Nuruddin ibn Ali ar-Raniri ( ar, نورالدين بن علي الرانيري) (also transliterated Nur ud-Din ar-Raniri /

Rander Rander (also known as Rahe Neer or city of mosques) is a town in Surat district in the state of Gujarat, India. Located on the bank of the Tapti River, it is from the city of Surat. History There are some historic indications that Rander ...

i, died 1658) was an Islamic mystic and scholar from

in Surat province of

Gujarat Gujarat (, ) is a state along the western coast of India. Its coastline of about is the longest in the country, most of which lies on the Kathiawar peninsula. Gujarat is the fifth-largest Indian state by area, covering some ; and the ninth ...

, in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, who worked for several years in the court of the sultan of Aceh in what is now

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. He was the most prolific of the authors of the Acehnese court, and helped contribute to its international reputation as a center of scholarship. His work was considered the oldest Muslim scholarship of South east Asia. Shaikh Randeri (Ar-Raniri) (Shaikh Nur ad-Deen Muhammad b. Ali b. Hasanji al-Hamid as-Shafi'i al-Ashari al-'Aydarusi ar-Randeri) was born into a

Gujarati Muslim The term Gujarati Muslim is usually used to signify an Indian Muslims, Muslim from the state of Gujarat in western coast of India. Most Gujarati Muslims have Gujarati language as their mother tongue, but some communities such as the Momin Ansari ...

family of Hadhrami lineage, that was descended from Quraysh Arabian nobility. He arrived in Aceh in 1637 and enjoyed the patronage of Iskandar Thani (reigned 1636-1641) in quality of jurist consult (Arabic: ''

mufti A Mufti (; ar, مفتي) is an Islamic jurist qualified to issue a nonbinding opinion (''fatwa'') on a point of Islamic law (''sharia''). The act of issuing fatwas is called ''iftāʾ''. Muftis and their ''fatwas'' played an important role ...

'') and later of the highest-ranking religious office of '' Shaykh al-Islām''. He denounced his predecessors at the Acehnese court, Hamzah Pansuri and Syamsuddin of Pasai, for what he saw as their heresy in violation of the Islamic belief that God was unchanged by his creation. He ordered their books to be burned, while he wrote numerous works setting what he insisted were orthodox religious standards. His most notable work was the Bustan as-Salatin ("The Garden of Kings"), begun in 1638 and written in Malay based on

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

sources. It is a seven-volume encyclopedic work, covering the history of the world from the creation through the period of prophets of Islam and the Muslim kings of the Middle East and the Malay area, as well as several sciences. Ar-Raniri's works were translated into other Indonesian languages, and had considerable influence in Malay literature. He lost favour with the court of Iskandar Thani's successor, his widow

Taj ul-Alam Sulṭāna Taj ul-Alam Safiatuddin Syah (1612 – 23 October 1675; born Putri Sri Alam) was the fourteenth ruler of Aceh. She was the daughter of the sultan Iskandar Muda and the wife of his successor, Iskandar Thani. She became sulṭāna u ...

, and left Aceh in 1644, and died in India in 1658.

References

Sources

* Muhammad Naquib al-Attas. ''Raniri and the Wujudiyyah of 17th century Aceh''. Singapore: Monographs of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 3, 1966. * G.W.J. Drewes. "Nur al-Din al-Raniri's charge of heresy against Hamzah and Shamsuddin from an international point of view." pp. 54–9 in C.D. Grijns and S.O. Robson (eds.). ''Cultural contact and textual interpretation: Papers from the fourth European colloquium on Malay and Indonesian studies, held in Leiden in 1983''. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 115. Dordrecht and Cinnaminson: Foris Publications, 1986. * Takeshi Ito. "Why did Nuruddin ar-Raniri leave Aceh in 1054 A.H.?" ''Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde'', vol. 134, no. 4 (1978), pp. 489–491.

See also

References

Sources

Further reading