siècle. Paris : Cahier d'Archipel 41, 2012. 460 p.*

The book by the French researcher Paul Wormser is one of the works that does not appear in print every year in terms of its significance and depth of coverage of the stated topic.¹ It is no coincidence that in 2011 this work was awarded the prize named after the famous French ethnologist Jeanne Cuisinier, which, according to her own plan, was to be awarded "for the best research written in French by a student (or graduate) of the School [of the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations-INALCO. - L. G.] and dedicated to Indonesia"[Création..., 1983, p. 15].

P. Wormser's research is devoted to one of the largest and most famous figures in Malay literature of the 17th century - Sheikh Nuruddin ar-Raniri, an ethnic Arab from Gujarat who served at the court of the rulers of the North Sumatran sultanate of Aceh Iskandar Thani and, later, the widow of the latter, the Sultaness Taj ul-Alam. His opera magna is The Garden of Kings (Bustan al-Salatin). Written around 1640, it is the most voluminous work ever written in Malay. It consists of seven books (bab), it is represented by many manuscripts, but no lists containing the full text of the monument have been preserved.

One of the main features of the cultural and political life of insular Southeast Asia(Nusantara) It had a cosmopolitan character, which is most characteristic of the states located on the shores of the Strait of Malacca. The trade route from the Middle East and India to China has long been developed by seafarers of these regions, and coastal trading posts, where they waited for months for a passing monsoon, became natural conduits for foreign cultures, primarily Islamic. In Aceh, a region located in northern Sumatra, Sunni Islam prevailed with a Sufi dominant. The first place among the preachers of the Muslim faith there was occupied by immigrants from Arabia and Gujarat.

The reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607-1636) was an era of political and cultural prosperity for Aceh. He and his successor Iskandar Thani (1636-1641) were able to unite under their rule a large part of Sumatra, as well as a number of areas of the Malacca Peninsula. The literature of the region of this period is marked by the names of such authors as Hamza Fansuri, Bukhari al-Jaukhari, Shamsuddin Paseysky, the novelized biography of Iskandar Muda, the famous-

* P. Wormser. Bustan al-salatin Nuruddin ar-Raniri. Reflections on the cultural role of foreigners in the 17th-century Malay world. Paris, 2012. 460 p.

¹ See also the review by M. Ricklefs [Ricklefs, 2013, pp. 184-186].

In this context, it is natural for a writer like Nuruddin ar - Raniri to appear in the court circles of Aceh, as well as translations from Persian and Arabic, including the Qasida of the Cloak (Qasida al-Burda) by Sheikh al-Busiri (XIII c.). In these circumstances, it seems natural for such a writer as Nuruddin ar-Raniri to appear in the court circles of Aceh.

Born around 1590 in Gujarat to a family of Hadhramaut Arabs, Nuruddin proved to be the most prolific Malay writer, writing more than three dozen works. His research interests include Sufism, history, hadith, and comparative religious studies. The encyclopedic education of ar-Raniri was the reason that he was invited to the post of chief religious adviser (Sheikh al-Islam) of the Sultanate of Aceh, which he held from 1637 to 1643. After taking up this post, Nuruddin considered his main spiritual and political mission to fight the Wahdat al-wujud Sufi movement, which was widespread in Aceh, and its adherents which was already named by the major writers Hamza Fansuri and Shamsuddin Paseisky. Their books were burned, and their followers, who remained faithful to their teachings, were condemned to death. The brutality of these measures turned the Aceh people against ar-Raniri and eventually led to his expulsion from Aceh in 1644. The writer took refuge in his homeland, in Randera (Gujarat), where he died in 1658.

One of the main goals of writing The Garden of Kings was the author's desire to include the Malay world in the general Muslim cultural and historical context. A number of chapters in the second book of the monument dedicated specifically to the history of Aceh served this purpose. At the same time, ar-Raniri set himself the educational task of bringing together a wide body of data: myths and legends, historical facts, regulations and prescriptions that a Muslim should be familiar with, and transmitting them in the Malay language - lingua franca of Nusantara. According to the Malaysian scholar Naguib al-Attas, Ar-Raniri's work is an encyclopedic work, the only one of its kind that exists in Malay, which played a key role in the modernization and Islamization of the Malay language as a carrier of knowledge and scientific education [Al-Attas, 1986, p.25].

Since the book of ar-Raniri has the character of an encyclopedic collection that accumulated a wide variety of subjects and information related to Islamic tradition and the world of Islam as a whole, P. Wormser focused his attention on the sources, direct and indirect, to which the writer turned. To do this, he had to refer to the existing manuscripts of the monument, none of which, as already noted, contained its full text, as well as to the printed editions of individual books of the Garden of Kings, starting with the Meccan Arabic script edition of 1893-1894, up to publications in Latin at the end of the XX-beginning of the XXI century. ²

Describing the structure and content of the work, P. Wormser notes the internal heterogeneity of its text, in which two parts can be conditionally distinguished. The first of them-historical-includes books one and two (creation of the world, world history starting from Adam up to the contemporary rulers of Aceh), and the second-didactic-books from the third to the seventh (advice to rulers and their entourage, stories about ascetic kings, saints of the past, as well as about kings- tyrants, about generosity, wars for the faith and wars of the Prophet Muhammad, about the mind, physiognomy, medicine, marriage and women). According to P. Wormser, the text of the monument gives the impression of an open size, allowing for subsequent additions.

As the researcher notes, the customer of the "Garden of Kings" was the patron of ar-Raniri-Sultan Iskandar Tani, who sought to include Aceh in the orbit of general Muslim history. The task that the writer himself set for himself was to introduce Malays to Arabic culture by creating an encyclopedic set of knowledge necessary for a Muslim. The book was written not in Aceh (as one might expect), but in Malay, which had already produced many outstanding works in the Islamic period, and was intended for a wide range of literate readers.

Ar-Raniri's work as a person of Arab culture mainly marks, the author notes, "a transitional stage from texts with Persian influence to texts with Arabic influence" (p. 143). In the preface to his book, ar-Raniri lists eleven Arabic sources that he used in writing it. However, as P. Wormser notes, not all of them were actually used by ar-Raniri, and those that served as sources for him were not always named. The need to refer to primary sources was perceived by the author

² The bibliography of these publications can be found on the website http://mеp.anu.edu.au/N/BS_bib.html/.

as a necessary element of such essays ³. Even in cases where references to the source can be considered reliable, their text in the "Garden of Kings" was subjected to editorial revision; there are often cases of misunderstanding of the Arabic original or preserving in the translation of Arabic expressions that were difficult to convey in Malay.

The researcher emphasizes the Middle Eastern geographical dominance of ar-Raniri's work, which is dominated by characters, plots and toponyms of the Arab-Iranian world in the period up to 922. The list of " climates "(regions) is identical to that given in the work of the Andalusian geographer of the XII century. Abu Hamila al-Garnati Tuhfat al-albab, and does not relate in any way to the personal experience of ar-Raniri: neither Gujarat, nor Hadramaut, nor Ache appear there. The last chapters of book two are an exception. Chapter 11 refers to Northern India, Chapter 12 to the areas surrounding the Strait of Malacca, and Chapter 13 to Sumatra and its trading partners in the Indian Ocean and China. This gave reason to perceive these chapters as later additions to the text of the essay.

An additional argument in favor of this assumption is the wariness of ar-Raniri in relation not only to Wahdat al-Wujud, but also to possible Shiite influences, expressed by him in his other writings. The writer angrily denounces the Old and New Testaments, as well as traditional monuments of Malay literature ("The Tale of Seri Rama" and "The Tale of Indraputra"). According to P. Wormser, the glorification of Aceh given in chapters 12 and 13 of the second book sharply contrasts with this, which casts doubt on whether these chapters belong to the pen of ar-Raniri himself. I will note, in particular, the use of pre-Islamic literary cliches in the funeral scene of Iskandar Tani, which is found not only in the "Tale of Indraputra", but also in the "Tale of the Victorious Pandavas", which, in turn, goes back to the ancient Javanese "Bharatayuddha" (see: [Monuments of Malay Literature..., 2011, p. 64]). Equally contradictory is the admiring description of the royal orchestra playing from the lips of a writer who called for the destruction of musical instruments, because they allegedly distract a Muslim from pious thoughts about the other world.

Ar-Raniri's attitude towards women is also noteworthy. In The Garden of Kings, they are described as small-minded and frivolous beings whose advice should not be relied upon. As an argument, the author cites many didactic stories that go back to Arab-Persian sources, although ar-Raniri was well aware that in Aceh at the turn of the XVI-XVII centuries, a woman held the post of admiral, not to mention the fact that starting in 1641, Iskandar Tani's widow, Sultan Taj ul - Alam, became the patroness of the writer (1641-1675 ave.).

All these major and minor inconsistencies and internal contradictions raised many questions for the researcher. First of all, there is the question of the authenticity of the text, which has come down to us only in later manuscripts. It is quite possible that some semantic inconsistencies occurred not through the fault of ar-Raniri, but as a result of repeated rewriting of the monument over two centuries.

P. Wormser specifically mentioned other errors related to the quality of translation of quoted passages from Arabic to Malay. The researcher assumes that the performers here were a variety of translators, which is easy to detect by the quality of their work, the type of errors, etc. Along with Malays and Acehans who were not very experienced in Arabic, Ar-Raniri's translation agency could also employ Arabs who understood the meaning of the original well, but were not able to offer an adequate Malay version of the text.

According to the researcher, ar-Raniri himself acted in this case as the author-compiler, who selected works for subsequent citation and determined the overall composition of the composition. Apparently, by his own decision, in chapter 2 of book three, edifying stories were grouped not by topic, but by the characters acting in them, in contrast to, say, the same "Crown of Kings" by Bukhari al-Jaukhari. This approach can easily be explained by the general encyclopedic orientation of ar-Raniri's work, where the" portraits " of the luminaries of Muslim history should have been presented in the most prominent way.

The very concept of a text as an indissoluble unity is less applicable to the Garden of Kings than to any other monument of the Malay written tradition. Thus, his preface was borrowed by the copyists of some manuscripts of the "Malay Genealogies" (Sulalat-us sala-

³ The same formal approach to the "list of used literature" was also inherent in Bukhari al-Jauhari, the author of the mirror for rulers " The Crown of Kings "(Taj al-salatin) (1603), which served as a model for ar-Raniri. See: [Monuments of Malay Literature..., 2011, pp. 392-396].

A summary of chapter 13 of the second book of the monument was included in such works as" Notes on the History of Johor "(Peringatan sejarah Negri Johor) and" The Book of Nine Questions " (Kitab sembilan perkara).

The most popular copyist of the "Garden of Kings" was the seventh book, represented by more than half of the surviving lists of the monument. In a number of manuscripts, it ended with chapter 24 of The Crown of Kings, followed by book six, and the entire text was titled "The Garden of the Wise" (Bustan al-'arifin). There are also cases when fragments of the Garden of Kings were included in the text of The Crown of Kings. As the researcher emphasizes, in the minds of both copyists and the reading public, both of these monuments were perceived as a single whole.

There is no doubt that there is some general plan according to which the essay should have been built. However, a number of signs indicate that the work was never completed: these are the declared but unwritten sections of the book, the disproportionality of its parts, the lack of conclusions at the end of chapters, and, most importantly, the additions to the text of chapters 11-13 of book two, reflecting the events of 1641-1658 and made more than twenty years after the writer's death. According to P. Wormser, the students of ar-Raniri intended to continue and complete this monumental work, and the manuscripts that have come down to us cannot be considered its final version.

Summing up the research, P. Wormser notes that "The Garden of Kings" can hardly be called an original work - rather, it can be attributed to the category of translations. The titanic plan that the ar-Raniri team managed to implement, even in rough draft, testifies to the ardent desire of the Malaysians of the XVII century to stand on a par with the entire Islamic world, and the efforts made at the same time allow us to call the Garden of the Kings a unique, most voluminous and ambitious project in the history of Malay literature.

In addition to the general conclusions proposed in P. Wormser's research, one of its main advantages is the appendices that take up half of the entire volume of the book. This list itself is so impressive that it is worth giving it here in full. This is a summary of the content of edifying stories from books three to seven, a list of sources of these stories with links to modern publications, excerpts from the Garden of Kings: the geographical section of Book one and the history of Muslim India (chapter 11 of book two), an index of geographical names and peoples mentioned in the monument, geochronological tables of stories from the Garden an index of places of origin of characters, a chronological table of internal stories, an index of quotations in books three to seven, a table of addressees of edifying stories, geographical maps of places mentioned in the monument, a list of mentioned kings, an index of plants, and, finally, an index of edifying stories borrowed from the Garden of Kings and found in the " long"versions of" The Tale of Bakhtiar "(Hikayat Bakhtiar).

It is obvious that P. Wormser sought to delineate the entire circle of connections between The Garden of Kings as a complex literary phenomenon and the general Muslim cultural context. It seems that the "portrait" of ar-Raniri and the story about his unique creation were quite successful for the researcher, and the conclusions concerning the procedure of the writer's work on the monument look convincing. As P. Wormser managed to show, ar-Raniri's initiative (as they would now say, the "project") was successful. The incompleteness of individual chapters, the plasticity of the compositional structure of the monument puts " The Garden of Kings "on a par with other narrative works that have a frame structure (for example, with the already mentioned" long "version of" The Tale of Bakhtiar " [The Tale of Bakhtiar, 1989, p.16-17]).

It is difficult to overestimate the merits of a young French researcher who managed to accumulate a huge, disparate and sometimes heterogeneous material, bring it together and offer as a result quite reasonable conclusions regarding a unique monument, such as the "Garden of the Kings". The author of the review would like to make a number of observations based on his own experience of studying works of a similar genre-the Malay " framed stories "and the mirror for rulers" Crown of Kings " by Bukhari al-Jauhari.

It is hardly possible to definitively and unambiguously determine, in particular, the primary sources of the stories that make up the didactic part of the Garden of Kings (books three through seven). This is probably why in the index of sources (Appendix 2) the researcher carefully names his links: "Source or variant". It is well known that there is a certain general corpus of" wandering " edifying subjects dating back to the pre-Islamic and Early Islamic past, which are found with minor differences in many works of the Arab-Muslim tradition that have a framework structure, including in the monument under study. Cataloging such stories from various sources is a time-consuming but feasible task.

it is hardly possible to build them chronologically and show where exactly the author (compiler) of the next set borrowed this plot from. The author of the review was convinced of this by his own experience in translating and preparing for the publication of Bukhari al-Jaukhari's "Crown of Kings "and the" long "version of"The Tale of Bakhtiar".

Considering the connection of the Garden of Kings and the Crown of Kings with the mirror of al-Ghazali "Advice to Rulers" (Nasehat al-muluk), P. Wormser notes that the translator of the inserted stories from the mirror of al-Ghazali follows the Arabic original almost verbatim, while the author of the Crown of Kings, Bukhari al-Jauhari, sets out these stories less detailed and simpler language. At the same time, ar-Raniri arranges the translated borrowed stories as he sees fit, while al-Jawhari almost always follows the structure of the original. These features indicate not only the differences in the approach of the two authors to the original source, but also that for ar-Raniri, the text of al-Jauhari hardly served as a model, and both of them, independently of each other, dealt directly with the original.

A special place among the works of this kind is occupied by the so-called long version of the Tale of Bakhtiar. The" short " version of this monument is a classic framed story, with four (sometimes five) internal stories woven into the fabric, each of which is connected in meaning to the framing story. In turn, the "long" version includes elements of various kinds: from the classic magic-adventurous novel (hikayat) to edifying short stories (mainly dating back to the cycle of stories about the wise parrot), Muslim legends about the prophets and figures of early Islam, instructive stories and legends (also found in the " Crown of Kings"and" The Garden of Kings") and, finally, purely everyday advice from the field of medicine, psychology, physiognomy, etc.The number of internal stories of the" Story " according to various lists exceeds a hundred, but no manuscripts have yet been found that would contain its completion - the final episode of the frame story about Bakhtiar.

The incompleteness and fragmentary nature of many internal stories, the lack of manuscripts containing the text of the monument in its entirety, as well as its compilatory nature, make the Garden of Kings similar to the "long" version of The Tale to Bakhtiar. As noted by P. Wormser, individual fragments of the Garden of Kings were scattered in different lists, and sometimes, at the behest of an unnamed copyist, were included in other works with a different name. Under these conditions, the very concept of the boundaries of the monument text is called into question, and each of these works appears as part of some intertext, the existence of which is more or less obvious to the next transmitter/carrier of the tradition.

list of literature

Monuments of Malay literature of the XV-XVII centuries: The Tale of the victorious Pandavas; Bukhari al-Jauhari. Korona tsarei [Crown of Kings]. from Malay, research, comments, applications and pointers by L. V. Goryaeva, Moscow: East Lit., 2011.

The Tale of Bakhtiar / Introduction to the study of the monument, translation, appendices, notes by L. V. Goryaeva, Moscow: GRVL, 1989.

Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naguib. A Commentary on the Hujjat al-siddiq of Nur al-Din al-Raniri. Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Culture of Malaysia, 1986.

Création du prix Jeanne Cusinier // Archipel. Etudes interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien. Vol. 26, 1983.

Ricklefs M.S. Review of: Paul Wormser, Le Bustan al-Salatin de Nuruddin ar-Raniri: Réflexions sur le role culturel d'un étranger dans le monde malais au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Cahier d'Archipel 41, 2012. Pp. 460. Maps, Bibliography, Index // Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Vol. 44, Issue 1. February 2013.

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