A Public-Figure Mufassir from the Malay-Indonesian World: Hamka (d. 1981) and his Tafsir al-Azhar

Abstract

While Arabic remained the foundational language of religious learning, by the sixteenth century Malay had become established as a cultural language of Islam in Islamised Southeast Asia. Though little is preserved in written form, by this time the vernacularisation of the Islamic foundational texts well under way, and the spiritual, mystical, jurisprudential and intellectual traditions inspired by (and deriving from) them formed part of the corpus of Malay letters. Show more