History in Motion: Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī’s Retelling of ʿAbbāsid History in Seventeenth Century Aceh

Verena Meyer

doi:10.18196/afkaruna.v20i2.24794

Authors

Verena Meyer Leiden University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18196/afkaruna.v20i2.24794

Keywords:

Aceh, Islamic Historiography, Malay, Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī, Sufism.

Abstract

This article focuses on the seventeenth-century Islamic scholar Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī (d. 1658), who became especially known for his harsh oppression of monistic Sufism during his tenure as Shaykh al-Islām at the Acehnese court. Yet, some indications suggest that Rānīrī’s opposition to Sufism was not as clear-cut as it first seems. Revisiting a thus-far unanswered question about a strange idiosyncrasy in Rānīrī’s magnum opus, a universal history in Malay titled Bustān al-Salāṭīn, this article seeks to dislodge simplistic understandings of the legitimacy of certain strands of Sufism, the polemics around charges of being “monistic,” and Rānīrī’s own positionality.

Author Biography

Verena Meyer, Leiden University

Before joining MF, Verena Meyer received her PhD and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University's Department of Religion. Trained in Islamic Studies and specializing in Islam in the Malay-Indonesian world, her research has focused on the construction of self-consciously pious Islamic identities in Indonesia and their situatedness in transnational intellectual networks, popular culture, and the politics of knowledge of postcolonial Indonesia. She is currently working on her first book project, Future’s Past: The Politics of Memory in Islamic Java, which examines historical memory as a conceptual framework for articulating normative visions and identities for the present and future in different groups of Muslims. In addition to her ethnographic work on contemporary Islam, she has also published on the reception of Arabic philosophical traditions in classical Malay and Javanese literature.

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