Shaykh Nawawi Of Banten : Texts, Authority, And The Gloss Tradition

Gloss literature, the writing of multiple commentaries on Islamic religious works, used to be handwritten in manuscripts, transmitted from generation to generation within the framework of an oral-aural transmission of knowledge; it thus played an important role in the traditional Islamic education. In the modern quest for creative thought and originality in texts, the historical and social meaning of gloss literature has been neglected.

This study seeks to interpret Islamic gloss literature, particularly in its printed form since the arrival of printing technology in the Arab world in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. It deals with Shaykh Nawawi of Banten--a Javanese teacher-scholar who lived in Mecca in the latter part of the nineteenth century--his biography and his writings, which serve as a vehicle for understanding the role gloss literature played in the transmission of knowledge. Although Shaykh Nawawi produced many books in Arabic and was considered brilliant, his commentaries seem pedestrian and dull. How is one to get beyond their sameness and see what they have to teach us?

The text-artifacts we are dealing with were used in the context of education; they are situated discourses. Interpreting gloss literature as a speech act performance and relating it to the practices of a specific cultural "habitus" will provide us with a means not only to understand what these works explicitly and objectively set forth, but also what they unconsciously reveal in so far as they partake of the values of a particular period in a society.

The didactic elements in gloss literature show the function of a commentary as a learning interface. The use of repetition and digression reflects a learning strategy. Learning is thus not so much an effort to understand a text, much less an appropriation of the concepts it contains, but rather a process of immersing one's self in the tradition. The pervasive presence of reference to authorities of the past not only guarantees the orthodoxy of the text, but also represents an epistemological strategy that defines truth.

More than being an epiphenomenon, gloss literature, therefore, had important functions in the social and cultural reproduction of an Islamic society in which a text and its authoritative transmitter were inseparable. The advent of print technology changed this. Authority is now transposed and reified in the text itself. The printing of gloss literature was its crowning moment, but it also was its demise.