A Didactic Verse from Early Twentieth-Century Aceh
December, 2022
Aglaia Iankovskaia
Source: Collective volume with two texts in Arabic with interlinear translation in Malay Or. 7075, Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections, used under Creative Commons CC BY License / Cropped from the original
In the Leiden University Library, an unremarkable, at first sight, and yet peculiar manuscript is found. Dating back to around 1903-1904, it was acquired in Aceh by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), a well-known Dutch Orientalist and scholar of Islam in what is now Indonesia. The manuscript, registered as Or. 7075, contains two Arabic poems provided with translation to Malay between the lines, and one of them we will discuss in this post. Part of the traditional Islamic education world, this bilingual text might shed some light on the roles of didactic verse and interlinear translation in the Islamic teaching and learning practices of the time.
The manuscript remains a witness of the dramatic last stages of the Aceh War (1873–1913), as well as of Snouck Hurgronje’s academic interests. The text of both the poems and their translations was copied for the scholar, who was back then an advisor to the Governor of Aceh, from another manuscript brought from a campaign in Gayo lands by Gotfried C.E. van Daalen (1863–1930), an infamous military commander whose atrocities would raise heavy criticism a year later. This original manuscript, that had earlier belonged to “migrant Acehnese legal scholars and nobles,” was soon transported to Java and is nowadays stored in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta.
The poem under discussion, the first of the two, is untitled and consists of 38 lines. It is written in Classical Arabic and addresses a student (of an Islamic school, apparently) with instructions in the ethics and principles of learning. Classified as urjuza, a poem written in rajaz metre and paired rhyme, the poem presents an example of Arabic didactic verse that has been known in the Middle East since the medieval period and was used to assist memorisation. In the Malay-Indonesian world, this practice found its continuation in the genre called naẓm or manẓūm, which comprises didactic texts written in rhymed verse. The genre falls within the larger category of kitab kuning, i.e. various texts used for teaching in pesantrens and other Islamic schools of the region. The poem on the duties of a student is one of such texts and is still used for teaching in these institutions, being known under the title Naẓmu l-maṭlab.
In Indonesia’s Islamic schools, teaching such texts often incudes their recitation in unison which is followed by the teacher’s translation and explanation, while students write those down between the lines. In the Leiden manuscript, the interlinear Malay text is arranged according to the traditional pattern described in Malay and Javanese traditions with the terms “bearded books” (kitab jenggotan) or “hanging meaning” (makna gandhul). Broken down into fragments, the phrase by phrase translation of the poem is placed diagonally under the line, its units hanging as if hooked to particular words or parts of the Arabic text. However, the Malay ‘translation’ does not always correspond precisely to the source: while some of the lines are provided with rather literal Malay equivalents, in other cases interlinear text diverges from the Arabic original to different extent. The borderline between translation and what a modern reader would call a commentary or interpretation appears to be rather vague, and one might wonder if this kind of distinction existed for the writers and readers of the text.
As studying such bilingual texts seems to involve both memorising the original through its repetitive recitation, and obtaining an understanding of the content by listening to the teacher’s explanation, one could possibly speculate on the correlation between the form of the translation and its purpose. The interlinear translation of the urjuza is neither a literal one, fragmented into the smallest units in order to allow the students to scrutinise the structure and grammar of an Arabic sentence, nor is it a polished literary, not to say poetic, translation aspiring to become an equivalent of the source text. It appears to be something in-between, apparently aiming at teaching both the Arabic language through a meaningful text, and the meaning of the text, i.e. learning principles and ethics, through an authoritative language—the language of the Quran.