Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia

by Ronit Ricci

The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines.

In  Islam Translated,  Ronit Ricci uses the  Book of One Thousand Questions —from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.

Genres: Islam, History

313 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ronit Ricci in her study of Indian Ocean Islam provides a curious and somewhat amusing twist to Sheldon Pollock's Cosmopolitanism, with her Arabic Cosmopolis. As her magisterial work's title Islam Translated shows, Arabic exercises its cosmopolitanism precisely in its willingness (and its unwillingness) to be translated. In other words, Arabic thrives precisely in not being in Arabic. By examining a literary tradition known as 'Thousand Questions' Ricci argues, as against Pollock who disregards religion almost, that the process of conversion - from Buddhism or Hinduism in this case to Islam - would need to address the absence of prior text and memory, which are both so important in creating and maintaining a shared identity. Conversion therefore cannot rely either on wholesale adoption of a new language nor a complete translation (which is near-oxymoronic). Instead, the target language: Javanese, Malay, and Tamil and their respective sensibilities and imaginations would need to be tethered to an imaginaire that is peculiarly Arabic, and thus be invited to inhabit an Arabic world, and Arabic cosmopolis. Almost as an inverse of the Sanskrit edition, the Arabic Cosmopolis lives on the adoption of scripts for the target languages (in the Malay case, the language is literate today mostly in Arabic and Latin alone and not in an indigenous), in the rejection of translation for key words, and in retaining a track record of loan words (i.e. in Malayan "translations" like the Hikayat Seribu Masala, one can notice Malayan variants of Arabic words, Persian words, Dakhini and finally Tamil words - indicating the journey the text may have taken to arrive at Malaya), and sometimes in something as minimal as the introduction of Arabic diacritics for Javanese and Malayan characters.

[Kristian Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muslims have been historically connected in various ways. Networks have fostered the spread of Islam through commerce and trade, Sufi brotherhoods and pilgrimage. Ideas too have traveled these paths and literary networks have facilitated cultural exchange across geographic and linguistic boundaries. The role of language in the process of making Islam intelligible to various local audiences serves as a shared thread for an excellent new book, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2011). This innovative study, which won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions Award, explores the role of Arabic in South and Southeast Asia as it affected Javanese, Malay, and Tamil literatures. Ronit Ricci, Researcher at the Australian National University, determines the relationship between translation and religious conversion in the process Arabization and vernacularization in these three linguistic contexts. Translation serves as tool for self-fashioning Islam in particular contexts, which is witnessed in the numerous tellings of the Book of One Thousand Questions. This detailed and theoretically rich study offers new perspectives for understanding Muslim communities who formulate and maintain a collective identity through textual production in local languages. It should be required reading for anyone who is interested in non-Arabic speaking Muslims communities from now on.
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