The Library of an Eighteenth-Century Malay Bibliophile: Tengku Sayid Jafar, Panglima Besar of Selangor

The Library of an Eighteenth-Century Malay Bibliophile: Tengku Sayid Jafar, Panglima Besar of Selangor

Author: Annabel Teh Gallop

Annabel Teh Gallop, ‘The library of an 18th-century Malay bibliophile: Tengku Sayid Jafar, Panglima Besar of Selangor’. In: Social codicology: the multiple lives of texts in Muslim societies, ed. Olly Akkerman; pp.199-258.  Leiden: Brill, 2025. (Leiden Studies in Islam and Society; 21).

(References from the Light Letters collection, specifically the letters from Tengku Sayid Ja'far: MS 40320/3 f.38; MS 40320/4, f.44).

"...Despite the diverse nature of the Selangor library, the contents demonstrate certain preoccupations, with a particular emphasis on jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, and devotional poetry, alongside, as in all parts of the Malay world, a strong interest in divination and supplications for particular purposes. Some volumes certainly came from considerable distances, while others are more evidently local products. Interestingly, the only manuscript in the collection that we can firmly assign to production within Selangor itself is the great, unfinished Qurʾan, conceived on what was perhaps a more grandiose bibliographical scale than had previously been seen in the region...."