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A ground-breaking exploration of exile and diaspora as they relate to place, language, religious tradition, literature and the imagination.
Local renderings of the two Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata in Malay and Javanese literature have existed since around the ninth and tenth centuries. In the following centuries new versions were created alongside the old ones, and these opened up interesting new directions. They questioned the views of previous versions and laid different accents, in a continuous process of modernization and adaptation, successfully satisfying the curiosity of their audiences for more than a thousand years. Much of this history is still unclear. For a long time, scholarly research made little progress, due to its preoccupation with problems of origin. The present volume, going beyond identifying sources, analyses the socio-literary contexts and ideological foundations of seemingly similar contents and concepts in different periods; it examines the literary functions of borrowing and intertextual referencing, and calls upon the visual arts to illustrate the independent character of the epic tradition in Southeast Asia.
This volume is a collection of essays on transregional aspects of Malay-Indonesian Islam and Islamic Studies, based on Peter G. Riddell’s broad interest and expertise.
This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’.
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
Serious academic work that moves away from the polemical sectarian discourses on shi'ism in southeast Asia.
In this monograph Philipp Bruckmayr examines the development of Cambodia’s Muslim minority from the mid-19th to the 21st century. During this period Cambodia’s Cham and Chvea Muslims established strong relationships with Malay centers of Islamic learning in Patani, Kelantan and Mecca. During the 1970s to the early 1990s these longstanding relationships came to a sudden halt due to civil war and the systematic Khmer Rouge repression. Since the 1990s ties to the Malay world have been revived and new Islamic currents, including Salafism and Tablighism, have left their mark on contemporary Cambodian Islam. Bruckmayr traces how these dynamics resulted inter alia in a history of local Islamic factionalism, culminating in the eventual state recognition of two separate Islamic congregations in the late 1990s.
The spread of Islam and the process of Islamisation (meaning both conversion to Islam and the adoption of Muslim culture) is explored in the twenty-four chapters of this volume. Taking a comparative perspective, both the historical trajectory of Islamisation and the methodological problems in its study are addressed, with coverage moving from Africa to China and from the seventh century to the start of the colonial period in 1800. Key questions are addressed. What is meant by Islamisation? How far was the spread of Islam as a religion bound up with the spread of Muslim culture? To what extent are Islamisation and conversion parallel processes? How is Islamisation connected to Arabisation? What role do vernacular Muslim languages play in the promotion of Muslim culture? The broad, comparative perspective allows readers to develop a thorough understanding of the process of Islamisation over eleven centuries of its history.