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This is a scholarly edition of Muḥammad Abū al-Surūr al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī’s Exegesis of Sūrat al-Fatḥ. Al-Ṣiddīqī was a prominent Sufi scholar in Ottoman Egypt in the 16th century. The edition includes a biography and family history of its author. The book is based on a unique manuscript found in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul and represents a lesser-explored philosophical school of thought within Islam, which enjoyed the patronage and endorsement of the Ottoman caliphate of the time. It presents the original Arabic text and a commentary in Arabic, as well as an English introduction.
This is a scholarly edition of Muḥammad Abū al-Surūr al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī’s Exegesis of Sūrat al-Fatḥ. Al-Ṣiddīqī was a prominent Sufi scholar in Ottoman Egypt in the 16th century. The edition includes a biography and family history of its author. The book is based on a unique manuscript found in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul and represents a lesser-explored philosophical school of thought within Islam, which enjoyed the patronage and endorsement of the Ottoman caliphate of the time. It presents the original Arabic text and a commentary in Arabic, as well as an English introduction.
The book was awarded the Dissertation Prize 2019 by the Academy for Islam in Research and Society (AIWG) and the Classical Islamic Book Prize by Gorgias Press (2020).
The book was awarded the Dissertation Prize 2019 by the Academy for Islam in Research and Society (AIWG) and the Classical Islamic Book Prize by Gorgias Press (2020).
Section Editors:Ines Aščerić-Todd, Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabé Pons, Jaco Beyers, Emanuele Colombo, Lejla Demiri, Martha T. Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan M. Guenther, Vincenzo Lavenia, Arely Medina, Diego Melo Carrasco, Alain Messaoudi, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Charles Ramsey, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Cornelia Soldat, Charles Tieszen, Carsten Walbiner, Catherina Wenzel.
Section Editors:Ines Aščerić-Todd, Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabé Pons, Jaco Beyers, Emanuele Colombo, Lejla Demiri, Martha T. Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan M. Guenther, Vincenzo Lavenia, Arely Medina, Diego Melo Carrasco, Alain Messaoudi, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Charles Ramsey, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Cornelia Soldat, Charles Tieszen, Carsten Walbiner, Catherina Wenzel.
Abstract
Religious booklets formed a substantial part of the boom in commercial publishing and print culture in nineteenth and early-twentieth north India, cheaply available and widely reprinted by multiple publishers. This essay considers two popular texts that allow us to trace some of the range and of the linguistic and emotional contours of this production. Alif Be alphabet poems gesture towards the earlier history of Muslim oral traditions in north India. Short Wafātnāma verse narratives on the death of the Prophet Muhammad, conversely, were most likely produced by authors connected to Sunni reform movements and sought to focus their devotion on the Prophet alone.
Abstract
By the late nineteenth century, when printing press was popular across the world. In South Asia, there was increased production and dissemination of Tamil and Malayalam vernacular materials in Arabic script. This intermarriage of local languages with a cosmopolitan script was part of a larger trend of the time, and in South India those were advanced by Arabic-Malayalam and Arabic-Tamil literatures (also referred as Malabari and Arwī respectively). Hundreds of texts printed annually at the prime centres of Islamic printing on both Malabar and Coromandel coasts were circulated among mobile and immobile communities of the region across the Indian Ocean, Pacific and Atlantic littorals. The reach and impact of such vernacular printings are yet to be explored thoroughly, for these materials have been spread across several formal and informal collections and there has not been any systematic attempt to identify or catalogue them. In this article, I focus on uncatalogued Arabic-Malayalam materials at the British Library London on which I have been working on in the last few years. These materials from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries help us understand the history of the region, religion and printing. After a brief historical overview, I focus on some major features, themes, trends, places, and people in about 150 texts I consulted, and which I discuss in relation to broader histories of Arabic-Malayalam tradition.