The Burning of the Books

Within a few decades of his death his work was the subject of a bitter controversy in Aceh. Nuruddin al-Raniri, a Gujarati scholar of Hadrami descent who became the leading religious authority at the Acehnese court, attacked the doctrine he found in Hamzah Fansuri and in his follower Shamsuddin of Pasai as the heresy of the existentialists, holding that it collapsed the distinction between creator and creation. Books were burned in front of the great mosque and adherents were pressed to recant.

The dispute is usually described as one between the unity of being and the unity of witnessing, that is, between saying that only one being exists and saying that the mystic perceives only one being while the distinction remains real. It was also a court dispute, bound up with a change of sultan and with the position of foreign scholars in Acehnese religious life, and later Malay writers found ways to accommodate both sides.

What that episode did to the record is the reason so little is settled about him. His dates are argued from a gravestone in Mecca dated 1527 that Guillot and Kalus read as his, against a general assumption of a death around 1590, against a proposal that he lived into the reign of Iskandar Muda in the early seventeenth century. The identification of the gravestone is not accepted by everyone. Two places in Sumatra maintain tombs said to be his. The poems survive; the man does not.