{"title":"Words and their Worlds: A Conversation with Dilip M. Menon","authors":"Mahmoud Al-Zayed","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340087","url":null,"abstract":"In this Philological Conversation, Dilip M. Menon dwells on the questions of how to think concepts and theorize from the Global South and on writing history beyond the Eurocentric, colonial, nationalist, and terrestrial. We discuss the political and epistemic implications and consequences of such urgent tasks. Dilip M. Menon speaks about his affinities with Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and refects on the themes of coloniality of knowledge, postcoloniality, decoloniality, oceanic history, and the idea of paracoloniality. He links his earlier works to his recent decolonial intellectual projects and discusses his intellectual formation and his practice as a historian and social theorist. Put together via e-mail exchanges, this conversation is a culmination of several in-person conversations that took place in Beirut, Delhi and Berlin. One only hopes for many more to come.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" 68","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139144636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Place of the Qurʾān and Islamic Theology in Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and its Early English Receptions: A Study in Textual Citation and Excision","authors":"Claire Gallien","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10052","url":null,"abstract":"This article on the place of the Qurʾān and Islamic theology in Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān constitutes a study in textual citation and excision articulated in two main parts. The first part of the article studies the interconnections between philosophy and theology in Ibn Ṭufayl’s (d. 581/1185) life and the references to the Qurʾān and to Islamic theology in his Risālat Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. In the second part, I track the engagement with the Qurʾān and Islamic theology in the early-modern Latin and English variants of the tale. The article provides a detailed study of the Qurʾanic passages in translation, and reflects on practices of citation, excision and significant paratextual reorganisations. The article argues that the case is less one where the Qurʾān and Islamic theology are excised from the tale and vanish from view, than one where the tale is ‘de-Islamised’ so that it can serve intra-Christian and orientalist interests. The issue resides in making the Qurʾān and Islam epistemically dispensable and in disabling them as hermeneutic interlocutors to be reckoned with in a theological and philosophical debate.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"110 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139146964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writing as Commitment: In Memory of the Philologist and Editor Maurice Olender (1946–2022)","authors":"Markus Messling","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340088","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139249269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Space and Belonging in Suparto Brata’s Donyane Wong Culika (The World of the Untrustworthy)","authors":"Els Bogaerts","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10050","url":null,"abstract":"Exploring the representation of space and belonging in Javanese literature, I will use Suparto Brata’s novel Donyane wong culika (The World of the Untrustworthy, 2004) as a case study. Firstly, I will focus on how literary, linguistic and epistemological features shape and give meaning to Javanese spatiality and on how the references to Javanese customs, literary and cultural traditions, and the Javanese mind in the twentieth century may address and evoke feelings of belonging. Secondly, as the novel features historical events as a kind of backdrop, I will pay attention to what Le Juez and Richardson (2019) call the perceptions of associated loci and on how these loci articulate individual and collective memories of the 1965–66 events, a traumatic period in postcolonial Indonesian history.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139275257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language","authors":"Maryam Fatima, Alexander Jabbari, Mehtap Ozdemir","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340086","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135781079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fashioning a Persianate Offspring for a Modern India: Urdu Visions of Persian Pasts, 1890s–1950s","authors":"Maryam Fatima, Andrew Amstutz","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article addresses how some influential Indian Muslim intellectuals conceptualized and imagined the Urdu language as the linguistic offspring and heir of the Persian language and Persianate textual cultures from the late nineteenth century through the early 1950s. As the symbolic and material value of Persian gradually declined in India, select Persianate idioms, genres, and histories were drafted for Urdu’s modernity. This article considers the significance of Persian as it was variously construed as either a burden or a model by Urdu scholars and as either a worthy or unworthy predecessor for Urdu from the 1890s to the 1950s. It traces the shifting textual processes by which three prominent Indian Muslim intellectuals constructed a parent-offspring relationship between Persian and Urdu in response to colonial education reforms, competing national projects, and pan-Islamic intellectual currents. In summary, this article excavates the many uses that Persian served as it was simultaneously erased from and encoded into Urdu’s anticipated futures.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135781082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Veil of Purity: Tropes of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Reform and Ahmad Khan’s naicar","authors":"Fatima Burney","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) was one of the most prominent Indian Muslim reformists of the nineteenth century and was exceptional for the ways in which he proposed that nature and observations of nature were central to Islam. Like many nineteenth-century reformist narratives, Khan’s ideals on naicar (nature) routinely employed a rhetoric of ‘break,’ ‘renewal,’ and ‘purity’ to imply that Indo-Persian culture was in a state of malaise and in need of rejuvenation. Yet despite this outward denunciation, Khan’s reformist project also ironically reflected many qualities of Persianate Islam that had characterized Indo-Muslim culture before the nineteenth century. This article reconsiders Ahmad Khan’s modernism in light of the Persianate modes that he maintained to point out some of the rhetorical inconsistencies of modernist writing, and the historical lacunae which they create.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135781081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Added in Translation: Keywords for the Study of Javanese Islamic Texts","authors":"Ronit Ricci","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10046","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The idea of keywords was introduced in Raymond Williams’ seminal Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), and has since had a profound influence on research in multiple fields. This article explores what the idea of keywords might contribute to the study of interlinear translations from Arabic into Javanese. The interlinear translation, which presents an Arabic text with a word-for-word Javanese translation appearing between its lines, is a space where languages, beliefs, and entire histories encounter one another on the page. Taking as my example the 1864 interlinear Babad Maulud (a Javanese translation of the Arabic Maulid Syaraf al-Anām , recited on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday), I suggest that despite the Javanese translator’s overall literal translation strategy which attempted to duplicate the original, he or she decided to add “Javanese keywords” at particular points in the translation, with such exceptions revealing contemporary Javanese understandings of social etiquette, identity and genealogy.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135943600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Murdering Mangir","authors":"Verena Hanna Meyer","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10047","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Contemporary Javanese Islam is often imagined as unusually peaceful, the result of an allegedly conflict-free early history populated by Sufis and saints. Yet not all of Java’s Islamic history is peaceful, and neither were violent historic episodes always marginalized by historians and writers. This article discusses two literary accounts of a murder that happened in the early years of Mataram, the dynasty that facilitated widespread Islamization. Their two authors—Raden Ngabehi Suradipura and Pramoedya Ananta Toer—used the story as a familiar allegory to process their own experiences of violence and oppression in the colonial and postcolonial state. Belying normative visions of a teleology of peace, they present theo-political imaginaries in which violence is accepted in the cultivation of virtue and the creation—or aspirational creation—of a just polity. Through their literary work, these writers expressed their complex positionalities as they made sense of oppressive regimes, the political role of Islamic beliefs, and the normative content of history.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135943598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Money, Morality, and Modernity: A Javanese Remake of a 1930 American Whodunnit in 1960s Indonesia","authors":"E.P. Wieringa","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10049","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Suparto Brata (1932–2015) belongs to the pioneers of the Western model of the whodunnit in modern Javanese literature. His early (1962) work Pethité Njai Blorong (The Tail of Nyai Blorong) is a remake of the 1930 whodunnit While the Patient Slept by the US crime novelist Mignon G. Eberhart (1899–1996), which is a murder mystery in true Agatha Christie fashion. This article shows how Suparto Brata did not simply reproduce Eberhart’s detective story in a postcolonial Indonesian setting but thoroughly and successfully reworked it until it hardly resembled its prototype anymore, turning a foreign example into a veritable modernist Javanese kind of Bildungsroman that mirrored 1960s Indonesian societal issues under the shadow of Sukarno’s nationalist policies and catastrophic economic conditions.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135943599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}