The Etymology of the Indonesian Word Sanubari (“Conscience”) from the Arabic Ṣanawbar (“Pinecone”)

This is a translation/adaption of a piece originally published in Indonesian at bincangsyariah.com for a general English-reading audience.

The origins of the Indonesian word sanubari (conscience) are quite interesting and roundabout. They also demonstrate the important influence of the Islamic intellectual tradition on Malay-Indonesian literature and the formation of the Indonesian language.

The word sanubari derives from the Arabic ṣanawbar (صنوبر). But oddly, the Indonesian means “conscience” or “heart” in the metaphysical sense, whereas the Arabic simply means “pinecone.” But this large semantic shift can be explained through the history of its usage within the world of Arabic scholarship that spanned from the Middle East to the Indo-Malay archipelago.

The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyā ꜤUlūm al-Dīn), one of Islamic history’s most influential Sufi manuals, was written by the 11-12^th century Persian scholar Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. It became one of the popular religious texts in the archipelago as the region Islamized in the 15^th century and beyond. It gained especially great importance with the spread of the Sammāniyya Sufi order in the 18^th century, when the Sumatran scholar ꜤAbd al-Ṣamad al-Palimbānī (a deputy of the order) translated much of the text.

In a section of The Revival of The Religious Sciences focused on “the wonders of the heart,” Ghazālī explains that the word “heart” (qalb) has two meanings: one physical (i.e. the bodily organ) and the other spiritual (i.e the conscience, the emotional heart). He describes the physical heart as “اللحم الصنوبري الشكل”, or “pinecone-shaped flesh.” Here, the shape of the heart is compared to that of a pinecone, here being the critical association of “heart” with “pinecone.” But it’s striking that this descriptor is used specifically for the heart-as-organ, rather that the heart-as-conscience—the meaning it takes on later in Indonesian.

A modern edition of Ghazālī's Revival of the Religious Sciences. 

When I first wrote about this etymological observation in a Facebook post last year, I had assumed that Ghazālī was the first and only Arabic scholar to describe the heart with the image of a pinecone. This was based on a quite limited search through BYU’s Arabic language corpus. Ghazālī has a reputation for employing compelling descriptive analogies, so it wouldn’t have been too far-fetched. But I was very wrong!

I was aided by the help of two contemporary Indonesian Islamic scholars with expertise in the works of Ghazālī who commented on my post.

Ulil Abshar Abdalla (from Pati, Central Java) provided me with two other sources that also use the shape of a pinecone to describe the heart, from the works of Ibn Farishta and Shaykh Zada, Ḥanafī scholars from the 15^th and 16^th centuries, respectively. On further inspection, Ibn Farishta seems to have taken the description directly from Ghazālī, as he words this sentence about the heart almost exactly the same. Shaykh Zada is more interesting, as he uses ṣanawbarī (pinecone-like) not as a descriptor of the heart, but seemingly as a synonym for it. He writes of “inside the ṣanawbarī cavity” and “the left side of the ṣanawbarī flesh.” This might show that, by the 16^th century, ṣanawbari had become so commonly associated with the heart that it was even occasionally used as a gloss for it.

But even at this point, I was under the impression that Ghazālī was the original source of this description that these two later scholars had borrowed. But this assumption was also wrong. It was only with the help of another contemporary Ghazālī expert, kyai Muhammad Ma’mun (from Jember, East Java) that I realized how much deeper this history goes. He suggested that, since it is well-known that Ghazālī takes many of his psychological concepts from Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), the great Persian philosopher and doctor who lived a century before Ghazālī, it would be worth checking whether this particular medical description was also Avicennan in origin.

Kyai Ma’mun was right. It turns out that Ghazālī borrowed this pinecone imagery from Ibn Sīnā’s comprehensive medical summa The Canon in Medicine (al-Qānūn fī’l-Ṭibb). But Ibn Sīnā is also known to have drawn much of his medical theory and knowledge from the 2^nd century Greek doctor Galen, and a quick Google search also showed that Galen too had described the heart as pinecone-shaped! As an interesting side-note, apparently it is through medieval artistic representations of the Galenic heart that the Western tradition came to symbolize the heart as ❤️, with the cone-shaped bottom. (What the linked article here fails to mention is that medieval Christian Europe was exposed to ancient Greek medicine mostly through Latin translations of Arabic medical scholarship, especially Ibn Sīnā.)

But of all the writers mentioned above, it is only Ghazālī whose works became prolific in the archipelago. So, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Indonesian word sanubari (conscience) entered Indonesian solely through the spread and study of his Revival of the Religious Sciences. This means that a word that is now widespread in Indonesian literature (it belongs to the language’s poetic register more than to the popular) came into usage mostly due to the widespread study of a single text within the archipelago’s traditional Islamic boarding schools (pesantren).

This is far more extraordinary than the appropriation of most other loan words from Arabic to Malay-Indonesian, like sehat (healthy) from ṣiḥḥa (health). This is a commonly used word in Arabic that is then simply imported into Malay-Indonesian, since many in the archipelago studied Arabic. Normal. But in the case of sanubari, this was only used as a descriptor in a specific situation within the Arabic medical scholarly tradition and still able to enter the lexicon of a language across the Indian Ocean. Quite a testament to the importance of Ghazālī within the Indonesian Islamic tradition.

The odd part is, while Ghazālī used ṣanawbar to describe the physical heart, sanubari in Indonesian now means the metaphysical or emotional heart. Also notable is that, unlike the Arabic and English conception of the heart as the seat of consciousness and emotion, in Indonesian this is associated instead with the liver (hati)! This might make it seem more curious how the meaning of sanubari shifted from the physical to the emotional heart, until we realize that most of the Indonesians reading Ghazālī would have been familiar with the Arabic association of heart with conscience. Ultimately, I’m left thinking that maybe in Indonesian, conspicuously Arabic loan words just tend to have a more spiritual ring to them.

(If any readers happen to know more about descriptions of the heart as pinecone-shaped in the Arabic tradition or about early uses of sanubari in Indonesian, please let me know!)