Persianate Prose and the Making of Malay Muslim Literature : Text, Translation and Commentary of the Durr al-Majalis

The book investigates lines of connection and shared literary heritage between the Persianate and Malay-Indonesian worlds over many centuries.Majid Daneshgar provides a critical and comparative study of Persianate-Malay stories, with specific focus on Durr al-Majalis, or Pearl of Gatherings – a classical Islamic text produced by Sayf Zafar (late thirteenth–mid-fourteenth centuries CE), a writer and scholar of Central Asian background, during the Delhi Sultanate. The book illustrates how the Durr al-Majalis contains various legal, theological-philosophical, metaphysical, chivalrous and mystical accounts.In addition, it traces how the book travelled beyond the so-called ‘Balkans-to-Bengal’ borders and was copied, translated and annotated across Eastern Africa, Eastern Turkistan, Mongol-dominated China, Arabic-speaking Egypt and South East Asia.It demonstrates how this Persian collection of stories shaped the idea of Islam, Islamic teachings and stories across the Muslim World, and in the Malay-Indonesian World in particular.