Poetry
Sharab al-'ashiqin
Not translated into English
Hamzah Fansuri · 1580
Synopsis
A prose treatise that sets out, stage by stage, the path of the Sufi: repentance, asceticism, love, then the annihilation of the self and union with God. The author supports each stage with verses of the Quran and prophetic sayings, at length commented, following the method of the masters he had frequented in Arabia, and he does so in Malay, a language that had not yet served this purpose. Two other treatises from his hand answer it, one on the degrees of knowledge, the other on the station of those who know.
Context
The author left three prose writings and some thirty poems, all preserved in copies, his originals having been consigned to the flames at the instigation of Nuruddin ar-Raniri, who accused him of confusing God and his creation. None of his texts bears a date: this one is placed around 1580 by philologists, within the thirty years in which its author wrote. It was edited by Doorenbos in 1933, by Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas in 1970, with an English translation, and then by Drewes and Brakel in 1986, from a Leiden manuscript copied at Banten in 1704.
Who it is for
A demanding mystical treatise, to be read as a guide to spiritual progress and not as a work of theology, and one that assumes familiarity with Sufi vocabulary.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first major text of systematic mysticism in Malay; it fixed a spiritual vocabulary that remained in use long after the burning of its author's writings.