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Persianate Prose and the Making of Malay Muslim Literature

Text, Translation and Commentary of the Durr al-Majalis

Majid Daneshgar

$288

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English
Edinburgh University Press
09 September 2025
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-Majlis, or Pearl of Gatherings

a classical Islamic text produced by Sayf Zafar (late thirteenthmid-fourteenth centuries CE), a writer and scholar of Central Asian background, during the Delhi Sultanate.

The book illustrates how the Durr al-Majlis 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.
By:  
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 244mm,  Width: 170mm, 
ISBN:   9781399537575
ISBN 10:   1399537571
Series:   Gibb Memorial Trust
Pages:   664
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Persianate Prose and the Making of Malay Muslim Literature: Text, Translation and Commentary of the Durr al-Majalis

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


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