The spread of Islam throughout South and Southeast Asia and the socio-cultural transformations that occurred in its wake have received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. While basing herself on available scholarship, Ronit Ricci presents a novel and innovative approach to the momentous transformations occasioned by the Islamisation of this vast region. In contrast to earlier studies, Ricci does not limit her investigation to a single regional case-study, but compares three cases from both South and Southeast Asia. She does so by focusing on a particular textual tradition, the so-called Book of one thousand questions, and its adaptation into Javanese, Malay, and Tamil literary traditions. Her investigation is informed by two theoretical models, namely first the study of processes of Islamisation as a form of ‘translation’, and second Sheldon Pollock's model of the interaction between ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘vernacular’ languages. Utilising these two models allows Ricci to highlight the particularities of the specific ‘translation’ of the tradition of the One thousand questions into the three literary traditions under consideration, while simultaneously studying these traditions in relationship to each other as vernacular instances of an overarching Arabic cosmopolis.

The book is divided into three parts comprised of three chapters each. The first part, after the introductory chapter, is entitled ‘Translation’, and deals in the first chapter with ideas and terminologies of ‘translation’ in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil, and then in one chapter each with the three corpora of texts comprising the tradition of the Book of one thousand questions in these three languages. The second part, ‘Conversion’, deals in three chapters with the way cosmopolitan Arabic was ‘translated’ into the vernacular traditions under consideration; with the way conversion to Islam is depicted in the One thousand questions; and with the characterisation of the two main protagonists of that tradition, the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish scholar Abdullah ibnu Salam. The final concluding part reintegrates the findings of the study into the larger context of an Arabic cosmopolis in the eastern Indian Ocean.

The innovative framework adopted by Ricci permits her to move beyond the narratives of the localisation of Islam that have played such an important role in studies of the Islamisation of Southeast Asia and South India. While she pays close attention to the particularities of the diverse literary traditions she is studying and the historical contexts in which these arose, she also stresses how it was the adoption of Islam and the impact of the Arabic cosmopolis that in turn transformed literary production in the local vernaculars. Thereby, she avoids the tendency sometimes found in scholarly treatments of the topic to perceive of vernacular texts as somehow compromised and less-than-Islamic traditions. For example, rather than being content with the frequent assertion that the use of Tamil literary conventions in Muslim texts integrated Muslims into a shared South Indian religious culture, Ricci demonstrates how the Tamil One thousand questions used these conventions precisely to highlight the distinction between Islam and non-Islamic practices (pp. 106–28). At the same time, the comparative angle actually allows her to determine the specificities of the three literary traditions under consideration with far greater detail than would be possible in a study that focused on only one such tradition.

Ricci's presentation of her findings is lucid and convincing, and the many translated passages allow the reader glimpses of the style and character of the texts under consideration. Besides looking at Javanese, Malay, and Tamil texts, she also draws on sources in languages as diverse as Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew. Specialists of the different traditions discussed may perhaps disagree with one detail or another. Also, the focus on the relationship between the Arabic cosmopolis on the one hand and the specific vernacular corpora of the One Thousand Questions tradition could benefit from being more firmly integrated into the wider context of Islamic literary cultures in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil, though Ricci moves in that direction in her chapters on the individual traditions and the conclusion. But the insights gained by her comparative perspective more than compensate for any minor shortcomings. Ricci's excellent and innovative study should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the spread of Islam beyond Arabia and serve as a starting point in reconsidering the role of vernacular literatures in processes of Islamisation across Asia.