Article

A Tamil Malay manuscript

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A Tamil Malay manuscript

Ph. S. van Ronkel, Professor of Malay at Leiden University, published this article in 1922 describing a multilingual Islamic manuscript (Leyden University Library, No. 754) composed in Tamil, Malay, Arabic, and Persian, which he presents as material evidence for the South Indian origins of Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago. The manuscript, dated internally to 29 August 1767, was acquired by Snouck Hurgronje in Java and is argued to have been produced by a peranakan scribe of Tamil-Malay parentage in British Malaya.

Summary

Van Ronkel situates the manuscript within the well-established scholarly consensus that popular Islam, its mysticism, and its literary forms reached the Archipelago via South Indian (Dekhan) Muslim merchants rather than directly from Arabia. The manuscript itself is a composite devotional and practical text: an Arabic dogmatical treatise titled Izam al-fawa’id fi nizam al-‘aka’id, attributed to Mahmud Ibn Muhammad Labai Kumaran and compiled from sources including Al-Ghazali, Al-Nawawi, and Ibn ‘Arabi, is rendered sentence-by-sentence into Tamil written in Arabic script, with the Tamil gradually expanding from translation into commentary over fifteen folios. This is followed by Malay dogmatical tracts, mystical circles (dairahs), divinatory material, wedding formulae, and a Malay poem, making the volume a microcosm of the four great Islamic languages operating simultaneously in the region.

The article’s central analytical contribution concerns the identity of the scribe. Van Ronkel argues that no Tamil immigrant could have achieved such fluency in Malay as to write in both languages with equal ease; rather, the author must have been a peranakan—a son born in Malaya to a Tamil Muslim father and a Malay mother, inheriting Tamil from the father, Malay from the mother, and Islam from both. This generational model of linguistic and religious transmission is presented as the mechanism by which Islam took root in the Archipelago: the first generation of Dravidian or Guzerati settlers married native women, their sons became bilingual, and by the third generation only Malay remained.

The manuscript’s physical and textual features reinforce this reading. Tamil is written throughout in Arabic characters using emphatic and dental letters with sub-dots, a practice van Ronkel notes is rare in manuscript form. The text uses the term Ariwi to designate the Tamil language, which van Ronkel derives from Aruwa, one of the thirteen regions where a lower register of Tamil was spoken, with the Arabic ending -i. A page containing a Persian passage alongside Tamil, preceded by lines in an unidentified Indian idiom, further attests to the multilingual milieu of the Dekhan-Straits corridor.

Key Findings

  • The manuscript (Leyden University Library, No. 754) is a folio containing four Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, Malay, and Tamil in Arabic script—united in a single volume, a combination van Ronkel considers unique in the Netherlands and Dutch India (p. 30).
  • The Arabic treatise Izam al-fawa’id fi nizam al-‘aka’id is attributed to Mahmud Ibn Muhammad Labai Kumaran and draws on Al-Ghazali, Al-Nawawi, Muhammad Ibn ‘Arabi, ‘Abdulkarim Al-Jabli, Muhammad Ibn Fadlallah, and Ahmad Al-Kushashi (p. 31).
  • The final folio bears a Malay poem by “Tambi Mirah,” titled Sha’ir Indra Dibawan, dated A.H. 1192, 4 Sha’ban (29 August 1767), with the owner’s name given as “Kumaran” and a town name ending in puram (p. 34).
  • The term Ariwi is used in the manuscript as the Islamic designation for the Tamil language; van Ronkel derives it from Aruwa (one of the thirteen lower-Tamil-speaking regions) with the Arabic ending -i, and notes that in Hindustani arwa is a Dakhni word meaning “of or belonging to Malabar” (p. 31).
  • The manuscript was purchased in Java by Snouck Hurgronje, who was then Adviser to the Netherlands-Indian government and later Professor of Arabic at Leiden (p. 34).
  • Van Ronkel identifies the scribe as a peranakan of the second generation—born in Malaya to a Tamil Muslim father and Malay mother—whose bilingualism represents the generational mechanism of Islamic cultural transmission from the Dekhan to the Archipelago (p. 34).

Conclusion

Van Ronkel concludes that although the manuscript is neither very ancient nor of special literary importance, it constitutes a “curious historical document” from the period when Islam was introduced from the negeri di-atas angin (Persia and Hindustan) into the negeri di-bawah angin (Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and the eastern islands). It bears witness to the great movement that displaced Hindu culture in the Indonesian world and points to the Straits as the critical link between Southern India and the Archipelago.

Context

  • The manuscript is held in the Malay manuscript collection of the Leiden University Library, catalogued in van Ronkel’s supplementary catalogue (No. 754); the article draws on direct examination of this single codex.
  • The study contributes to the historiography of Islamic transmission in Southeast Asia by providing a concrete textual artifact for the peranakan model of linguistic and religious transmission, complementing the broader arguments advanced by Snouck Hurgronje and others on the South Indian vector of Islamisation.

References