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Front Cover
Back Cover
Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean
Author:
Nile Green (editor)
ISBN:
9789395474986
Binding:
Hardcover
Year:
2027
Pages:
336 with 12 b/w photos, 9 b/w illustrations, 2 b/w maps
Size:
16 x 24 x 3 cm
Weight:
638 grams
Price:
INR
2195.00
About the Book
The most comprehensive anthology of primary sources on Sri Lanka’s links with the Islamic world ever assembled in English.
Sri Lanka is an underappreciated focal point of global history. Known to Persian and Arab traders as Serendib, the island has long been a site of intensive cultural and material exchange, as well as a holy place—Islamic tradition holds that the biblical Adam arrived there after his expulsion from Eden. Assembling centuries of texts, this volume presents an array of sources from the Indian Ocean.
Serendipitous Translations
gathers travelogues, literary works, commercial records, inscriptions, religious tracts, pilgrim manuals, and more—an unprecedented range of Muslim voices from Sri Lanka between the 1200s and 1990s. These works vividly document medieval pilgrimages, maritime mysticism, diplomatic encounters, colonial-era commerce, and the bustling everyday affairs of a cosmopolitan Asian nexus. Expert translations bring Arabic, Malay, Turkish, Urdu, Dhivehi, Sinhala, Arabic-Tamil, and Tamil texts to readers of English for the first time. Editor Nile Green situates these texts in their Indian Ocean contexts by introducing the broad sweep of Sri Lanka’s story. An invaluable collection,
Serendipitous Translations
is the most comprehensive anthology of primary sources ever assembled on Sri Lanka’s thousand-year links to the Muslim world.
About the Author
Nile Green
Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. He is the author of many award-winning monographs, the editor of eight books, and the host of the podcast
Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam
.
Editorial Reviews
“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
“
Serendipitous Translations
pushes open a new door onto Sri Lanka’s past—and a polyglot array of voices emerge. Building on welcome moves to explore non-European traditions of travel literature, this volume presents the accounts of a succession of Muslim visitors to its shores but also stands as a real contribution to the history of Islam in Sri Lanka. It is also a beautiful sourcebook for the study of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.”
—Alan Strathern, University of Oxford, author of
Converting Rulers: Global Patterns 1450-1850
“
Serendipitous Translations
will significantly assist scholarly work in a burgeoning area—that is, the study of Sri Lanka, namely the island’s status in the Islamicate World. It will be of value to those who consider Sri Lanka’s connections around trade, migration, and religious ideas in the Indian Ocean region. It will also provide secure source evidence and rigorous scholarship for the consolidation of Muslim communities’ sense of deep belonging and rootedness in Sri Lanka today. These were communities which were not singular or homogenous, but rather people demonstrating richly variegated traditions of migration and residence through and on the island.”
—Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, author of
Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire
Customer Reviews
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