MALAY COURT RELIGION, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE. INTERPRET- ING THE QUR’AN IN 17th CENTURY ACEH

The writer of the book under review has previously written on topics relating to Southeast Asian studies, which he had inaugurated with his thesis at ANU on Tafsir Tarjuman al-Mustafid by Shaykh [Abd al-Ra’uf of Singkel (d. 1687) some of whose material is included in the present work. In the aforementioned work (2001), Riddell advanced the view that the Qur’an is a composite document which was stabilized and fixed in the 3rd century of the Muslim Hijrah. This revisionist idea underlies his approach to the text of the Qur’an as a whole. The present book studies a tafsir of Surah al-Kahf which is found under MS Or.Ii.6.45 at Cambridge University library, which he compares to the Tarjuman al-Mustafid. The MS Or.Ii.6.45 was procured in 1628 when the owner’s widow donated it to the library. The exact date when the text was actually written is unknown. However, assuming it was a ‘comparatively fresh copy’, Riddell believes it might have been written in 17th century Acheh. Thus, the book in general is divided into three parts, the first part of around 48 pages provides a historical background of 17th century Acheh; the second part around 73pages purports to give an analysis of the commentaries, the last part consists of Appendix A & B, i.e. the romanization of the Malay Jawi text with a translation in English. The last part itself runs into 200 pages, i.e. the most substantial part of the book.