magazinelogo

Journal of Literature Advances

ISSN Online: 3066-0998 CODEN:
Frequency: Instant publication Email: jla@hillpublish.com
Total View: 189419 Downloads: 17932 Citations: 0 (From Dimensions)
ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jla.2026.06.005

Mystical Cosmopolitanism and the Poetics of Daʿwah: Hamzah Fansuri and Rethinking World Literature

Badrah Uyuni1,*, Zamakhsyari Abdul Majid1, Mohammad Adnan2, Samsul Maarif1

1Faculty of Islamic Studies, As-Syafiiyah Islamic University, Jakarta 17411, Indonesia.

2Postgraduate Program, Syarif Hidayatullah Islamic State University of Jakarta, South Tangerang 17411, Indonesia.

*Corresponding author: Badrah Uyuni

Published: May 19,2026

Abstract

This article reconsiders the position of Hamzah Fansuri within debates on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and Islamic intellectual history. Rather than asking how a sixteenth-century Malay Sufi poet might be incorporated into an existing global canon, the study reconceptualizes the debate by exploring how the category of ‘world literature’ shifts when approached through early modern Islamic metaphysics. Drawing on qualitative conceptual-historical analysis and critical discourse analysis of 38 authenticated poems attributed to Hamzah Fansuri, the article develops the analytic category of mystical cosmopolitanism and advances the notion of a poetics of daʿwah. The findings indicate that in Fansuri’s corpus, daʿwah functions not primarily as juridical exhortation or communal boundary-making but as an ontological summons oriented toward existential self-realization. Maritime imagery—ships, oceans, ports, and voyages—structures a cosmopolitan epistemology in which mobility becomes a metaphor for the transregional circulation of knowledge. Fansuri relocates authority from institutional office to experiential realization (maʿrifah) while grounding it in inherited Sufi genealogies. Temporally, the poems articulate a layered sacred time that resists linear center–periphery chronologies and situates the Malay subject within a universal metaphysical horizon. By foregrounding the internal coherence of these semantic and symbolic patterns, the article argues that Hamzah Fansuri’s poetics instantiate a form of universality grounded in waḥdat al-wujūd rather than in secular-liberal translation regimes. This configuration complicates dominant models of world literature that privilege print capitalism, metropolitan recognition, and European modernity as the primary conditions of literary worldliness. Instead, the Malay Sufi manuscript tradition emerges as an alternative infrastructure of global literary space structured through metaphysical claims, pedagogical circulation, and daʿwah as epistemic mediation. The study contributes a conceptual refinement to both Islamic Studies and literary theory by demonstrating how early modern Sufi poetry reorients cosmopolitanism from within a theological ontology. Rather than merely adding a peripheral figure to a fixed canon, the analysis calls for a reconsideration of the epistemic coordinates through which the “world,” the “cosmopolitan,” and the “modern” are theorized.

Keywords

Mystical cosmopolitanism; daʿwah poetics; Hamzah Fansuri; world literature; Sufi metaphysics

References

Ahmed, S. (2021). What is Islam? The importance of being Islamic. Princeton University Press.

Alatas, S. F. (2020). Intellectual imperialism and the social sciences in Southeast Asia. Asian Journal of Social Science, 48(3-4), 245-262.

Al-Jīlī, ʿA. al-K. (1963). Al-Insān al-Kāmil fī Maʿrifat al-Awāʾil wa-al-Awākhir. Maktabat al-Qāhirah.

Al-Juwaynī, A. al-M. (1997). Al-Burhān fī Uṣūl al-Fiqh. Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah.

Al-Shāṭibī, I. (2004). Al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Sharīʿah. Dār Ibn ʿAffān.

Apter, E. (2013). Against world literature: On the politics of untranslatability. Verso.

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford University Press.

Aydin, C. (2017). The idea of the Muslim world: A global intellectual history. Harvard University Press.

Bashir, S. (2023). Sufi metaphysics and the problem of translation. Journal of Islamic Studies, 34(2), 145-168.

Cheah, P. (2016). What is a world? On postcolonial literature as world literature. Duke University Press.

Damrosch, D. (2020). World literature in a postcanonical age. Modern Philology, 117(3), 345-360.

El Shamsy, A. (2020). Rediscovering the Islamic classics: How editors and print culture transformed an intellectual tradition. Princeton University Press.

Fansuri, H. (1995). Syair Perahu dan Syair-Syair Lainnya. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Green, N. (2012). Sufism: A global history. Wiley-Blackwell.

Green, N. (2020). The Indian Ocean as Islamic zone of circulation. Journal of Global History, 15(2), 189-210.

Hallaq, W. B. (2013). The impossible state: Islam, politics, and modernity’s moral predicament. Columbia University Press.

Hallaq, W. B. (2022). Authority, continuity, and reform in Islamic law. Islamic Law and Society, 29(1-2), 1-25.

Ho, E. (2006). The graves of Tarim: Genealogy and mobility across the Indian Ocean. University of California Press.

Ho, E. (2021). Inter-Asian Islam and the circulation of authority. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63(4), 845-872.

Ibn ʿArabī. (2004). Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah.

Ibn Taymiyyah. (1991). Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā. King Fahd Complex.

Ismail, F. (2024). Vernacular metaphysics in early modern Malay Sufism. Indonesia and the Malay World, 52(152), 1-22.

Kugle, S. S. A. (2020). Mystical bodies and ethical transformation in Sufi poetry. Religion, 50(3), 421-440.

Laffan, M. (2011). The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi past. Princeton University Press.

Laffan, M. (2022). Aceh and the Ḥaramayn: Textual itineraries in the early modern Indian Ocean. Modern Asian Studies, 56(5), 1440-1465.

Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.

Mahmood, S. (2022). Religious difference and ethical formation. History of Religions, 61(4), 321-340.

Moretti, F. (2000). Conjectures on world literature. New Left Review, 1, 54-68.

Underwood, T. (2019). Distant horizons: Digital evidence and literary change. University of Chicago Press.

Zaman, M. Q. (2012). Modern Islamic thought in a radical age. Cambridge University Press.

Zaman, M. Q. (2021). The ʿulamāʾ and the state in contemporary Islam. Modern Asian Studies, 55(6), 1891-1915.

Copyright

© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

Mystical Cosmopolitanism and the Poetics of Daʿwah: Hamzah Fansuri and Rethinking World Literature

How to cite this paper: Badrah Uyuni, Zamakhsyari Abdul Majid, Mohammad Adnan, Samsul Maarif. (2026). Mystical Cosmopolitanism and the Poetics of Daʿwah: Hamzah Fansuri and Rethinking World Literature. Journal of Literature Advances3(1), 37-46.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jla.2026.06.005