Maulid al-Nabī Sharaf al-Anām from Colonial Ceylon

January 2023

Ronit Ricci

Figure 1: Opening page of the Maulid al-Nabī Sharaf al-Anām from Colombo. Courtesy: Jayarine Sukanthi and Thalip Iyne.

Maulid (or maulud) texts depicting the episodes surrounding the Prophet Muhammad’s birth and singing his praises have been known in the Indonesian-Malay world since at least the 18^th century. They are recited in commemoration of the Prophet’s birth (celebrated on the 12^th of Rabi‘ al-Awwal) and on other occasions such as marriages and circumcisions. One of the most popular among these maulids in the region is the undated and anonymous Maulid Sharaf al-Anām (“The Birth of the Best of Mankind”), composed in Arabic and known by Muslims from Ethiopia to the Philippines.

The exemplar to be discussed here is from colonial Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). The original Arabic text was copied in Colombo in 1891. The small manuscript measuring 15x10 cm and containing 98 pages includes, besides the Arabic text, a Malay interlinear translation. On the cover are written in black ink the title and the owner’s name: Muhammad Mu‘in al-Din ibn Baba Yunus Saldin (known as M.M. Saldin). According to a note in Malay on the manuscript’s second page the manuscript was gifted to the owner by encik Junus Tumurtu, who, as clarified by a brief note in English on the inner cover, was his maternal grandfather who presented the manuscript to him in 1910. [1]It was later inherited by Mrs. Jayarine Sukanthi Iyne, M.M. Saldin’s granddaughter, and is presently in the possession of her family in Colombo. It was digitized as part of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (“Digitizing Malay Writing in Sri Lanka,” EAP609) and is listed as item EAP 609/5/4, available at https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP609-5-4

The manuscript is in very fragile condition, with some pages falling out and the binding loosely connected. It is illuminated on its first two and last two pages in red, green, blue, brown and black, with flowers, leaves, buds and geometrical designs framing these pages (see Figure 1). All other pages exhibit a simple, double-lined frame in red ink. The Arabic is written in black ink while the Malay is written in a lighter shade of gray and a smaller unvocalized script, known across Southeast Asia as jawi and in Sri Lanka as gundul. The hand of the Arabic text and the translation is not the same. On the initial five and a half pages, written in poetic verse in which all lines begin with “assalamu ‘alaika,” only the second half of the lines is translated, beyond the first instance (which includes the translation “salam atasmu hai Muhhmad.” The translation is written with a slant beneath each straight Arabic line, sometimes extending beyond the end of the line and red frame, especially in the pages’ bottom lines (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: A page from the Maulid al-Nabī Sharaf al-Anām where the extension of the translation beyond the frame is visible.

The manuscript offers testimony to the ongoing connections between the small diasporic Malay community in colonial Ceylon and the Indonesian-Malay lands to the southeast. Not only was the Sharaf al-Anām among the most popular mauluds in that broader region but it was also selected for translation via the interlinear method, most often into Malay, in different sites across it, including Aceh, Java, Makassar and Patani from the 18^th century onwards. Composed in part-prose, part-poetry it stands out among numerous interlinear translations from the region that are more prescriptive and less narrative in nature. A comparison among such interlinear translations of the same devotional Arabic text reveals both local particularities and a strong standardizing impulse, the understanding of which will require much further research. Preliminary findings point to the Ceylon translation in some ways resembling a Javanese interlinear translation of the Maulid more than it resembles other Malay interlinear translations of the text. For example, both the Ceylon exemplar and one from Java (British Library, MS. Or 16873) add titles (that do not appear in Arabic) to various figures depicted in the narrative and they also tend to clarify details (e.g. inserting a name into the translation rather than employing ‘ia’ or ‘nya’ which translate the Arabic pronominal suffixes more precisely) where other Malay translations do not. These similarities may reflect the strong demographic and cultural Javanese element within the broader, diverse diasporic community that over time came to be designated as “Malay.”

 

References:

Maulid Sharaf al-Anām. British Library MS. Or. 16873

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?index=23&ref=Or_16873

Maulid Sharaf al-Anām. EAP 609/5/4 https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP609-5-4

Ricci, Ronit. Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge

      University Press, 2019).