Citing as a Site: Translation and circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Networks 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.</jats:p>

An Invitation into the Mehfil: Muslim Women's Interregional Intellectual Networks

“…Ricci includes such regions in her formulation of the Arabic cosmopolis. Following Pollock, Ricci proposes a network of contact and exchange “among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia” based on shared literary inheritances (Ricci 2012, 331). Although the geographies that encompass Ricci's Arabic cosmopolis do not coincide with those I include in the Perso-Arabic sphere, a point of congruence between her work and mine revolves around how we posit our linguistic-geographical categories as sites where language and literature, rather than travel and trade (331), form the basis of interaction and meaningful exchange between geographically distant but culturally similar communities.…”

“…I began mapping the conjectural space of the mehfil by examining print materials in the imaginative repertoire of Bengal's Muslim women writers, especially Bengali periodicals published in the first half of the twentieth century, which they read, edited, and wrote for. Such periodicals emerged as what Ronit Ricci calls “citation-sites” (Ricci 2012, 332). Ricci's concept of citation is rather flexible and inclusive; she includes within it practices of reading, writing, translation, and transmission ranging “from direct quotation to more general and less precise forms of adopting and adapting prior sources” (332).…”