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

Ronit Ricci’s book Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia is an ambitious, erudite, and accessible work aimed at reformulating our understanding of the language, literature, history, and religion of much of maritime Asia. Despite setting her sights very high, Ricci delivers a fascinating book with the potential to transform contemporary debates framing our perceptions of Islamic conversion from south India to eastern Indonesia. In order to do this, Ricci focuses her attention on a text titled The Book of One Thousand Questions, a tale of conversion from Judaism to Islam, set in seventh-century Arabia. The text was originally composed in Arabic, but later spread, sometimes via Persian, into the corpuses of Tamil, Malay, and Javanese literature. The text in question narrates a conversion from Judaism to Islam set in seventh-century Arabia. Over the years, the story has been recast in many forms in other locales, and these often involve related characters and settings as the story was translated into the languages of South and Southeast Asia, and through its telling introduced the audience to the affirmed truths of Islam, as well as its history, practices, and genealogies. The processes of translation and conversion were symbiotic processes, Ricci argues, and produced a cultural zone she describes, adapting Sheldon Pollock’s term, as an “Arabic Cosmopolis.”

One of the strengths of the work is Ricci’s acute attention to translation as a critical historical process involved in the spread of literature, religion, and ideas across vast expanses of the Asian maritime world. Her knowledge of Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages—a rare combination in the academy—facilitates her ability to analyze the translation of Islamic texts from Arabic into the vernacular of South and Southeast Asia in a manner that cuts through the divides normally entrenched by area studies. On page 33 she states,

in order to understand a significant historical process through which Islam—as a belief system and a way of life—spread far and wide and was adopted in South and Southeast Asia, we must attend to translation in its narrowest sense—the rendering of the words of one language into another.

Ricci demonstrates how, despite the text’s translation into three different languages and diverse cultural contexts, many characteristics of the stories in the text remained unchanged, thus making it possible to speak of an “Arabic Cosmopolis” stretching across much of the previously Sanskritized world. Ricci’s book broadens Indonesia scholars’ focus beyond national narratives, showing how people from a region stretching from southern India through Sumatra, Java, southern Borneo, Sulawesi, and throughout Maluku, as far east as Ambon, were tied together with a shared literary tradition from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Central to Ricci’s narrative is a reorientation of the conception of “region.” The Asian maritime world is the focus of her study, and she shows how, before colonial era conceptions of “India,” “Indonesia,” or even “South Asia” and “Southeast Asia,” there was a cultural zone through which religion and literature flowed, uninhibited by language barriers. Her concentration upon literary networks is reminiscent of the work by other scholars, such as Azyumardi Azra, but she pushes the debate in new directions. Rather than focusing on the teacher–student relationships present within Islamic scholarly traditions, she looks rather at how literature linked various parts of the Asian maritime world. For Ricci, each telling of the story was a meeting place between the trans-local and the trans-regional, between Tamil, Malay, and Javanese literary expressions and those of Arabic origin. While Ricci draws convincing links between each of these regions and their languages, the role of Persian as an intermediary is not fully explained, which one might expect given the influence it had upon literary traditions throughout the “Arabic cosmopolis.” Nevertheless, her view of literature as a two-way avenue for the maintenance of connections between the “very local...