A Malay Pantheist Charm. 
By RO) Winsrupm. Din, (Oxon) 
According to the Shiites Ali, the baginda “Ali of Malay charms, 
~was the repository of Islamic mystical knowledge. And there is a 
story how a great prince, who had been defeated by a mightier, askel 
him: “ Teach me the charms which the Apostle of God taught you.” 
It is certain that this was a request which the first Malay converts 
to Islam were always making to the early Indian missionaries. And 
the charms the missionaries taught them were heldto be esoteric, like 
the mantra of the Brahmins and the secrets of Sufism. The Shrite 
heresies and the pantheism, orthodox and heterodox, to be detected 
in many Malay charms await closer study at any rate by Hnghsh 
scholars. “ The utterances put into the mouths of the eight or nine 
principal saints of Java betoken a rash mystic pantheism,” says 
Snouck Hurgronje. ‘“ This same heretical mysticism found some 
opponents and many strong supporters in Acheen in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. The book of the “ Perfect Man,” al- 
Jil’s Insanwl-Kamil, was much studied in early days in Java and 
left its mark on the bizarre contents of numerous native tracts. 
Allah is the one, indivisible Being, exalted above time and space. 
Multiplicity is appearance. Only God exists.” <A full description 
‘of al-Jil’s book can be read in Nicholson’s ‘‘ Studies in Islamic 
Mysticism ” (Cambridge, 1921) or in Shaikh Muhammad Iqbal’s 
“The Development of Metaphysics in Persia” (London, 1908). 
“Such mysticism ” continues Snouck Hurgronje, “1s found also in 
Arabian lands but only in small circles of the initiated, as half 
secret doctrines of the Sufis, cautiously concealed on account of the 
hunt of official theologians for heresy and of the suspicious fana- 
ticism of the vulgar. In the Hast Indies, however, it formed woof 
and warp not only of learned speculation but of popular belief. 
Tracts with drawings and tables were used in the endeavour to 
realize the idea of the Absolute. The four elements, the four 
winds, the four righteous Khalifs, the four founders of the schools 
-ot law, the four sorts of attributes of God in dogma, the four grades 
of progress in mysticism, the four extremities of the human body 
and many other sets of four were for popular mysticism revelations 
-of the one indivisible self of man; through the names of Muhammad 
and Allah, each in Arabic spelt with four letters, were symbolized 
the One Being. ‘ Who knows himself, knows his Lord and he who 
knows his Lord has knowledge of himself,” said these mystics.” 
(“ Arabie en Oost-Indie,” Leiden, 1907). A pawang’s charm to 
-eall back to memory the medium in Kelantan’s main putéri, for 
example, invokes 
-Jour. Straits Branch R. -\. Soc., No. 86 1922. 
