The Abolished Sultanate and its Royal Library: Arabic Qur’an Commentaries from Eighteenth-Century Banten
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines a number of Islamic manuscripts from the Banten royal library. Following the abolition of the Banten Sultanate and the forced abandonment of Surosowan Palace in the early nineteenth century, the Dutch colonial government appropriated the sultan’s goods and chattels, which included a collection of Islamic manuscripts. These were transferred to Batavia, where they were housed in the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen. My focus is on a number of Arabic Qurʾan commentaries that formed part of this collection. In this article, I argue that the manuscripts that were held in the Banten royal library demonstrate the existence of a highly sophisticated level of exegetical scholarship at the court. Moreover, the collection notably includes two manuscripts of the ʿArāʾis al-bayān, the Sufi Qurʾan commentary of the famous Persian Islamic scholar and mystic, Ruzbihān al-Baqlī (d. 1209). These are of differing dates but are clearly directly related. The inclusion of this work in the royal library is clear proof that the Islamic scholars of the Banten Sultanate were familiar with Sufi tafsīr, in addition to works that constituted a more mainstream Qurʾanic exegetical discourse in the pre-modern Southeast Asian context. Furthermore, the inclusion of a later copy of al-Baqlī’s commentary indicates that this work was in continual use in Southeast Asia since the sixteenth century until the fall of the sultanate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".