Traversing sources in Malay, Javanese, Tamil, and Arabic, Ricci's book probes the cosmopolitan idioms generated by the transmission of texts across Southeast Asia from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The most ambitious aspect of Ricci's work is the use she makes of her texts' lives in translation to think through fundamental questions about literature, literariness, and translation. Part One engages the question of translation through close readings of the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil retellings of The Book of One Thousand Questions, an Arabic dialogue between the Prophet and the Jewish convert Ibnu Salam set in the seventh century but dating to the tenth. Part Two considers the effects that translations of this conversion text had on conceptualizations of conversion in early modern Southeast Asia. Part Three elaborates a framework for what Ricci terms the “Arabic cosmopolis,” a cultural-political formation that “came to coexist with, often overlap with, and in some cases inherit” (14) the cultural formation that Indologist Sheldon Pollock has termed the “Sanskrit cosmopolis.”

In addition to being the first scholarly work to examine Javanese, Malay, and Tamil in their mutual interactions, Ricci's is the first monograph to engage Pollock's work on the Sanskrit cosmopolis from a comparativist (rather than strictly Indological) perspective. In part because of the regional overlaps between the Sanskrit model and its Arabic counterpart, the encounter is productive, notwithstanding that the Sanskritization of Southeast Asia contrasts with later Islamicizing processes that entailed religious as well as literary change. But alongside Arabic, Persian cultural and political formations influenced the Islamization of Southeast Asia during the same period and, as Ricci acknowledges, Persian rather than Arabic may have been the medium through which The Book of One Thousand Questions was transmitted to Southeast Asia.

One would have liked a clearer outline of the Arabic cosmopolis' parameters. Did its borders coincide with South Asia and Southeast Asia, or did it extend to West Asia to encompass the entire Islamic world? Perhaps the dual (Arabic-Persian) linguistic base through which Southeast Asian literary cultures were Islamicized attests to the difficulty of mapping the Sanskrit model, where only one language reigned supreme, onto early modern vernacular multiplicity, wherein Arabic was but one among several cosmopolitan languages. Despite these differences (which are treated reflexively by Ricci), the attempt to think comparatively about the work done by a cosmopolitan language in shaping regional vernaculars is enriched here by centuries of scholarship on Southeast Asia's prior encounter with Sanskrit. The Persianization of Southeast Asia has yet to be explored systematically through cosmopolitan frameworks or comparative translation studies. Ricci's framework can enrich both areas of inquiry. Together with her edited volume, Translation in Asia (2011), the questions Ricci raises in her excavations of Javanese, Malay, and Tamil texts will enliven Asian and Islamic literary studies and embolden scholars to pursue global questions on local terms and through local archives for generations to come.