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

This is a pathbreaking book, part of a new initiative that got under way in 2010 entitled "South Asia Across the Disciplines," financially supported by the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press. Publishing first books by a single author, the series "showcases monographs that strive to open up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggest new methods and approaches" (www.press.uchicago.edu/books/saad/SAAD_series.html).

As a philologist and historian of medieval South Asian literature, I have learned to live, not without frustration, with a contextualization of cultural artifacts, such as texts, art, architecture, often unhelpfully constricted in compartmentalized disciplinary research. This type of approach has endlessly complicated the work of sorting out what actually were the dynamics of social, political, religious, and literary interactions that produced them. We are slowly digging ourselves out of such "silos of the mind" thinking, which had led to de facto "communalization" of what to research and how best to carry it out. For example, it should be obvious that the linguistic history of north India between circa 1200 and 1947 is the result of a complex interplay of dialects/languages affected by social, political and religious conditions. Yet for the past two hundred years our thinking has been shaped by a subjectively driven approach more concerned in parsing difference in communal identities than similarity and more interested in defining a "standard language" than in solving the problem of dialects interacting and influencing one another. This state of affairs has seriously problematized the historiography of Islam in South Asia, particularly when it comes to the question of the role of religious transformation and literary production. Though Ronit Ricci's book primarily focuses on the spread of Islam in Southeast Asia, paying some attention to southeast India (Tamil), I found her methodology and intellectual presuppositions to be refreshingly innovative and helpful in addressing similar challenges facing textual studies and the development of Islam in South Asia.

Ironically, the majority of Muslims today live in South and Southeast Asia, yet the conditions through which Islam developed in these regions is understudied and not well understood. Inspired by Sheldon Pollock's work on the "Sanskrit cosmopolis," Ricci brilliantly uses Pollock's model, illustrating, as the book jacket explains, "how the pervasive influx of Arabic into South and Southeast Asia transformed local languages and their speakers, contributing, [she] argues, to the rise of an Arabic cosmopolis."¹

The book operates on two levels. It is primarily a recapitulation of the travel, translation, and adaptation of a tenth-century Arabic text, the Book of One Thousand Questions (which relates a conversation between the Prophet Muhammad and Abdullah Ibnu Salam, the putative leader of the Jews living in Mecca at the time of the Prophet, resulting in Salam's conversion to Islam) into three languages: Tamil, Javanese and Malay. Second, Ricci converts her meticulous spatial and temporal textual study of the One Thousand Questions into a broad-spectrum reflection on the processes through which Islam traverses and profoundly stimulates social and religious change in South and Southeast Asia. Along the way, her conclusions contribute to a corroboration of Pollock's "cosmopolis thesis," albeit with caveats and adjustments to accommodate paradigm shifts reflected in differences inherent in the way Sanskrit and Arabic interacted locally with vernaculars. "Pollock's work on the Sanskrit cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia provides an inspiring model for considering the idea of a later, Arabic cosmopolis that emerged in parts of the same regions, existing side by side with, overlapping with, and at times inheriting the Sanskrit one" (260). In specifying the differences between the Arabic and Sanskrit cosmopolis, Ricci notes that "a major difference . . . is in their links to religion, as the Arabic cosmopolis's coming into being and its consolidation corresponded to...