Persianate Prose and the Making of Malay Muslim Literature

Majid Daneshgar is Associate Professor of Area Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He is the former Munby Fellow in global bibliography at Cambridge University Library in association with St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and George Grey Scholar at Auckland Libraries, New Zealand. He has frequently published on Islamic studies, orientalism, Persianate-Malay literature and manuscript studies. His main monographs are Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy (Oxford University Press, 2020), Tantawi Jawhari and the Qur’an (Routledge, 2018; Arabic translation 2023), and several co-edited volumes such as Malay-Indonesian Islamic Studies (Brill, 2023), Islam and Science in the Future (Zygon, 2020), Deconstructing Islamic Studies (Ilex-Harvard University Press, 2020), Islamic Studies Today (Brill, 2017) and The Qur’an in the Malay-Indonesian World (Routledge, 2016). He was also awarded the Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Union, the Best Publication Prize 2022 (FRIAS), and nominated for the Most Inclusive Teacher Award at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2015.

In this path-breaking new work Daneshgar shows that there must have been more intensive relations between the Iranian world and Southeast Asia than was previously accepted. His findings suggest that Persian was in fact known by a literate elite in Java and Sumatra, as was Malay in early Safavid Persia. He argues that the fourteenth-century Persian text Durr al-Majalis, which is edited and translated in this book, is the main source of many of the Malay pious tales (hikayat) of the pre-modern period. This is a masterly study of exchanges between medieval Persian and Malay manuscript cultures as well as Persian influence on early Southeast Asian Islam.

• AcknowledgmentsTransliteration FormatTable of FiguresList of TablesPrefacePart A: On Literature, Context and Text1. Introduction Durr al‑Majālis in Southeast AsiaThe Persian-Malay Network: Historical Ties between MuslimsPersian Phonology in Malay LanguagePersian Origin of Malay Islamic Literature2. Durr al-Majālis: Origins and IdentityReception of the TextBibliographical and Biographical Details3. Transregional CirculationDurr al-Majālis in PunjabiDurr al-Majālis in PushtoDurr al-Majālis in Bengali (and in Bengal)Durr al-Majālis in Turkic Languages and ContextsDurr al-Majālis in the Arabic ZoneDurr al-Majālis in Kurdish4. Islamic Themes and NoveltyBelief and DoctrinePhilosophical TheologyOccultism and MagicAbout the ProphetsA Killing Story of Sunnis and Shīʿīs, and the idea of de-ShīʿitisationDialogue5. Persianate-Malay Islamic Stories: A Comparative AnalysisOn Persian-Malay Muslim LiteratureShared Islamic Stories in Persian and MalayClose Similarities6. A Critical Persian Edition and Critically Edited Translation of Durr al-MajālisPersian EditionEnglish TranslationFormationPart B: Persian Edition and English TranslationPersian EditionEnglish TranslationPart C: AppendicesAppendix A: A Description of Select Persian-Language ManuscriptsAppendix B: A Description of Select Translated CopiesAppendix C: A Description of Select Printed VolumesAppendix D: Personal Digital CollectionBibliographyIndexPersian Preface