If numbers tell a story, the conversion to Islam of the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago can be counted as a great success. It is clear that Islam has taken strong root in the region and has influenced many facets of life – from politics and language to the economy and education – over several centuries, as it continues to do today. The protracted process of the region’s large-scale Islamization has given rise to various explanations and interpretations, representing different perspectives on when, where, how and why individuals and communities converted to Islam. The goal of this essay is to focus on a little-explored source for the study of conceptions about, and depictions of, conversion to Islam: the literary corpus of the Book of One Thousand Questions. Although this narrative is known in many languages, my emphasis here is on its versions in Javanese and their relationship to additional, more popular conversion narratives in that language. The comparative study of such sources reveals how early conversions were remembered, retold over time, and reconfigured to address local, and contemporary, events and concerns.
Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.
AbstractNetworks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, practices of reading, learning, translating, adapting, and transmitting contributed to the shaping of a cosmopolitan sphere that was both closely connected with the broader, universal Muslim community and rooted in local identities. I consider a series of ‘citation sites’ in an attempt to explore one among many modes of inter-Asian connections, highlighting how citations, simple or brief as they may often seem, are sites of shared memories, history, and narrative traditions and, in the case of Islamic literature, also sites of a common bond to a cosmopolitan and sanctified Arabic.
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