Panel
7. Multiple Ontologies: Religiosities, Philosophies, Languages and Society
Q. 19 (Maryam, Mary) is the only chapter in the entire Quran named after a woman. Within it are expressed principal elements of Islam’s gender conception, one of which is the gendered relation between the human (prophets and saints) and the divine, which is addressed in the first half of the chapter. The paper scrutinizes the differing ways in which Javanese Muslims in the period between the 17th and 19th centuries interlinearly translated and further appropriated the Quran’s gender conception, more specifically in the context of human-divine gendered relations. It explores the unique, advanced technique of translating nearly all grammatical elements of the original Arabic text while at the same time appropriating the gender conception. Involving manuscripts from Central and West Java, the paper also attempts to shed light on the great extent to which gender conceptions can vary across not only time and space, but also individuals and communities.
Muhammad Dluha Luthfillah
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel