Hamzah Fansuri

An Acehnese Sufi poet and philosopher - is it possible he influenced Spinoza?

Hamzah Fansuri was a 16C philosopher who lived in Sumatra and wrote Sufi-inspired prose and poetry in Malay.

While Fansuri likely lived in Barus (Sumatra), there is reason to think he was born in what was called “Shahr Nawi” (Ayutthaya), in modern-day Thailand: a city destroyed in 1767 and called the “Venice of the Southern Seas” in Han Suyin’s The Enchantress).

This 800 PAGE (!!) PhD thesis by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas includes a Romanised edition of Hamzah’s three prose works and English translations: https://archive.org/details/themysticismofhamzahfansuri…. A tremendous work of scholarship, making Fansuri accessible to nearly anyone with an interest.

Sufism was no longer popular in the Arab world during Fansuri’s time, and in the 17C a Muslim scholar of Indo-Arabic origin, Nurrudin al-Raniri, went to Aceh to try to stamp out Sufi “heresies”. It seems, however, that he was driven out, due to the popular support for Sufi ideas there.

Al-Attas aims in his study to show that Fansuri’s doctrines were not heretical; nevertheless, I find them to be a fascinatingly radical form of pantheism, with very strong resonances with Spinoza (I’ve written about Spinoza-Sufi resonances here). I wonder whether the colonial and trade connections between Aceh and the Dutch Republic could have brought ideas like those of Hamzah Fansuri to Spinoza.

A video interview with al-Attas (on Islamic thought in general, not in Hamzah Fansuri) can be found here: