Persianate Prose and the Making of Malay Muslim Literature - (Gibb Memorial Trust) by Majid Daneshgar (Hardcover)

About the Book

Presents the most complete Persian edition and the first known English translation of the Durr al-Majālis

Book Synopsis

The book investigates lines of connection and shared literary heritage between the Persianate and Malay-Indonesian worlds over many centuries. Majid Daneshgar provides a critical and comparative study of Persianate-Malay stories, with specific focus on Durr al-Majālis, or Pearl of Gatherings - a classical Islamic text produced by Sayf Zafar (late thirteenth-mid-fourteenth centuries CE), a writer and scholar of Central Asian background, during the Delhi Sultanate.

The book illustrates how the Durr al-Majālis contains various legal, theological-philosophical, metaphysical, chivalrous and mystical accounts. In addition, it traces how the book travelled beyond the so-called 'Balkans-to-Bengal' borders and was copied, translated and annotated across Eastern Africa, Eastern Turkistan, Mongol-dominated China, Arabic-speaking Egypt and South East Asia. It demonstrates how this Persian collection of stories shaped the idea of Islam, Islamic teachings and stories across the Muslim World, and in the Malay-Indonesian World in particular.

Review Quotes

This book represents a ground-breaking contribution to the study of early Islamic history in Southeast Asia, particularly through its examination of Durr al-Majalis. By expanding on the foundational work of earlier scholars, the author offers fresh insights and opens new doors for future scholarship in the field.--Peter G. Riddell, SOAS University of London

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.--Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University