A TEXT REREAD

The Admonitions of Seh Bari. 

By G. W. J. DREWES. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. Pp. 149.

(reviewed by Clifford Geertz)

This text, a collection of what Drewes aptly calls "admonitions" of a semilegendary Indonesian religious teacher, was first published in Dutch in 1916 by B. J. O. Schrieke as Het boek van Bonang. The change of title is not, however, arbitrary. It is Drewes's view that the attribution of the work to Bonang, an also semilegendary, East Javanese, prince-saint-one of the supposed bringers of Islam to the island-of (probably) the late fifteenth, early sixteenth centuries, is false, despite the fact that the text itself concludes with the sentence: "End of the book, the author of which is the Lord of Bonang." Instead, the manuscript, which was brought to Holland around 1600 by one of the first two Indonesian voyages of the Dutch, was, he argues, probably composed by an anonymous author in a religious school in Banten-that is to say, in western, not eastern, Java. The attribution to Bonang is either a bit of myth making by a later copyist, anxious to enhance its authority, or a simple mistake resulting from the ingrained tendency of traditional Javanese to assume illustrious manuscripts issue only from illustrious hands.

This is not a mere detail. For, if Drewes is right (his argument that Bonang did not compose the text seems to me rather stronger than his argument that an obscure seminarian in Banten did), the significance of the work, whatever it is called, rather changes. To remove the text from East Java to West, from the cosmopolitan, mercantile world of the north-coast bazaar towns to the monastic, sectarian world of the rural Muslim boarding school, is to remove it from one stream of Indonesian history to another. Drewes, who is committed to an intellectual history approach to textual interpretation--one in which the context of ideas is other ideas, preferably written ones-does not draw out the implications of this surprising social reassignment. But it is that reassignment which causes this, in itself not all that expressive a document, to take on a heightened interest. To put a text in a different historical light is rather more positive a hermeneutic act than might be imagined by those for whom what counts in a document is the doctrine it espouses and the origin of that doctrine.

The doctrine, in any case, is familiar enough: a Javanese formulation (the Old Javanese and English are given on facing pages) of the man as the passive vehicle of God's self-love conception, usually associated in Islam with the name of Al-Hallaj. In this case, Al-Hllaj's writings, which were apparently not known in Indonesia, cannot have been the stimulus, though his example and the famous statement leading to his crucifixion ("I am the truth"), which were known, may have been of some significance. Even more important, however, in Drewes's opinion, was contemplation of one of the so-called "holy hadiths" (ahadith qudsiya)--that is, traditions resting on inspired exclamations ("theopathic locutions," to use Massignon's suggestive rendering of sathiyat) rather than on anecdotes about the Prophet--which appears, in Arabic and Javanese gloss, toward the middle of the text: "The inner self of man is my Inner Self, and I am his inner self" (pp. 60-61). Drewes's rather brief, and in some places rather cryptic, discussion ofthe meaning of the text then consists of a review of some references, direct and oblique, to this hadith qudsi in the works of assorted Islamic scholars--Bukari, Ibn AI-'Arabi, and in Indonesia, Al-Raniri--proceeding to the conclusion:

"In light of the above [review] it now becomes clear that the principal idea of our text, to which it constantly returns in roughly the same words, is none other than that of the hadith qudai, namely that it is God who, pervading in His eternal love the whole being of those favoured by Him ... operates in it, while eliminating all activity on their part." [p. 31]

This is, indeed, to some degree of monotony, the theme that pervades the work; but the view that the way to interpret a text is to factor out its "principal idea" in an intellectualist sense and show the kinship of that idea with si:rp.ilar ideas appearing elsewhere seems somewhat old fashioned and, especially when one is dealing with a work whose claim to attention cannot rest on its philosophical brilliance, more than somewhat limiting. In any case, what is interesting about the text as such, that is, internally, is not that it is animated by this rather standard Sufi view of the relation of God and man, but what it does with it, the literary means it uses to formulate, explicate, and recommend it. For, aside from a passage viewing man's praise of God as comparable to a wind which passes through a blowpipe (pp. 92-93)--that is, God's own voice directed in self-praise through the passive tongue of manthe rhetoric of the text centers not on images of ("theopathic") speech, but on ones of ("theoscopic") vision.

The controlling metaphor is the mirror, or, more exactly, the virtual image of oneself one perceives in a mirror. Man's existence is such a virtual image of God's being. "He who looks in a mirror," Seh Bari declares to his pupils (pp. 48-49), "is subject and object of his vision." When a man looks in a mirror, the image he sees there is of his own being; it has no independent existence. So it is with God-man's reality is apparent, the phantasmal reflection of Divine Existence:

"Your being is to be compared to a reflection in a mirror. Since by divine ordinance the reflection is identical with the sight of him who looks in the mirror, it is His very self that sees and is seen, loves and is loved. The vision of the servant is only evidence of the vision of Him who loves and is subject and object of His own love, so that the vision of the beloved is annihilated, pervaded by the love of Him who is eternally seeing. Thus the vision of the servant is only a reflection. Should anyone say that He who looks in the mirror does not see His reflection, then he is an unbeliever." [pp. 64-65]

On the basis of this rather dizzying conceit, mystical progression is then formulated as the annihilation of human sight as, moving toward knowledge, it drowns in the reflexive Seeing of God. Gnosis is blindness:

"Once I walked in the field of faith [iman] and by virtue of God's mercy and grace I could see my own doings. After I had walked in the field of faith I proceeded to the field of tawf'id [union]. Then I did not see my own doings but I beheld only the Being of Allah. After I walked in the field of tawf'id I proceeded to the field of (mystical) knowledge [ma'rifa]. My own being had vanished, neither did I see the Lord. This means that because my vision had become concentrated, my own sight had vanished into the one and only sight." [pp. 94-95]

One gets, then, an almost Hegelian conception of the creative Negative, stated in these same seeing and not seeing terms. Seh Bari says, the first stage of iman, or faith, is "yes" and "no," because the eye of faith distinguishes between right and wrong. The perception of unity, tawh'id, does not distinguish "yes" and "no" anymore, only the source, Allah, from which they come, so that at this stage all is "yes." But the final stage, mystical knowledge, ma'rifat, is a mere "no," "because this clear sight which is concentrated upon the Lord essentially amounts to 'no,' so that one's own sight is annihilated and disappears as it is overpowered, replaced and blotted out by the very sight of Him who is the eternal subject and object of His own sight, and there is only one sight" (pp. 70-71). Indeed, as Drewes notes (p. 21) but, as usual, fails to pursue, the fact that the Javanese word for "eye," mripat is derived from ma'rifat, permits the compression of the whole argument into a metaphysical pun: ma'rifat appears when (the function of) mripat has been eliminated. The "true men of God," the "examples worth imitating," are those who see without eyes; Ba'aitu RabbÌ, bi-RabbÌ "I see my Lord through my Lord" (pp. 98-99; 100-101).

But of all this, like the shift in provenance, little is made, though most of it is remarked in Drewes's commentary. At a time when hermeneutics is being enriched from all directions--structuralism, phenomenology, history of religions, psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistic philosophy, symbolic logic, literary criticism, sociology, stylistics, the study of oral literature, cultural anthropology, la petite histoire--it is at least odd to find a text interpreted wholly in terms of its isolable ideas. Drewes can argue-and in the preface does-that the important thing is to get the text right so that "a correct understanding of its contents will be possible." This is true, and with his usual industry, care, and erudition--the last of which is altogether stunning--he has done it (a short catechism, based on the text and found independently of it, is also included), a fact for which we must be suitably grateful. But as Drewes is also one of the few people with the linguistic knowledge to produce such a "correct (or, anyway, deeper) understanding"--and will descend with all the wrath of the outraged philologist upon anyone with less knowledge who is rash enough to try it--it is more than a little saddening that the whole world of contemporary thought concerning the discrimination and analysis of meaningful forms is apparently closed to him. Or, more accurately, he to it.

Clifford Geertz
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

A Text Reread (Book Review), in: History of Religions, Vol. 11, No. 4 (May, 1972), pp. 414-417.

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