we switch from one language or dialect into another; Ortega’s silence is a term of comparison. We can consider the way in which English and Indonesian classify siblings. Whereas in English, siblings are differentiated by gender (brother/sister), in Indonesian, they are differentiated by relative seniority (kakak/adik). Such respective silences may become a problem in translation, unless more information is provided (for similar examples, cf. Becker Citation1995: 6–7).
3 Benjamin (Citation2012: 76–77) famously differentiates between the poet, who is ‘spontaneous, primary, graphic’ and the translator, who is ‘derivative, ultimate, ideational’. This distinction appears less relevant in the Malay literary context, as originality and uniqueness are specific western literary virtues (cf. Sweeney Citation1987: 88).
4 Wujūd, often translated as either ‘being’ or ‘finding’, references the realisation of God’s being in one’s consciousness.
5 As Braginsky (Citation1999: 137) details, our sources for the reconstruction of Hamzah’s life include autobiographical references in his poetry (the takhallus bait, cf. also Brakel Citation1979: 81); references in the works of other writers, both Malays and foreign visitors; and the theological landscape and historical context of Aceh and other places visited by Hamzah.
6 Al-Attas suggested that Hamzah Fansuri was born in Shahr-i Naw, the Persian name for the Siamese capital Ayutthaya (cf. al-Attas Citation1970: 4–8), but this view has been refuted by Brakel (Citation1969), and Drewes and Brakel (Citation1986: 5–6). Fansur has generally become accepted as Hamzah’s birthplace. Many scholars identify ancient Fansur as the modern city of Barus. For a different view on the location of Fansur, cf. McKinnon Citation2013.
7 Brakel (Citation1969: 210) was the first to propose that Hamzah was still alive during the reign of Iskandar Muda (r.1607–1636) and did not die until the 1620s. This hypothesis is shared by Braginsky (Citation1999: 163–172). Drewes, however, argued that Hamzah’s death date should be around 1590, partly because he was not familiar with the seven grades of being which became more popular during the early 17th century (Drewes and Brakel Citation1986: 3; cf. Braginsky Citation1999: 166 for the opposite view). Based on their discovery of a funerary stele with Hamzah’s name on it, Guillot and Kalus (Citation2000) have argued that Hamzah died in 1527, but the conclusiveness of this evidence has not been universally accepted (cf. Braginsky Citation2001). For references to local legends on his burial site, cf. McKinnon (Citation2013).
8 For example, Drewes and Brakel (Citation1986: 8 ff.) doubt that his references to Java are meant literally and question al-Attas’s interpretation of the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya as his birth place (4; cf. also Brakel Citation1969; al-Attas Citation1970: 3 ff.). Braginsky (Citation1999: 137–148) has argued that Hamzah’s autobiographical references in his poetry need not only be either literal or metaphorical, suggesting that they might be elaborate puns and therefore both. Braginsky’s view is particularly compelling and convincing in the light of this article’s argument.
9 Al-Attas (Citation1970: 14) traces the sources of Hamzah’s citations and enumerates 15 writers, including al-Bisṭāmī, al-Ḥallāj, al-Ghazālī, Rūmī, and of course Ibn al-ʿArabī, and concludes that he must have read all of them. While Drewes disputed that Hamzah knew much Persian (Drewes and Brakel Citation1986: 13–15), Braginsky (Citation1999: 138) does not share Drewes’s reservations and shows throughout his work the large extent to which Hamzah drew on Persian poets.
10 The syair, derived from the Arabic shiʿr (poetry, verse), is a verse form made up of quatrains with monorhymes and a simple metre based on the relative isosyllabism of verses (Braginsky Citation2004: 301–2).
11 Braginsky (Citation1993a: 38 ff.; Citation2004: 624-5) builds on the insight of Drewes and Brakel (Citation1986: 36), that some of Hamzah’s poems had a specifically didactic or homiletic function as they were rather straightforward in their theological meaning and adds that other poems, that presumed an already learned audience, were more symbolic. This difference can perhaps be understood as a spectrum or a tendency rather than a precise opposition.
12 The Arabic script was adapted to the Malay language by using diacritics to express Malay sounds that are absent in Arabic.
13 Here and in the following, the numbering and transcriptions are adopted from Drewes and Brakel’s (Citation1986) critical edition of Hamzah’s poems. The transcription suggests that the standard Arabic spelling was used for all originally Arabic words, but it is unclear if this was always the case. Because of the limitations of Drewes and Brakel’s translations (cf. Sweeney Citation1992: 96), I have not adopted their translations but made my own.
14 The Old House (al-bayt al-ʿatiq) is a synonym for the Kaʿba (cf. Q 22: 29; 22: 33).
15 As Ricci (Citation2011: 145) notes, this convention set Malay apart from translations into certain other languages in the region. In translations into Javanese, for example, more care was taken to translate and explain phrases or terms.
16 The transformation of the Malay language by the insertion of Arabic words led to the naturalisation of formerly foreign words over time. As Ricci (Citation2011: 148) observes, ‘the question of what was considered Arabic within Malay literature and among its authors … shifted over time, with an increasing number of words becoming so familiar that they were integrated into Malay and no longer represented as foreign’. Cf. Ricci (Citation2016: 74–5) for examples on how translation from Arabic into Malay transformed not only Malay vocabulary, but also Malay syntax.
17 In the absence of an equivalent emic term from Malay literary criticism, the term ‘pun’ is used as a shorthand for Hamzah’s use of ambiguous words, even if the English term has different connotations, not usually known as a means of communicating ineffable truths. Braginsky (Citation1999: 142 n. 8) has shown that Hamzah systematically adopted and appropriated literary techniques of play with homophones from Persian poetry with which he was familiar, including the figures iham and tajnis. Although these terms might be a more fitting designation for Hamzah’s plays on words, for simplicity’s sake, the not entirely adequate term ‘pun’ will be used here.
18 Braginsky (Citation1999: 141), citing Sweeney (Citation1992: 97), who made a similar point, argues that it was in fact the phonetic rather than the graphic form or the spelling of the words that Hamzah’s puns are based on. Although we may not know for certain how Malay was pronounced in Hamzah’s time (Ricci Citation2011: 70) and may therefore disagree whether these puns were actual homophones (for a more sceptical perspective, cf. Brakel Citation1979: 79), this argument is convincing, especially when we consider that texts like this one were more often performed than read silently (Sweeney Citation1980: 15; Citation1987: 89–90), and that Hamzah’s puns therefore had to work in an oral/aural context.
19 For other examples of bilingual puns in Malay religious literature, cf. Braginsky in this issue. The use of such theologically productive ambiguities in poetry is also a feature in Javanese, the other great literary language of the region. Javanese, even more so than Malay, is characterised by a semantic ambiguity of critical words, including personal pronouns, and a lack of tense markers. These indeterminacies allow the poet to play with and gesture towards different meanings at the same time (cf. Florida Citation2018: 169).
20 The term ‘textual communities’ was used by Brian Stock (Citation1990: 37) to designate groups of readers, listeners, and interpreters of a particular body of literature, that would become united around common views and objectives. As detailed by Braginsky (Citation2004: 624), one group of Hamzah’s poems had a didactic-homiletic function. These poems are directly addressed to their target audience, beginning with ‘Aho segala kita yang … ’ (Oh all we who are …). The understanding of his poems was not just an intellectual exercise, but had a soteriological aim as awareness would lead members of this textual community closer to God, and, like Stock’s textual communities, they were also united by common understandings and goals.
21 Brakel’s mention of the puns’ humorous function may be surprising at first sight, as the mystical contemplation of identity and non-identity does not seem particularly funny. However, many authors point to the humorous function of puns in Malay literature (Tham Citation1981; Shaiful Bahri Citation2000). Furthermore, Maier (Citation1991: 66–70) has pointed to the ways in which humour can be related to a deconstruction of a clear and authoritative link between language and reality, which is a compelling point in the light of this paper’s argument. Humour and reverence need not be mutually exclusive (Citation1991: 64).
22 As Wormser (Citation2010) has shown, al-Rānīrī appears to have been opposed not so much to Ibn al-ʿArabī’s theology in general, which he did cite appreciatively in some of his works, but rather to Hamzah’s reception, which he considered false and idolatrous.
23 Cf. Braginsky (Citation1999: 141). Perhaps in these puns we also see a reflection of Malay incantatory poetry that is premised on the identity (but phenomenal difference) of word and sound or utterance and creation (cf. Braginsky 2006), which resonates with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s theology of wujūd.
24 The term ṭarīq (way, path) is another word play, signifying simultaneously the spatial distribution of the waves and the Sufi’s spiritual path or method.
25 Ākhir (last, ultimate) also designates the hereafter, making explicit the eschatological dimension of the waves’ absorption into the ocean.
26 Judging from the frequency of a particular image, the sea occupies the first place in Hamzah’s poetry and is therefore arguably his favourite (Braginsky Citation2007). In addition to the theological resonances of this image and its suitability for punning, it may also have been an imagine that resonated particularly well with Hamzah and his fellow Malays, who were experienced seafarers.
27 Cf. Hadiwijono Citation1967: 54, 66; Zoetmulder (Citation1995: 51, 63). For similar metaphors in pre-Islamic literature describing the ontological relationship between God and humans cf. Acri (Citation2017: 382 ff.)
28 As will become clear, the epistemological in the thought of both Ibn al-ʿArabī and Hamzah Fansuri is an expansive concept, including not only the cognitive grasp of knowledge but also its phenomenological realisation.
29 Cf. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s chapter on Adam in The bezels of wisdom: ‘It is established that the originated is [completely] dependent on that which brings it about, for its possibility. Its existence is [entirely] derived from something other than itself, the connection in this case being one of dependence’ (as translated by Austin Citation1980: 54).
30 With the notion of God desiring to be known, Ibn al-ʿArabī references a well known ḥadīth qudsī in Mekkan Revelations, in which the Prophet reports that God says ‘I was a Hidden Treasure but unrecognised. I loved to be recognised, so I created the creatures and I made Myself recognised to them, so they recognised Me” (as cited and translated by Chittick Citation2005: 31). Hamzah Fansuri also explicitly mentions this ḥadīth qudsī in XXIX: 2.
31 Love for Ibn al-ʿArabī is something that, like wujūd, has its root in God and cannot be understood in itself but only in its expressions. As primordial desire for recognition, it is an aspect of divinity, inasmuch as tawḥīd can be said to have aspects (Chittick Citation2005: 40). Perhaps it is wujūd considered as desiring rather than knowing, but is as such incomprehensible except as made manifest in creatures.
32 This belief is based on a Qur’anic passage that reads: ‘He taught Adam all the names [of things]’ (Q 2: 31). The notion that these names are God’s names is an interpretation that is central for Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teaching of realising the status of al-insān al-kamīl, the perfect human, who has accomplished the actualisation of this knowledge (Chittick Citation2005: 49–50).
33 Another possibility that was advanced by Louis Massignon and has since been challenged is that al-Ḥallāj adopted the terms from Imāmī theologians. For a more detailed discussion of the origin of the terms, see Arnaldez Citation2012; Knysh Citation1999: 292 n.75).
34 While we do find a systematised emanationist model and vocabulary in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s work, the specific terms lāhūt, nāsūt, and their intermediaries are not part of it (cf. McAuley Citation2012: 17–18).
35 As mentioned above, this model of four successive spheres with malakūt (sovereignty) and jabarūt (omnipotence) are not found in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s work. According to Elias, this particular fourfold model was systematised by the Persian Sufi al-Simnānī (1261–1336 CE) (cf. Elias Citation1995: 61 ff.), who was otherwise known as a critic of Ibn al-ʿArabī (cf. Elias Citation1995: 57–58). But while al-Simnānī’s model was widely used among Sufis after him, not everyone who used it necessarily shared his critical attitude towards Ibn al-ʿArabī. Neither was al-Simnānī’s terminology and its associated meanings or the exact nature of the realms used consistently across different thinkers (El Shamsy Citation2016: 216). In the Malay world, this and closely related systems also had some currency (cf. Braginsky Citation1993b: 203; Citation2004: 278–279; cf. also van Nieuwenhuijze Citation1945: 75 ff.).
36 The term occurs for example in Q 6: 74, 7: 185, and 23: 88.
37 The Preserved Tablet (al-lauḥ al-maḥfūẓ) is a tablet with the original copy of the Qur’an kept in heaven (cf. Q 85: 22). According to tradition, the pen (al-qalam) was first created by God to write down events to come (Huart and Grohmann Citation2012).
38 The primary meaning of nāṭiq relates to the faculty of speech, but the term has the additional dimension of articulate and rational speech or, more broadly, being endowed with reason (cf. Lane Citation1984).
39 Other personal pronouns in the third person singular used by Hamzah in his poems include the Arabic huwa (cf. for example XVI: 1 above; cf. also V: 10) and the Malay/Indonesian ia/iya (I: 10; II: 13; XIV: 1).
40 According to Lane (Citation1984), ḍiyā’ has a more intensive signification than nūr, an opinion he bases on Q 10: 5, in which the sun is termed ḍiyā’ and the moon nūr (Lane Citation1984: cf. ضوأ ). Elsewhere in the Qur’an, however, God is referenced as nūr rather than ḍiyā’, for example in the famous light verse (Q 24: 35), which suggests that the difference in intensity between the two words may not be consistent.
41 Engkau is a Malay/Indonesian pronoun for the second person singular (‘you’). The -lah is a suffix that in this case adds emphasis.
42 There is another ambiguity in this line: The referent of bāqī is ambiguous, as it could be either God or the mirror reflecting God. I am grateful to Nancy Florida and Willem van der Molen for pointing out the multiple ambiguities of this line to me.
43 Cf. Chittick Citation2005: 49–51. Although this phrase is often rendered as ‘the perfect man’, the Arabic word insān is gender neutral and therefore more appropriately translated as ‘human’.