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Citing as a Site: Translation and circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2012

RONIT RICCI
RONIT RICCI*
Affiliation:
School of Culture, History and Language, The Australian National University College of Asia-Pacific, Canberra, ACT 0200Australia Email: ronit.ricci@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, practices of reading, learning, translating, adapting, and transmitting contributed to the shaping of a cosmopolitan sphere that was both closely connected with the broader, universal Muslim community and rooted in local identities. I consider a series of ‘citation sites’ in an attempt to explore one among many modes of inter-Asian connections, highlighting how citations, simple or brief as they may often seem, are sites of shared memories, history, and narrative traditions and, in the case of Islamic literature, also sites of a common bond to a cosmopolitan and sanctified Arabic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Sites of Asian Interaction , March 2012 , pp. 331 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 For a discussion of the idea of an Arabic-centred cosmopolitanism in South and Southeast Asia, see Ricci, Ronit, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 I refer here to textual citation, and do not address prayer and Qur'anic recitation, which could be analysed in a similar way.

3 Serat Pandhita Raib, Mangkunagaran Library, Surakarta, 1792, copied 1842. MS. MN 297.

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8 The question of ‘corrupt’ or false citation is a loaded one in general, and is also specifically relevant to the One Thousand Questions. There are at least two types of ‘corruption accusations’: those (mostly by Muslim scholars) discussing the relationship of the Prophet's words as presented in the text to his ‘real’ words, and those (mostly by Western scholars) discussing spelling, grammatical, and syntactical mistakes. See, respectively, Hamid, Ismail, The Malay Islamic Hikayat (Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1983)Google Scholar, and Pijper, Guillaume Frederic, Het boek der duizend vragen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1924)Google Scholar.

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18 I have used the Indonesian translation of this work, originally published in Dutch in 1899. van Ronkel, Ph. S., ‘Over de Invloed der Arabische Syntaxis op de Maleische’, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde, 41, 1899, pp. 498–528Google Scholar. Ikram, A. (trans.), Mengenai Pengaruh Tatakalimat Arab Terhadap Tatakalimat Melayu. Vol. 57 (Jakarta: Bhratara, 1977)Google Scholar.

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28 Vaṇṇapparimaḷappulavar, Āyira Macalā, p. 14.

29 Vaṇṇapparimaḷappulavar, Āyira Macalā, p. 17.

30 Samud, Leiden University, Oriental manuscripts collection, late seventeenth century [?]. MS. LOr 4001.

31 Hussainmiya Collection, National Archives of Sri Lanka, Colombo, reel 182.

32 Hikayat Patani, Malay Concordance Project. See: <http://mcp.anu.edu.au/N/Pat_bib.html>, [accessed 17 December 2011].

33 The repetitive use of tamat in this citation is somewhat unusual. Its final appearance, tamat adanya, may emphasize that this is the end of the entire text rather than an end of a section. I am grateful to the late Ian Proudfoot for discussing the uses of tamat with me.

34 Genette, Paratexts, p. 2.

35 Brockett, A., ‘al-Munāfiḳūn’, in Bearman, P., Bianquis, Th., Bosworth, C. E., Donzel, E. van and Heinrichs, W. P. (eds) Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Leiden: Brill, 2010) Vol. VII, p. 561Google Scholar.

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38 Pijper discussed the use of Qur'anic quotes in the Malay One Thousand Questions and, noting their frequent ‘corruption,’ assumed they were cited from memory. The result was a form of Arabic that drew more heavily on sound—the way words were heard by a Malay ear—than on accurate spelling, as may be expected in the context of a predominantly oral literary culture. Also, frequent Qur'anic recitations in which Arabic was heard but not necessarily seen by many meant that attempts to recapture it in writing had to be made via aural memory. See Pijper, Het boek, p. 82.