Mystical language of love in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetry : Sufi poetics in the 16th-century Malay world By Kris Ramlan

This dissertation examines the mystical poetics of love in the works of Hamzah Fansuri (fl. 16th century), widely regarded as the earliest Sufi poet of the Malay world and a foundational figure in Southeast Asian Islamic intellectual history. Through close textual analysis, lexical comparison, and intertextual study, it demonstrates that Hamzah’s writings are not mere adaptations of universal Sufi themes but constitute a distinctively Malay articulation of Akbarian metaphysics. His plurilingual idiom, shaped primarily through Malay and Arabic with traces of Persian and Sanskrit, serves as a performative medium for mystical ontology. Within this idiom, poetic sound, metaphor, and structural recursion function both as aesthetic expression and as epistemic disclosure. The study is divided into two parts. Part I reconstructs Hamzah’s intellectual formation and literary milieu, reassessing his chronology and situating his work within transregional Sufi networks and manuscript traditions. Part II offers the first sustained reading of love in his corpus, developing a typology across three registers—ontological, transformative, and experiential—each underpinned by a lexical-symbolic stratum. It further reconstructs the semantic field of Hamzah’s love lexicon within the wider Malay literary archive, demonstrates how poetic form itself operates as metaphysical pedagogy, and reframes the translation of Arabic Sufi terminology into Malay as a performative act of interlingual mystical articulation. The study also introduces the concept of symbolic transposition to explain how Hamzah reoriented select pre-Islamic motifs toward an Islamic metaphysics of Being and love. The findings show that Hamzah’s poetics enact rather than merely describe mystical realities. His verse creates a literary space in which divine love is experienced as the mode by which Being manifests, veils, and reveals itself. By transposing Sufi metaphysics into Malay, Hamzah expanded its expressive range as a vehicle for mystical thought and positioned Malay literature within a broader cosmopolitan tradition of Islamic poetics.

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