Ayesha A. Irani

The Muhammad Avat?ra (eBook, ePUB)

Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In The Muhammad Avatara, Ayesha Irani offers an examination of the Nabivamsa, the first epic work on the Prophet Muhammad written in Bangla. This little-studied seventeenth-century text, written by Saiyad Sultan, is a literary milestone in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural history of Islam, and marks a significant contribution not only to Bangla's rich literary corpus, but also to our understanding of Islam's localization in Indic culture in the early modern period. That Sufis such as Saiyad Sultan played a central role in Islam's spread in Bengal has been demonstrated primarily through examination of medieval Persian literary, ethnographic, and historical sources, as well as colonial-era data. Islamic Bangla texts themselves, which emerged from the sixteenth century, remain scarcely studied outside the Bangladeshi academy, and almost entirely untranslated. Yet these premodern works, which articulate Islamic ideas in a regional language, represent a literary watershed and underscore the efforts of rebel writers across South Asia, many of whom were Sufis, to defy the linguistic cordon of the Muslim elite and the hegemony of Arabic and Persian as languages of Islamic discourse. Irani explores how an Arabian prophet and his religion came to inhabit the seventeenth-century Bengali landscape, and the role that pir-authors, such as Saiyad Sultan, played in the rooting of Islam in Bengal's easternmost regions. This text-critical study lays bare the sophisticated strategies of translation used by a prominent early modern Muslim Bengali intellectual to invite others to his faith.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Dezember 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780190089245
• Artikelnr.: 60992703

Autorenporträt

Ayesha A. Irani is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston

Inhaltsangabe

* Acknowledgments * A Note on Transliteration and Other Conventions * A Map of Medieval Bengal and Arakan * 1. The Prophet of Light and Love: N
r Muhammad in Bengal's Mirror * A Historical Overview of Cä
agr
ma * Islamic Bangla Literature and Islamization * Literary Portraits of the Author * Inscribing Islam in the Bengali Religious Landscape * N
r Muhammad as the Ontological Principle of Light and Love * The Islamic Cosmogony of Om
* Later Developments in Islamic Bengali Cosmogonical Discourse * Cosmogony, Translation, and Conversion * 2. Text, Author, and Authority: The Nab
vä
a and the Making of Islamic Community * Genre and Performance * The Structure of the Nab
vä
a's Salvation History * The Critical Edition of the Nab
vä
a vis-à-vis the Manuscript Tradition * Author and Authority in the Making of Islamic Community * 3. Translation and the Historiographic Process: The Work of a Text in the Making of Bengali Islam * The Terms of Translation * Translation as Qur
nic Exegesis * The Representation and Transculturation of Musalm
ni and Hindu
ni Traditions * Translation as Entextualizing Conversion * A Hermeneutic Model of Muslim Missionary Translation * Frontier Literature * 4. A New Prophetology for Bengal: Pur
a- Kor
n Salvation History * An Indo- Islamic Salvation History for Bengal * The Original Couple, M
ric- M
rij
t or
iva- P
rvat
* The Pur
ic Predecessors of
dam * The Account of
dam, the First Man * Righteous
i
and Islam's Triumph over Hindu
ni Adharma * Evil Iblis as Primal Guru of the Hindu
ni Clans * Translation as Renewal, Subversion, and Manipulation * 5. Hari the Fallen Prophet: An Avat
ra's Descent into Disgrace * In the Shadow of Gau
ya Vai
avism * Recasting the Acts of Kr
a * The Polemics of the Tale of Kr
a * An Islamic Reappraisal of Vai
ava Theology * Messianic Intersections of the Avat
ra and Nab
* Missionary Translation as Creative Iconoclasm * 6. Ascension and Ascendancy: Constructing the Prophet for Bengal * The Nab
vä
a's Ascension Narrative in the Perso- Turkic Mi
r
j Tradition * The Prophet as God's Beloved * The Prophet as Perfect Phakir * The Prophet as Intercessor * The Historiographer and Legitimation * Conclusion: Historiography, Translation, and Conversion * Appendix: Distribution of Manuscripts of the NV in Various Bangladeshi Archives * Works Cited * Index