Translating Conversion in South and Southeast Asia: The Islamic Book of One Thousand Questions in Javanese, Tamil and Malay.

This dissertation examines the spread of Islam into South and Southeast Asia through the lens of translation processes, linguistic change and literary transmission. The textual materials analyzed are those produced by Muslim communities in three of the regions' major languages---Javanese, Malay and Tamil---between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. The major source studied is the Book of One Thousand Questions as it was translated and adapted into the three languages. Originally composed in Arabic circa the tenth century it was later widely translated and circulated. The Book revolves around a question and answer debate between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish leader Abdullah Ibnu Salam in seventh century Arabia. The Jew inquires about Muslim ritual, history, theology and mysticism, and finally, convinced by the replies, converts to Islam. The dialogue format provides a rich comparative arena as the questions and answers vary across and within languages, providing a glimpse to shifting agendas and emphases in different communities. Concurrently, the various textual versions maintain a certain level of uniformity, signaling a participation of authors and their audiences in a trans-regional, shared Islamic cultural universe. The Introduction presents a history of the Book of One Thousand Questions and places this study within the context of comparative studies of India and Indonesia and Islam in South and Southeast Asia; Chapter One examines the Islamic dialogue genre and offers examples of its employment across languages; Chapters Two and Three focus on translation, understood not as a universal practice but as one rooted in particular literary traditions, and which occurs at many levels when a story is retold in new circumstances. Special emphasis is given to the influx of Arabic into Javanese, Malay and Tamil translated texts. Chapters Four and Five discuss (1) conversion to Islam as it is depicted, understood and remembered in the Book and other local sources and (2) the roles of the Prophet and Ibnu Salam as guru and disciple. Finally, Chapter Six integrates many of the dissertations' themes and, drawing on Pollock's discussion of a Sanskrit Cosmopolis in South and Southeast Asia, presents a model for a later, Arabicized Cosmopolis in the same region. Evidence suggests that, within that community, literary texts and networks played an important role in transmitting ideas and stories, in formulating new histories for converted Muslims, and in connecting them---across boundaries of language and geography---with an even broader pre-modern Islamic global sphere.PhDAsian literatureComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligious historyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126273/2/3238069.pd