Devoting Philology

When many practical sciences have a lot of devotees due to their promising prospective, and the opportunity to study them becomes very competitive, so that everyone centers his attention to get them in their dream of study, devoting philology, representing looking for ancient and vulnerable texts by which many students are actually confused where to go, is the bravest decision. Philology is a theoretical (not practical) science focusing on revealing the content of the ancient hand-writings to its context, and it might be boring for some people in this multi-practical era. The practical science is now mentioned as more modern and prestigious than theoretical science like philology.

I together with a few friends keeps devoting in it. They reason of it is not really clear, but we know that it is about passion in which everything should not be equipped by its reason. We study and enjoy it with passion. No offense we have. Everything is in order. When many other students come to public institution to do research or to have work experience in it, we the Philologists cheerfully visit to quiet museums and conservatoriums to see manuscripts around or go to some remote areas to hunt the ancient books which are spread out in hands of local society.

It may be useful to write my first meet with the philology science. It was in 2013, when I was in semester three in the undergraduate program of Islamic History and Civilization, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, State Islamic University Sunan Ampel Surabaya. There was one science named Philology, taught by an eccentric teacher who had capability on it. The matter was very interesting and seemed distinctive to other matters. First the students were introduced to vulnerable text with blurred writings full of dust. The students were guided on how to treat such manuscript, because studying manuscript is not only reading and understanding the text, but also about preserving it. Many people even learners, as the teacher told, treated the manuscript wrong. This was the first important emphasize of the matter, before going to approach it methodologically or philologically.

Although we were in the program which focused firmly in Islamic history, but the philology is an important minor concentration in line of Islamic history in a whole. Hand writing text would be the main source of historical research which provided many useful things. The text revealed information not only about the content of the text, but more than that, also presenting many other sides behind the text, such as history of the text, manuscript trade, social life of the text writer of copyist, even the genealogy of knowledge in society in which the text was found. To dig such information was not easy part for sure. There were some so-called philological methodologies which must be applied.

From time to time we ‘the Philologist’ enjoy the matter and finished all of assignment on it well, then intentionally or not we fell in love to philology. Not to felt inferior, we got sexy with the philology, because it was currently rare that one devoted on it while it was one of the most important part of studying history and literature. For your information, the only professor of Islamic Philology in Indonesia had been Oman Fathurahman from State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta. Then yes, we were going to be the next professor. Amen.

Nowadays, if you ask many other students about their reason why they have competed in practical sciences, they would say that they want to be cool and unique person in this modern era with their capabilities. One studying communication, for instance, wants to be a good broadcaster, and another one devoting architecture is eager to be architect, and so on. Unfortunately, the fact that most of them “avoid” theoretical science like philology does mean that philologists will not be cool and unique, but that exactly opens widely the road of philologist to be cool and unique and prestigious. Frankly speaking, something cool or prestigious is not on how modern subject you study of how many students studying the subject, but is about something you have which others do not, and keep contributing is of course the only thing our effort fights for.