A Tribute to Prof. Edwin Wieringa

It's almost one year of my research scholarship in Germany. I will never be here unless Prof. Edwin Wieringa, or Pak Edwin as I address him informally, invited me in July 2004 to be a research fellow at the Department of Oriental Studies (Malaiologischer Apparat am Orientalischen Seminar), University of Cologne, in which he acts as the Professor since the beginning of 2004.

Based on his last two years experience (1996 and 1997) receiving an academic scholarship award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Prof. Wieringa recommended me at that time to submit an application of the scholarship to the Foundation. It is my pleasure to, finally, receive the Scholarship award from this one of the prestigious foundations in Germany, for the period 2006 till 2007, and become the first staff of UIN/IAIN who accept this kind of Scholarship.

I enjoy very much the period of research jointly with Prof. Wieringa. Since the beginning of my research, he has given me a fully discretion to carry out the research plans and stages, despite he always give me invaluable suggestions and, sometimes, sharp and critical opinion. It is nice to have his Preface included in my most recently publication on catalogue of Ali Hasjmy collections.

In my eyes, Prof. Wieringa is a Philologist, and also one of the foreign Indonesianists, who has great dedication to the development of Indonesian Philology as his major area of interest. The various academic works he wrote demonstrate his enormous attention on the study of Indonesian manuscripts, which are mostly neglected, even by many Indonesian people themselves.

Following his Volume One publication in 1998 on Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and other collections in The Netherlands, he has just finished editing the Volume Two of this Catalogue, and will be published soon in next July 2007. Prof. Wieringa’s utmost expertise on Javanese script (Carakan) also shows his seriously interests on this discipline.

It appears to me that Prof. Wieringa has great ambitions to develop the library of the Malaiologie to be one of the centers for the Indonesian studies in Germany. Of course it still needs a long time to achieve his ambitions, but I observe my self how Prof. Wieringa spends regularly the institutional budget to purchase the collections of books and journals which relate to the interests of his institution.

Recently, I involve a fruit discussion with Prof. Wieringa on the significance of writing a comprehensive book on Indonesian philology and codicology, in order to strengthen this field in Indonesia in the future. Hopefully we could make it real in a short time.

Thank you very much Pak Edwin, I am very proud to be the first research fellow hosted by yours. Thanks also to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its fully financial support.