ABSTRACT
This report aims to introduce three previously unknown and under-examined Indonesian manuscripts that are preserved in Iranian libraries. They are written on dluwang/daluang paper and each include interlinear translations and glosses in Javanese using Pégon script. These manuscripts had been in the possession of religious families in Iran.
Acknowledgments
Writing this article would have not been possible without the helpful comments of my colleagues and friends, in particular Edwin Wieringa (Cologne) and Annabel T. Gallop (London), on my earlier draft. I also thank different Iranian libraries, including that of Parliament (Majles) for granting permission to access their collections. My thanks too, to the anonymous reviewers of Indonesia and the Malay World for their constructive suggestions. All errors are mine.
Note on contributor
Majid Daneshgar is Research Associate at the Oriental Studies Department, University of Freiburg, Germany, where he works on transregional Islam, Orientalism and teaches Islamic studies. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 On the interaction between Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian materials see Kadı and Peacock (Citation2019).
2 There is evidence suggesting that people from Southeast Asia visited the heartland of Islam before the 13th century. The author will clarify this issue in his forthcoming article.
3 Bilingual Persian-Malay (-Indonesian) manuscripts in Indian and Pakistani private and public collections have not been considered in this report. On Indian and Indonesian literature see Ph S. Van Ronkel’s (Citation1922) essay on a manuscript from the Leiden University.
4 Another category will be ‘Malay-Indonesian manuscripts in/by Persian(s) in Iranian libraries’, which is the subject of my forthcoming research.
5 On marginalisation of East Asian and Malay materials in the Middle East, see Daneshgar (Citation2020b).
6 In Islamic legal (fiqhī) sources, al-muṭawwalāt relates to verbose treatises which comprehensively approach legal issues from different perspectives.
7 Thanks to Annabel Teh Gallop for drawing my attention to this issue, see: Gallop (Citation2015).
8 For more on Maʿrifat Islām see Braginsky (Citation2010).
9 For the picture and its analysis, see: Nur Ahmad (Citation2019).
10 Regarding the Javanese morphology and its relationship with that of Sundanese, see van Syoc (Citation1959).
11 There are similarities between such scripts as well as the Bengali text at Leiden, i.e., Or. 7368
12 See: ‘Pesantren manuscript, including Shahadatain, Umm al-Barahin and Al-Tasrif texts with commentaries’ (20113A11), Art Gallery of South Australia; Or 16764, British Library.
13 Pre-revolutionary seals show the title of Shorā-ye Mellī (National Consultative Assembly).
14 The author has already come across the family name of ‘Sariban’ in Bandung, West Java.
15 Such questions came out of my discussion with Edwin Wieringa, for which I am grateful.
16 My thanks to the second reviewer for drawing attention to this point.