ABSTRACT
Nur al-Din Muhammad ibn ‘Ali ibn Hasanji ibn Muhammad al-Raniri (d. 1658) was a scholar and religious reformer who was influential in the religious affairs of the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian Archipelago. He was born in the port city of Rander in Gujarat, India, in the late 1500s to a father of South Arabian and Indian ancestry and probably to a Malay mother. Little is known of al-Raniri’s early life, but he was likely already studying in Arabia when he performed the hajj in 1620. He was a member of the Shafi‘i rite, of the Ash‘ari theological school, and of the Rifa’iyya Sufi order.
