Session Name: Around the Line I: Writing, Reading, and Reciting Interlinear Translations in the Indonesian-Malay World
1 - Muslim Womanhood between the Lines: Reading the Kitab al-Mar'ah
Thursday, August 1, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract This paper explores a Kitab al-Mar’ah (A Women’s Book) from a manuscript blandly titled “A collection of prayers and Islamic jurisprudence.” The manuscript is part of the Muhammad Hilman collection of Cirebon manuscripts (EAP 211/1/4/37) and is claimed to originate in the 14th–18th centuries. The Kitab is in Arabic and contains a dense Javanese interlinear translation between its lines. The history of practices of interlinear translation in Indonesia is closely tied to Islamization, and also to pedagogy, transmission and an ongoing engagement with Islamic teachings. In general, not many narrative texts were translated using the interlinear model and so the ones that were, like this Kitab, are deserving of attention. The paper asks what such a “close translation” can teach us about perceptions of womanhood as they were developed in Javano-Islamic writing of the period and about whether and how notions of gender and gendered behaviors were imported wholesale or modified.
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