The heart of this fascinating and innovative study is a series of careful readings of Javanese, Tamil, Malay, and Arabic tellings of the One Thousand Questions, a tenth-century story (with older roots) of the conversion of Ibnu Salam, a Jew who challenged the Prophet Muhammad with a host of questions about religion, the answers to which proved conclusive to him accepting Islam. The wide distribution and complexity of translation practices relating to this story leads Ricci to postulate the existence of an “Arabic cosmopolis,” on the model of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” described by Sheldon Pollock in his The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Ricci has taken to heart criticisms of the starkness of Pollock's formulations about the cosmopolitan and vernacular millennia in South Asia and beyond by articulating a vision of the Arabic cosmopolis as constantly and inherently subject to local strategies and processes of translation.
Indeed, the first provocative argument of the book is that it is impossible “to speak universally about ‘translation’ without emphasizing the particular context in which it takes place” (p. 34). The point here is that translation may take myriad forms, sometimes coexisting, that go well beyond literal word-for-word renderings from one language into another. The diverse vocabulary in English (e.g., version, rendering, transcreation, adaptation, interpretation, transcription, etc.) itself signals the contextual variability of the purposes, functions, and modes of translation. For Ricci, “tellings” serves as an all-purpose term for describing the variable ways in which Javanese, Tamil, and Malay authors negotiated the tension between cosmopolitan pressures to incorporate Arabic vocabulary, syntax, and script and local pressures to produce literary works in accepted genres, with familiar images, and with known vocabulary. Drawing especially on A.L. Becker's Beyond Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), Ricci describes the common element in the formation of the Arabic cosmopolis as the creation of “prior texts,” defined as “ways in which thoughts, writings, and speech derive from, or draw upon, texts that are shared by members of a particular culture and that evoke resonant memories” (p. 166, see also pp. 246ff.). Cosmopolitan formation in this case consists precisely of the active creation and contextual re-creation of what Ramanujan called the “common pool of signifiers” that allows textual communities to connect through texts to each other.
The first half of the book devotes a chapter each to the Javanese, Tamil, and Malay tellings of the One Thousand Questions. Significant changes to the story itself, the kinds of questions asked, and the characterization of Ibnu Salam and the Prophet are noted with an admirable balance of philological rigor and interpretive prose. The first thing to respect about this work, in fact, is the depth of linguistic knowledge it takes to work respectably or better in four languages. I was, frankly, floored by the level of trust that Ricci developed in her ability to subtly deal with nuances across these languages, though I personally had direct access to only one, Tamil. Her readings of the different language tellings, therefore, are the most compelling part of the book in that they attend patiently to the nuances of literary and religious creativity and sentiment that would have been most meaningful in the historical contexts described.
The bigger arguments of the book, however, appear in the second half with chapters devoted to the elements of cosmopolitanism in these literary forms, the relation of this cosmopolitan literary network to conversion to Islam, and the variant figuration of the two principal characters in the story. While I am persuaded by nearly all the “smaller” points that Ricci makes in this half, I found myself increasingly less convinced that cosmopolitanism and cosmopoleis (which proliferate toward the end of the book) was the best overarching framework to describe the phenomena to which Ricci draws our attention.
Among the convincing points is a fascinating comparative discussion of conversion to Islam in the Indian Ocean and to Christianity in the Philippines. On the one hand, Javanese, Tamil, and Malay texts purposely left untranslated some key Arabic terms that are central to most Islamic religious imaginations while in other cases translating the terms with near equivalents or explanatory phrases “without anxiety about possible confusion and blurring of definitions” (p. 168). On the other, “Latin—expressing that which was assumed to be inexpressible in the local language—subordinated Tagalog” (p. 169). The contrast opens interesting questions about the relationship between linguistic hegemony and the effectiveness of conversion. The absolute necessity for the Qur'ān to be solely in Arabic was tempered by an openness to allow complementary religious literature to simultaneously inculcate “prior texts” shared across literary horizons from Morocco to Malaysia and draw upon local tropes, concepts, and genres. The chapter on conversion deftly details how this tension worked out in the literary cultures under study, especially in the tale of Ibnu Salam's own conversion in the story itself.
In her conclusion, Ricci differentiates the Arabic and Sanskrit cosmopoleis by virtue of the intimate connection of Arabic and Islamization and the concomitance of Arabic and Arabicized literature as opposed to Pollock's highly secular and rigorously Sanskrit-only view (p. 261). These differences, along with the issue of a dominant script (discussed in some confusing ways in pp. 170–82), point to some limitations on the value of the cosmopolis idea to the argumentative potential of Ricci's work.
Time and again, I found myself noting that what seemed to interest both the Javanese, Tamil, and Malay authors and Ricci herself were the strategies of localization at work in the literary tellings of the One Thousand Questions. Localization, of course, implies the contextual appropriation of a relatively stable literary corpus at a higher level of geographic dissemination. Too often, however, the “Arabic” cosmopolis is presented as significantly, even primarily, created by works not in Arabic such that the cosmopolitan literary imagination is really an aggregation of aspirational vernaculars rather than a direct engagement with Arabic. If cosmopolitanism means anything, it surely means the active relinquishing or passive loss of local identity and cultural practice, including language, a stripping away of the distinctive marks of belonging to a particular somewhere and sometime. That notion of a cosmopolis is not present in this case, which for me begged the question of its usefulness.
Complicating matters is the fact that there is regular slippage between the Arabic cosmopolis and descriptions of it as Islamic or “Islamic-Arabic” (p. 97). I did not find a single instance where the central question of translatability was not bound up with a question of whether a local term would capture the specifically Islamic import of an Arabic term. Now, a major and viable point of the book is to demonstrate that literature can often serve as a powerful material vector of religious life and promulgation but the label “Arabic” masks the critical role of Islam as presentable in Arabic to the spread of this tradition. In many, if not most, cases, therefore, the issue of translation centered on how and whether to render the Islamic vocabulary and imagery that was known, though not always, through Arabic.
This leads me to my final point about the limits of cosmopolis as a useful construct. Near the close of the book (pp. 267–68), Ricci acknowledges that the Arabic cosmopolis overlapped in time and space with other similar formations: the Sanskrit, the Persian, and the Buddhist cosmopoleis. For example, underexplored is the role of Persian and perhaps the “Persian cosmopolis” to the transmission and retellings of the One Thousand Questions, given that “a shared mention of Persian points to a commonality between its Malay and Tamil tellings, both of which claim a Persian source” (p. 132). The simultaneity of cosmopolitan visions and pressures suggests that Ricci might have been better served by framing the book more boldly as a challenge to Pollock's largely binary division of cosmopolitan and vernacular. In the end, the conclusion I drew from Ricci's work—one that she states in various ways, but not as her central conclusion—is that Islamic literature apart from the Qur'ān and the systematic treatises on kalām, fiqh, etc. played a pivotal role in sustaining and enlarging the place of Islam in the Indian Ocean area.
Criticisms of the frame aside, as a study of religion and literature this book yields terrific new insights and demands new approaches to the perennial questions of great/little or cosmopolitan/vernacular cultural dynamics. The contribution of Ricci's work lies in descriptions of the simultaneity and concomitance of commitments to the local and the universal or, better, to many locals and universals. This book is connected history of the highest order, a boundary-ignoring reconfiguration of Asian literary-religious networks that forces us to question parochial studies of both literature and religion. Ceaselessly redrawing the meaningful “areas” of area studies in this manner points to a bright future. It is a fantastic, conversation-starting work that sets a new standard for what we can aspire to in Asian studies.
