 | “This volume brings together a singular collection of translated texts that illuminate the entangled histories of Lanka and the Islamic world across the Indian Ocean. Preceded by concise commentaries, these fragments—spanning the medieval to the postcolonial—offer readers snippets of a world rarely assembled in one place. The choice to center Islamic-Lankan interactions is methodologically astute as it allows for an engagement with a multilingual archive—Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Tamil, Malay, Dhivehi, Urdu, and Sinhala—that resists the pull of Eurocentric historical frames. Instead, what emerges is a composite portrait of Lanka, situated within broader oceanic circulations of people, texts, and religious imaginaries. This is a book that invites readers not only to rethink the place of Lanka in Indian Ocean history but also to reflect on the ways in which histories are told, translated, and archived.”
—Nira Wickramasinghe, Leiden University, author of Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka
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