Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese Vol II. - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/29

 opinion the fulfilment of this law was indispensable, although in practice fruitless for the majority of those who are in name believers, since they have not grasped the deep mystic significance of the ritual observances and of the law in general.

Others however go much further and assert that this complete consciousness of the universal unity is a universal sěmbahyang or prayer, which does away with the necessity for the five daily devotional exercises of ordinary men. Nay they sometimes go so far as to brand as a servant of many gods one who continues to offer up his sěmbahyang or to testify that there is no God but Allah, since he that truly comprehends the Unity knows that "there is no receiver of prayer and no offerer thereof;" for the One cannot pray to or worship itself. The Javanese put such philosophy in the mouths of their greatest saints, and among the Malays and Achehnese also, teachers who proclaimed such views have been universally revered since early times.

From the chronicles of Acheh, portions of which have been published by Dr. Niemann, we learn somewhat of the religio-philosophical life in Acheh in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We see there that the religious pandits who held mastery in the country were not Achchnese, but either Syrians or Egyptians who came to Acheh from Mekka, or else natives of India, such as Ranīrī I cannot discover whether the Muhammad Jailānī b. Hasan b. Muhammed Hamīd Ranīrī of the chronicles is actually identical with the man known as Nuruddīn b. Ali. b. Hasanji b. Muhammad Ranīrī, or a younger relative of his. The latter name is mentioned in Dr. van der Tunk's essay on the Malay mss. of the Royal Asiatic Society (see Essavs relating to Inde-China, 2e series, Vol II, p. 44–45 and 49–52). The man of whom Niemann speaks came to Acheh for the second time in 1588 and settled the disputed questions of the day in regard to mysticism; the Ranīrī of Van der Tuuk resisted the mystic teaching of Shamsuddīn of Sumatra (Pasei), who according to the chronicles edited by Niemann died in 1630, and wrote the most celebrated of his works shortly before and during the reign of Queen Sapiatōdin Shah (1641–75). This would render the identity of the two very improbable, but the chronicler may have made an error in the date. The omission of the name Ali in the chronicle is in itself no difficulty, and the names Muhammad Jailānī and Nuruddīn may quite well have belonged to one and the same person; nay, in a Batavian ms. (see Van den Berg's Verslag p. 1, no. 3 and 9, no. 49 c.) Nuruddīn ar Ranīrī is actually also called Muhammad Jailānī. In the margin of an edition of the Taj-ul-mulk (see § 5 below) which appeared at Mekka in A. H. 1311, is printed a treatise bearing the title Badʾ chalq as-samawàt wal-ardh. The author of this treatise is called Nuruddin bin Alī Ḥasanji, and in the Arabic introduction it is told of him that he came to Acheh in November 1637, and received from Sultan Iskandar Thani the command to write this book in March 1638. The dates given, however, in the Malay translation which immediately follows the Arabic introduction, are quite different from the above! from Gujerat. We also notice