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Nile Green, "Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean" (U Texas Press, 2026)
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A
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B
Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, a small island at the center of a very big story. For over a thousand years, Muslim pilgrims, merchants, scholars and soldiers have passed through Lanka or Serendip, leaving traces in Arabic, Tamil, Persian, Malay, Ottoman, Turkish, Urdu, Devi, and Sinhala. Today we will talk about Serendipity's translations, a source book on Sri Lanka and the Islamic Indian Ocean, just published by University of Texas Press in January 2026, which gathers many of those voices together for the first time in English. From medieval travelers marveling at Adam's peak to modern novelists and newspaper editors wrestling with reform, nationalism and civil conflict. But first, a bit about the editor of Serendipitous Translations. Well, I'm happy to start the sixth year of New Books in the Indian Ocean world podcast with Dr. Nal. Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he's the celebrated author of 10 monographs and the editor of seven books and several journal issues with a particular focus on Islam and the Indian Ocean world. He also hosts the excellent podcast Akbar's Chamber Experts Talk Islam. I'm your host, Ahmed El Masmi, an assistant professor of history at UAE University. Welcome, Niall, to New Books in the Indian Ocean World. And thank you so much for taking the time.
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C
Well, thank you so much, Ahmed, for the invitation. It's an honor to be part of the podcast and, yeah, it's a pleasure to be talking with you.
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B
The honor is all mine. I've learned a lot over the years from your books, and it's a surreal moment to have you on the podcast. So thank you for joining us.
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C
Thank you. And listeners, if you haven't already, you must be reading Ahmed's new articles, and there's so much that learn from your work. And as I mentioned before we started recording, I'm just really excited to see more of your work on, gosh, the intellectual history of the Gulf occult traditions, the interaction with the Portuguese, the astrological works, and effectively the textual history of the Gulf and the Indian Ocean at large, which is really, I think, what we'll talk about more, I think has been the big desideratum in our field. And you're going to be filling it much more than me, I think.
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B
Thank you for that. All right, let's talk about Serendipitous Translations. And it's a wonderful title. And it's also etymologically related to the island, right? And so that's an amazing catch. So you describe Serendipitous translations as using Lanka as a synec for the ocean at large, assembling a multilingual library from around with Arabic writing, sometimes called the Green Sea, as your colleague Sanjay Sabramarian recently published across the Green Sea, as offering the largest range of primary sources on Islamic Lankan interactions yet published for listeners new to this story. What is the big picture history of Muslim Lanka and the Indian Ocean that you hope emerges from this collection of chapters.
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C
My main goal, really, Ahmed, has been to bring to a wider readership just the sheer range of languages, of different scripts, of genres of writing altogether, that in a sense converge on Sri Lanka, as you've said, a sort of synagogue of the Indian Ocean, as a center point where I could edit a book that has a certain amount of coherence, that every chapter isn't about some other far flung corner of this very large world region that we often say is interconnected. But those connections don't necessarily always seem to be sort of coherent in an edited book in particular. So, yeah, I wanted to focus on something that I feel very strongly about, which I think is the need for a much richer source base for Indian Ocean history in the languages of the Indian Ocean. And given the sheer number of languages, and as I mentioned, too, the range of Scripts involved, including different scripts for the Islamic languages, particularly the importance of Tamil in the Tamil script as well as Arabic and indeed De Vehi with its own unique Tanus script which we might speak about. This is necessarily a collaborative, collaborative endeavor. So yeah, my main goal then really kind of using Sri Lanka as just as a case study for thinking about how we can write Indian Ocean history through the languages, the writing systems, the genres of the people who traversed it. And as a historian of Islam and Muslims, my focus was really naturally on. On sort of on Islamic sources, except that one of the translations is looking at the Muslims of Sri Lanka, the difference of multilingual and multi ethnic Muslims of Sri Lanka, the communities and the sojourners that we look at through the book and looking at them from the outside by accounts of Buddhist and Christian Sinhala, the population of Sri Lanka and those kind of outsider accounts, but nonetheless kind of insiders, of course, course within, within the Indian Ocean, if not necessarily within the Indian Ocean world. And that's perhaps something we might come back to that of course not everybody who we every population, let alone every person who lived within, so we can chart them on a map of the Indian Ocean. They're not necessarily participants or even I don't know what would the word would be people are willing to go along with, who are actually not enthusiasts for that Indian Ocean world of connectivity and the benefits, particularly for merchants that came with that connectivity. So the book, I suppose to go back to your question, the other sub theme or purpose in bringing together the collection was to try to empirically test the cliche, I think it's pretty fair to say, of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism. What does that mean? Is everybody connected? Well, obviously not within this world, as I've just mentioned in this space that isn't not everybody within the map of the Indian Ocean is part of this connected world, still less a cosmopolitan or an enthusiast for whatever pre modern Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism might be. So by giving this sort of series of insider accounts and indeed insider, outsider, the Sinhala, Buddhist and Christian response to the Muslim presence, particularly Muslim merchants in Sri Lanka, the idea was then to actually test well how much cosmopolitanism can we actually see in these primary sources by actors and participants within Indian Ocean history.
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B
Indeed. And I really enjoy that sort of, let's say, juxtaposition of all of these voices that we find in nine chapters that the volume consisted of that moves across Arabic, Ottoman, Turkish, Tamil, Malay, Devi, Urdu and Sinhala and also across scripts such as Jawi and Arabic. Tamil used to write Malay and Tamil in modified Arabic letters, that multilingual and multiscript world tells us about how Muslims on and around Lanka actually lived, traded and worshiped. But what were the practical headaches of editing a book that crosses so many linguistic frontiers?
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C
That's a wise and astute question, Ahmed. There are always headaches in editing a book, as I'm sure you know, or editing a journal or a journal issue. I've edited a number of books before and every time I take on a new one, my wife reminds me, you said you'd never do it again. But I'm a slave to my own enthusiasm, so I do it again and again. In this case though, that even though I've a sense being around the block a few times with editing books, what I hadn't done before was edited a book of translations. And a book of translations brings up a range of different issues really I hadn't come across before. One, I suppose that in a modified or lesser version I had is the need for specialists. There are, of course, any edited book is going to be a book of specialists that the editors have to draw together a selection of thereof. But when it comes to these truly recondite languages that at least recondite within academe, languages such as Islamic Tamil, or texts written by Muslims, whether in Arabic script, Tamil or regular Tamil script, or Divahi, as I mentioned, with its own unique Tana script, or for that matter, languages such as Sinhala or indeed some better known languages in which scholars of Ottoman texts, I haven't necessarily studied anything of the Indian Ocean, let alone of Lanka. So the, I suppose the first challenge was finding that really small, and in some cases just that one scholar worldwide who had the capability really of translating from these languages and these genres, and particularly, as I say, kind of text written by Muslims in languages such as Hanoi. And then the second challenge is then were, I suppose more, as I say, on the technical side, the question well, we have so many scripts. Am I going to have this as a. As, let's say, a kind of a classic scholarly book that is going to be full of a lot of diacritical apparatus and every single chapter because of the different languages and the different scripts and the different modifications of scripts. So they're going to have a whole range of very different diacritical marks, of which of course I'm not an expert because I don't read Tamil, I don't know what Tamil diacritics are, for example. So the decision to standardize and have minimal diacritics was one that I took. But that itself is easier in some scripts or some scholarly conventions to say, okay, we do without diacritics than it is for others. So that was in some cases a bit of arm wrestling or negotiation with, with translators. And then the issue of what kinds of translation, aside from the particular texts, what kind of translations was I trying to commission in the sense of should these be? Well, there's the old adage about translations, isn't they can either be faithful or beautiful, but not both. So I wanted to make this a book of translations that are readable, that might be read in the classroom, that might be read for, for pleasure. These are in some cases literary texts that have a literary and equality of pleasure and enjoyment in the original language. So I wanted that element to shine through for these to be readable translation. But nonetheless it is a scholarly book with an academic press. So wanting to make sure, as an editor, ensuring there's a coherence of style in a sense of register across the different chapters, the question then of how many words we're going to have in parentheses, let's just say how many words of the, the original language we're going to have in, in parentheses through the text, how much, how, how much of a kind of expository or commentary footnotes there were going to be as well, because these, each of the translation, I, I tried to ensure as editor that, that they can be read and enjoyed and understood and appreciated by readers who have no knowledge whatsoever of that language or tradition in question. So each of the chapters have an introduction to that language, that literary tradition, that particular author and text or set of all to enable the readers to be able to appreciate and sort of better understand, make sense of the translation. And then just that, you know, to go back to the final bit of your question, then trying to make sure that there's a sort of a, a sufficient but not overwhelming number of footnotes or endnotes, as it turned out, to enable readers to get the text, but again, without it sort of being overburdened that you can't read the text without looking to 100 footnotes for every translation.
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B
I think you strike a good balance here between readability and also having a useful introduction to these traditions for researchers and students.
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C
Well, thank you, Ahmed. You're my first reader, at least the first reader I've heard back from, so that's a relief to hear. Thank you.
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B
Yes. Let's dig deeper now into the chapters. The forward, which is quite a good comprehensive crash course into Lanka's Islamic history, emphasizes that serendipitous Translations doesn't just retell the history of the largest Muslim group known as the Moors, called by the Portuguese and then adopted locally as well, but cautiously includes Malays and other minorities. In order to understand how the wider Muslim community formed, why was it important to decenter the Moors in this way and how did that choice shape which sources and genres you decided to include?
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C
Well, it wasn't actually a decision to descend to the Moors at all and I'll sort of come back to that in a moment as I as I sort of work around and work into a question. So yeah, with the introduction that I ended up writing a 75 page introduction which in a sense the. And the reason I did that was because we we have a a couple of excellent books on on the malaise of of Sri Lanka. So the smaller of the. Well I suppose the smaller of the two. Well I suppose. Let me dial back. The Muslim population of contemporary Sri lanka is around 10%, maybe slightly less perhaps 9 and a cent and of that 10% something like probably 8% are the moors to whom we'll we'll come to the the next largest or the next least small population a permanent population at least for as a prox are the Malays and then there were smaller sort of long term Indian Muslim groups. Now the Malays have actually had a have more scholarly work about them in recent years whether by the Lankan Malay scholar VA Hussein Mir who's written about the the Malay regiments under the British but also about Malay Lankan Malay literature. Ronick reaches important monograph on the Arabica Cosmopolis but deals with as indeed her second monograph does as well with Lanka and Lanka Milei it's okay not to.
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C
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D
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C
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California and for delivery and and also the the work of at least some of the work of Michael Laffan as well. So I really didn't want to de center the Moors at all. If anything, I would have liked to have pushed the, the, the. The story, the literature of the Moors of, of Lang into much bigger position. But the reason I didn't was actually finding any academics who were capable of translating Sri Lankan or indeed Islamic Tamil altogether, let alone familiar with Sri Lankan Tamil material. So the paucity of scholarship on the Muslims of Sri Lanka and particularly of let's say pre 19th and even more so pre 20th century and pre contemporary, let's say sociology and anthropology, so historians and textual scholars, the paucity of work on the Moors and indeed on other Muslim groups, that's what sort of led me to realize actually I think I should take this opportunity to write a, a sort of, kind of a. Yeah, well, the 75 page introduction which surveys the different Muslim communities, the history of the Moors, the Malays and others, and the range of different other Muslim sojourners and the textual history and outsider account. So the book as a whole then has accounts by the long term resident populations, Moors, Malays and indeed them from the 19th century, the British period, Indian Muslim groups, different kinds of Indian Muslims and then accounts of various outsiders sources as well, whether in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Divay. So I would love to see and I hope that the book, if the book doesn't succeed in anything else other than to stimulate interest in the Tamil literary traditions of the Moors of Sri Lanka, to me that would be a hugely gratifying outcome. I would love to see much more scholarship. In your own recent visit to Lanka, Ahmed, I believe you visit a few of the madrasas there which have of course long standing tradition of. Of Arabic studies, but also of texts in Tamil in Arabic Tamil and sort of in regular Tamil script written by Muslim. And that is the great sort of unknown, the great trove I think that we really need research on. There is a Lankan scholar and an Indian scholar with whom I wasn't able to make contact. In fact I'm not sure if they're still alive who publish books in, in. In Chennai or back when it was still Madras on, on these Lankan Tamil texts or to some degree, but there's so little known particularly within, within academe. So I would love to see that coming out. So just to. I suppose I should have mentioned earlier that the, the name, why they're called Moors is because this was an exonym of course the Portuguese term Moro just for sort of Muslims. Generically that was applied to the Tamil speaking Muslims of Sri Lanka who had historically called some version of the term Sonagar but that exonym, that external name Moro or then anglicized to Moor becomes adopted by the Moors as an internym, as a, as a self ascription. And that comes together with the Moors the Sonagar's assertion that they're the descendants of Arabs who happen to speak Tamil. So their assertion they are not ethnic Tamil. So that, that external, that exonym then of Moro and more in a way becomes useful of separating themselves from particular of the Hindu and Christian migrant population that comes to the island in the work plantations in the later 19th century and indeed of course by the end of the 20th century. To be a Tamil in Sri Lanka is a. Obviously during the Sri Lankan civil war you're on one side or the other. And the being Moors then allowed the Tamil speaking Muslims to maintain a sense of separation. Tamil indeed, the Tamil Tiger, Tamil Elam conflict. But what we still really lack, and I would love to see scholars research is pre 19th century or indeed pre late 19th century accounts of the history of the Moors. And to give some sense of well, how far back within let's say Moorish Tamil language accounts of their own history, how long back back do the traditions of Arab genealogy or Arab ancestry, Arab history more generally go? So there is so much work to be done with the Tamil language sources for the Moors and they are such a fascinating community. And as we break out of increasingly we talk about breaking out of area studies and the linguistic sort of prisms and prisons. I suppose sometimes that that area studies model created the, the restriction of people learning Tamil only for the huge and 2000 year old set of Hindu Tamil traditions really is. And indeed restricting Tamil only to sort of the Indian side as well of the Gulf of Mana has really sort of left sort of huge possibilities, but really a huge lacuna in Indian Ocean history as well as Sri Lankan history.
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B
Indeed. Actually a month ago I was in Singapore for a conference and there were a few papers about using Muslim Tamil writings, starting with the hagiographies of Shah of Nagor, Shah Al Hamid written in Tamil and they were circulating from Lanka all the way to Southeast asia from the 17th century at least onward. So there's a lot to excavate and many projects to be written. Indeed. So thank you for these clarifications. And on the claim to Arab genealogy and the recent edited volume that you blurbed Persianite genealogical traditions, I try to think about this question in terms of the genealogies of Hamza, the uncle of the Prophet and many Muslims around the Muslim world claiming that genealogy which is really fascinating. So I'm not surprised that these Tamils are also linking themselves in this way strategically perhaps to distinguish themselves from their neighbor. But you've also written a chapter within this collection, A Journey through the Sea. An Indian Merchant makes sense of Ceylon and Urdu, where you translate Mirza Muhammad Kazam's Barlas Sayyid Daria, printed at his Ahsan Al Matabah press in Muradabad in northern India and devoted almost entirely to Ceylon. And you show in that chapter how the book straddles two audiences, armchair Urdu readers and would be businessmen and two tones swinging between the Ajib or Gharib travel writing and matter of fact listing of prices, railroads, elephant pearls and rubies. I'm wondering what do we learn about late 19th century Ceylon and about Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism when we see the island through the Urdu speaking merchant's eyes?
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C
Right, yeah. Well, what excited me when I came across this text, which actually came across in, in the Aqeel Library at the University of Kyoto, which is a specialist, a very rare sort of Urdu collection that has been denoted by Akhil Sahib, a Pakistani scholar, to the University of Kyoto. When I found this text there, Seydid. So A Journey through the Sea, A Journey through the Ocean, I was really thrilled because about 15 years ago I put together with a colleague a research grant proposal which we didn't get, but that grant proposal was called An Ocean without a Sound was taken from a line by the poet Shelley, Percy Shelley, and really, again, going back to my ongoing motivations with this book, that Indian Ocean history has really developed into a huge field. But I think there was, there are no, there are few fields of historical inquiry that have grown so large on such a small empirical data set, such a small number of primary sources written in, in the languages of the region. That's improved certainly over the, whatever it is 10 or 15 years since I put forward that proposal. An Ocean without a Sound. An ocean then without, as it were, its own records, its own voices, but still not sufficiently in the sense that even though some very impressive work has been written by not least scholars such as yourself from, from, or based in the Gulf, using Arabic materials, in particular, Arabic, Arab, Arab documentary materials. And now you work on actually kind of Arab sort of narrative or, or longer, longer texts, technical and narrative, we have relatively, or still I think very little about the ocean itself as distant, about crossing the ocean, rather than about communities or individuals that happen to be based on one corner or the other of this space, that perhaps we are emically and perhaps over enthusiastically Calling an Indian Ocean world. So, so with this background then and this long standing kind of issue I have with the field of Indian Ocean, I was really thrilled that I have a text that says it has the ocean in the title and seded a journey through the ocean then. And that wasn't just as of course it can be the case with many books in Urdu or whatever other language. It wasn't just in the title. From the opening line all the way through the end of this text of what that 120 pages. It details the journey to Sri Lanka, travels around Sri Lanka and in indeed a later section even more of a rarity, a journey to the Maldives as well. And the other thing that excited me more as I read the text is that okay, we're so often told that the Indian Ocean is a space of cosmopolitanism and this cosmopolitanism is predicated on long term trade across this region. And yet again, with a few exceptions, think of the work of my colleague Sirbu Aslanian or a few other scholars working with Arabic materials. But we have very little primary source materials of trade that are written in the languages of the ocean and indeed even less in terms of let's say narrative materials rather than trading documents. So I was thrilled that this was a narrative account of the, the places in the community involved in this inverted commas cosmopolitan. So what this allowed me to, well, I mean readers will make for themselves, I mean in presenting a. A pretty substantial, what is it, 10, 000 word or something 8,000, 10,000 word translation of from the Seydi Daria, the journey through the ocean text we could actually see then. Well, how much cosmopolitanism, which is to say knowledge of indeed perhaps sympathy at the second level. Knowledge and sympathy for if they're ethno religious others in this diverse commerce cosmopolitan Indonesian world, how much knowledge and sympathy for these others does trade lead to? So that's something I'm exploring in a book. I hope to have out a monograph this time next year calling work entitled Sea of Difference. I'm looking at Sri Lanka, the Maldives and East Africa as kind of trading zones and using that term to ask did cross cultural trade lead to cross cultural understanding? But here in the translation of Badoulos text from the 1890s then I'm sort of allowing readers, encouraging readers to make their own mind up about how much cross cultural knowledge, how much cosmopolitanism comes out of trade from what I think is an extremely rare narrative text that's distinct from the trading commercial document document to come out of Indiana. And the last thing I would say was I think one of the most striking things about X that even though it comes out, it published. Well, we have the exact dates of the journey which I'm afraid I've forgotten a little while ago since I did the translation. Yeah, 1897 was it? Yes, 97, yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, I think the book came out in 96 or 97. I think the journey was slightly earlier, but yeah, basically the mid-1890s. So what's striking is that or the most striking thing for me from this period is that an author who is himself from North India, from the historical homeland of the Buddhal, he's writing in a period in which Indians, including North Indians, including Indian Muslims and Hindus are writing in the lingua franca, the North Indian lingua franca of, of Urdu. There are Tron. There are translations of Orientalist accounts of the Buddhism, translations of F. Max Muller's translation of the Dhammapada, the most important text of the Sri Lankan Pali Buddhist canon. And, and yet our author having also having that potential back background, but having the, as we know, the on the spot sort of the ethnographic trader on the spot empirical data set that a trader in Sri Lanka can get, he still has and he has an interest. He's a fascinating personality, at least to me because he's very, very curious and he's very keen as you sort of hint at, to. To dispel the Ajibu Gharib tradition of the weird and wonderful and to say this is empirically correct. This is what I saw with my own eyes, that we see very with regard to the majority population of Sri Lank, then the Sinhala Buddhists, the limits of what that empirical trader on the spot, the limits of the cross cultural knowledge that that is is able at least in the case of Balas who one major source so far. So I found that kind of really fascinating. It is indeed, yeah, broadly just a text. His, his. His interest in so many things, whether it is the, the, let's say the purely commercial what you can buy here, how much it costs, what you should be importing to trade it for and who are the traders, who are the local trading communities you will have to be dealing with. So there's that element, but then there's also the element that as a, an Indian Muslim merchant who goes there, he also makes a pilgrimage to Adam's Peak, which we might talk about more with its very ancient resonant and Islamic tradition and to Dafta Jilani, a much more local but evidently in the city For Bardas, at least a sort of a trans regional Sufi pilgrimage center as well. So he's, he's a merchant and a pilgrim, which is a classic Indian Ocean type, at least in the historiography. So this is why I was so excited to actually have a primary source that, that actually brings alive the, the words, even the experiences of this classic type of the historiography of the Indian merchant.
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B
Yes, indeed. And, and on the sources, I think this chapter would pair really well with Fahad Bashar new book Muslim Voyagers, where the readers can actually look at merchant writings coming from the Gulf alongside an order speaking Muslim in Ceylon, talking about prices and routes and merchants. And indeed, this is not a neutral ethnography, although he tries to dispel the weird and wondrous, but also, as you mentioned, an attempt to fit Lanka's peoples into what you call an Islamicate sociology of Indian or Ocean, where he focuses on those Indian merchants might actually meet. And I like the many nicknames he gave to the different groups. The Muslim Moors he calls Choli, the Buddhist Sinhalese he calls Chingli Arapal, fishers in the Gulf of Manar and elephant trapping Panayakan as parkin. And then he ranks these communities by religious and ancestral proximity, especially to the Arab descent, and by how trustworthy they appear as trading partners. What do you think of this taxonomy and what does it reveal about how these Indian Muslims coming from the north imagine the social geography of the Indian Ocean? How does this companion or so lexicon, Lisan al Jazair, listing Tamil, Malay and Sinhala terms alongside Urdu, extend that project of making Ceylon legible to Northern Indian trade traders?
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C
Well, I think one of the things I found most interesting about his Balas's anthropology in a sense as much as ethnography. It's an ethnography and an anthropological text in the sense that it is descriptive, it's ethnographic about the different communities of Sri Lanka, albeit ethnography with a purpose. The kind of need to know for merchants. These are the communities whom you will need to know if you want to get pearls, if you want to get elephants or elephant tusks, or if you want to be trading with jewels or if you want to be trading with tea. So he's really sort of, it's ethnography with a purpose. But as I've mentioned, he's also kind of. I've looked to a great deal of his subsequent books. This is his first book and he publishes a whole bunch of others. When he seems to sort of take on a second career as an author and publisher when he goes back to North. So as well as this ethnography with a purpose, his own, I think, intellectual curiosity drives into to develop an anthropology, by which I mean a sort of a more formalized set of more abstract inquiries or reflections, interpretations of that ethnographic data that he collects on the ground. And that's as you, as you mentioned in Ahmed, when Balas is trying to understand the history of the different community, meets particularly the Muslim communities by means of genealogy of Nasab, and particularly what he decides is the reliability, the trust, or the reliability of claims of Arab descent. So what I think is interesting here is that just as it's ethnography with a pop, this is also anthropology with a pop. That a sense of knowing people, and as in a sort of very traditional, very ancient, as in the sense of early Islamic and pre Islamic Arab and Islamic tradition of genealogical knowledge about how you know someone, how you know your relations, your social proximity or your social distance from a person you never met, is by knowing your own genealogy and by knowing their genealogy back to the umpteenth answer. So what we're seeing in Balas, then, is his own attempt anthropologically, to use a much older system of genealogical inquiry into different people that has always had, and in Barlas's own writing as well, continues to have a practical purpose. How close or how distant is one Barlas himself, or in turn, his readers to these people, or particularly the Muslim peoples of Sri Lanka? And this brings me to, or indeed brings Barlas to the practical outcome of this combined ethnography and anthropology, then, which is the issue of trust, because writing as a trader for armed readers, but as well as also, I think, for other potential traders, because he's giving all this, you know, very practical information on the laws, the prices of goods, the laws of exports, of permits for doing or trading or the other. He's explaining who is trustworthy, who can you trust, who can you not? And as a number of scholars, Francesco Trivellato and others have written in different contexts of the fundamental importance of trust for trade and especially for CR cultural trade. But I think that's something my colleague N. Seb Waslanian, and perhaps others whom I'm not aware of, have worked on the issue of trust within Indian Ocean training societies. But I think what's fascinating, but I think there's not enough of that. I think there's an assumption, again, going back to that sort of founding, oversimplified or problematic or untested equation of trade, Indian Ocean trade equals Indian Ocean cosmopolitan. Well, I think in that equals is that's where the issue of trust or indeed it's converse mistrust lies within that kind of equal. Well, Indian Ocean trade might lead to cosmopolitanism if that equals in the equation or whatever this signal would be in algebra, if that connecting symbol then is signifying trust. But as we see in Barlas's account there, there's actually a great deal of mistrust of social distance and of mistrust of various communities. These are described as being distrustworthy, as liars, as thieves, as cheats, etc. So yeah, I just found this really fascinating that when we have this primary source it suggests that wow, Indian Ocean trade could lead not just to trust and therefore cosmopolitanism and all the good stuff on that, but Indian Ocean trade can well what can reflect pre existing trust? So mistrust or maybe can even develop distrust and we can all perhaps have a a bit of casual empirical reflection on that ourselves. Whenever we've been in a different part of the world and felt cheated in a transaction. What is the emotional effect of that? So I think when we actually kind of problematize theoretically that issue of trade, trust, mistrust and cosmopolitanism or indeed just let's say more neutrally social relations, intercultural, inter ethnic social relations around the Indian Ocean, when we theoretically problematize that relationship between trade, trust, social relations and then actually have and track down further, let's say textual rather than, well, perhaps other ways of reading documentary accounts of trade as well. I suppose it depends what's written to the contract, the terms of trade, the legal terms. We can actually kind of really think a lot more deeply about what trade does and doesn't do. Whether the general long dure picture of Indian Ocean history that's been built around this assumption trade equals cause and politicum, or trade leads a cosmopolitan partisan or in much more grainy and particular contextualized account, which of course ultimately is what Barlos is. Barlos is one account of one trader and perhaps he was a particularly unfortunate trader who got ripped off and then wrote this account. But will only ultimately be able to I think kind of rebuild Indian Ocean studies and the history of trade more empirically by finding further accounts such as as that of Barless, which I just happened to find in Kyoto.
- [39:33]
E
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- [40:01]
B
That's amazing. And as you know, one of the reasons I actually asked to read this book is because I was planning to go to Lanka, which I did, and I was reading this account where he's talking about fake rubies and I tried to buy some antique artifacts actually in Gala which turned to be fakes as well. I was reading this alongside what was happening in the marketplace. So that was really amusing to see.
- [40:26]
C
Yeah, well that's absolutely right. Exactly. I mean, I suppose we're all familiar with it. I mean part of, you know, the global tourist industry is back based around.
- [40:33]
B
Yes.
- [40:34]
C
About fakes because there just aren't enough originals. There's plenty of fakes, isn't it? I mean it's almost built into the, the economics of the tourist industry, isn't it? But it has a potentially a certain effect, isn't it? You know, again, for perhaps some personalities light hearted way. Yeah. But it depends how much one spell someone's fake I guess.
- [40:52]
B
Right. And, and while reading him we also encounter medieval Arabic and Persian writers from the earlier century where they are situating the island among the islands of the Indian Ocean and centering their accounts on visits to Adam speak. And at the center of the island, pearls and rubies. And so both of them are thinking about riches but also they're thinking about sacred geographies. And whereas here we have Barlas's more empirical and sometimes skeptical traveler coming in five centuries later. Right. Do you find that Muslim experiences might be over the centuries becoming, let's say more grounded in actual practical trade needs rather than interest in sacred geographies and myths.
- [41:38]
C
I actually in a sense, I think found that throughout the, I mean really the, in the book and particularly through the introduction onwards, I try to survey, aside from the actual translation chapters, something like 1200 years of written certain Islamic accounts of Lanka. Some might just be a few lines building up to a paragraph building up to entire books as we get into the, the more modern period. But throughout, from the earliest periods onwards, Lanka seems to be associated in, in the Muslim imagination, if this sort of thing or the imaginations of Muslims from the earliest periods and from afar with, with its sacred geography with Ar Rahoon or Jabal Adam, so Adam's Peak, as it's called in English, the mountain, which is from early Islamic and Iraqi sort of earlier Basid era account from the 9th century onwards associated with Adam's footprint the place where Adam came to earth after his expulsion from paradise and left his footprint on the mountain. So as a pilgrimage place but also associated as a place called of riches and particularly with jewels including pearls or jewels of the jewels of the sea and jewels of the land. And the book as a whole really kind of has that that in addition to there are two chapters I wanted to make sure that at least two chapters going back to the Moors of translations of Tamil Source. And the second of the chapters of Translations by Alex McKinley is actually translations of of late 20th early 21st century more so Tamil language accounts of so by locals but actually about the the traditions of of of Adam's peak and Lanka's as it were Islamic or Quranic links that go right back to the to the first human being, the beginnings of human history. So these traditions are really there from very early on. So in the introduction and I sort of survey the early as it were geographical works of course the famous early Arabic Kitabal masaliq walmalek by Ibn Al Khawad Adabi from written around 870. Then Tabari Al Masudi in the early 10th century in their allusions to Lanka and Adam's peak. And then of course there's often what were probably perhaps ethnic Persian or Gulf Arab merchants and their figures such as Abu Huzaid al Sadafi then and the Akbar Sin Wa Al hind from around 915. So these more sort of sailors and merchants accounts. Bazor Gib and Shahriar from 953again these kind of well known tech I guess the Kitab al Ajaybu Al Hind then Al Biruni and other such figures like Al Qasvini who don't step anywhere near Lanka but are then drawing in this information. Even Alidrisi who's working of course of course in in Sicily in the early 12th century at the court of King Roger II of Sicily again drawing on earlier Arabic geographical or travel works as well. And then of course then we have the Persian text as well from the Hudud Alam of 982onwards which is written in northern Afghanistan of this information flowing north. One of the more interesting interesting text that are drawn which is actually based on a a translation by the by the late Bruce 1L of A of a Timurid Java Haname a Persian book of jewels written the court of Shahrukh in her art and what's now Afghanistan and A really detailed account of the. Of the jewel trade of Sri Lank. And of course, as Jabhar Namas of Books of Jewels did in that Persian genre, then the different meanings, the different, as it were. Well, as you'll know better than I do, the different occult properties of different jewels, which of course is what ultimately gives them commercial value. So we have that text from 1450 and thereafter onwards. So this whole range of texts across the long dure of Islamic history in the Indian Ocean in which as I say, this sort of. This role of Lanka as a place of. As a place of Muslim sacred geography and a place of Muslim trade and those still go on today, the Moors are still a trading community and as we see from Alex McKinley's translations, they still treasure and write about their great sacred spot of Adam's Peak, even though it is of course under threat now Sinhala Buddhist claim to that same site being footprint of the Buddha. Yeah. The risks involved in those shared sacred geographies, whether in Lanka or in India, we need other regions of the Indian ways for that matter. Yeah. So this long Duray picture then, which I think survives to the present day, I should also perhaps mention in my own sort of of itinerary is that my PhD, my own first book was actually about Aurangabad in the Deccan, that the lost newly founded Mughal capital founded by Aurangzeb in the late 17th century and in the period when, when Aurangabad was this Mughal and Persianate and indeed Arabic literary center. One of the great literatures of. Of Aurangabad then in the Mughal period, Late Mughal. Yeah, Mughal and post Mughal period was Azad Bilgrami who dies around 1720. And. And it was during my time working when I rang about that I came across Karl W. Ernstrond's translation of Bill Grimey's Subhat Al Madhajan, the Coral Rosary. So wonderful sort of Indian Ocean allusion in the title in which included in that. And what Collins focused on was the accounts written in late 17th century Aurangabad in the Indian Deccan of Sri Lanka's S.A. nadib's links to. To. To Adam's descent onto. So these stories then of Lanka spread. Lanka or of course Sandeep in Persian or Sandeep sometimes Ceylon spread really kind of far and wide across the. The Indian Ocean northwards into India and into Iraq by the early period. I suppose I probably should also mention that the earliest because of course perhaps the most enduring physically accounts of Arabic with Sri Lanka we have, we have are gravestones that sort of some have survived in Sri Lanka and some have only survived in a, in one case in of an early rubbing, an early Orientalist rubbing. But the earliest, the stele we have is an Arabic gravestone of a Muslim woman shm who died in in the Christian year 817. So we have these kind of very early Arabic stele as well as rather later manuscripts which again kind of links think the. The role of Arabic as well as the role of Adam, traditions of that that are sort of interlinked then with this sort of trading geography.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah, these, these Kufic tombstones are quite interesting. You find them around the same time in Zanzibar as well as. As as in Sri Lanka, which is really fascinating. You've mentioned the themes of the chapters briefly and we cannot of course do justice to the nine chapters, but I hope that we've said enough to whet the appetite to pick up the book and learn about all of of these wonderful chapters that you've included. But I would like to highlight the importance of this volume when it comes to the current condition in Lanka. As you've mentioned in the introduction and you cite many scholars who noted that Lanka's history has rarely matched the happy cosmopolitanism that haunts some Indian Ocean studies. And you describe how groups like the Budu Balasena have sought to erase the island's Muslim pass at sites such as Dr. Jelani and Adam Speake, relabeling them solely as Buddhist. And that contemporary context. How do the translated text in this volume help us see both the possibilities and the limits of cosmopolitanism or coexistence on the island?
- [49:37]
C
I think the what I would hope, and I'm glad to report to some listeners that there is a forthcoming South Asian edition not printed in Lanka, but printed printed in it'll be published in Delhi and that will be hopefully out later this year. And I mentioned that because already a number of Lankan scholars and others have written to me saying, oh, we would love to read this book but we can't afford it. And well, when a book's just out, it's not good form for an author to undermine the investments of publishers by sending out the PDF of the whole book online. So I'm very happy to report that there's a South Asian edition that hopefully people in Lanka will be able to read both Muslim and indeed non Muslims and using this then to get to your answer, I would hope that the book really shows which is something of great practical on the ground concern of the Moors of Lancre in particular throughout the since really since about well at least since 1915 with the great pogrom, what sometimes has been called Selonskristallnacht, when hundreds of, of of more businesses, shops, homes and also a number of more mosques were attacked, burned down. Etc. So this is a sort of a long standing sense among the Moors as the larger community and indeed of Malays too of their precarious position within colonial Lanka society as a minority and indeed in, in post colonial Lanka during the the long civil war and indeed increasingly after it as attention by Sinhala nationalists has turned away from the defeated Tamil, Tamil Christians and Hindus to the Tamil speaking but nonetheless self ascribed Arab or community of Moors. And what I hope that the book will do is help the Moors by bolstering what has been a very important claim for them within the be the dominant discourse of nationalism. Because the fact of the matter is while from our different parts of the world as academic, we might insist on the importance of internationalism as cosmopolitanism, globalism. And I'm a fortunate person that can live according to that ideology with my passport and my salary and my academic position, et cetera. But the facts on the ground of course for many communities and minorities in different parts of Asia is that their facts on the ground is they have to deal with the realities of very assertive ideologies, ideological and often ethno nationalism. So for the Moors themselves then the book I think and I hope will support their own claims to indigeneity of having been there a very long time, that they are not recent newcomers. So I think that is in a sense significant because this is a book about accounts by Muslim Muslim visitors and sojourners and traders and pilgrims like Balas, but also an account from those early gravestones of the early 9th century onwards right through to early 20th century, more accounts of the antiquity of their own history, their own presence on Sri Lanka that the Moors then I wouldn't want to to. I think it would be a disfavor to tell the story of the Moors as one of cosmopolitanism, of moving around the ocean. I think that would increase their precariousness. So I hope the book actually in a sense serves their, their own interests by showing their, their deep historical root on Lanka that, that Moors for at least the last 111 years since the 1915 pogroms and I'm sure saw for perhaps a millennium before of being keen to assert the longevity of their presence and their belonging on Lanka.
- [53:40]
B
I'm happy to hear that there is a South Asian edition because when I was at the Islamic Madrasa in Gull. I've told them about your book and they're looking forward to reading it. So that's great news and I hope.
- [53:51]
C
Well, yeah, this is. Yes, I, I will. I think I. Yeah, the address is easy to find, isn't it? I think that's probably the Bachat Al Ibrahim Ibrahim Ibrahimiye Madrasa.
- [54:02]
B
Is it indeed?
- [54:03]
C
Yeah, exactly. So. Well, good. I will send them a copy anyway. So that's going to be out there in public so they can hold me to that.
- [54:10]
B
And I saw they are keeping up with new publications, actually showing them on the table in the library. So it's good to have it there. We've taken a lot of your time and I know you're a busy man, so I really appreciate that. But before I let you go, we have two quick final questions. First, as one of the most prolific historians working today, how do you sustain that level of productivity? Mashallah. And do you have any influential advice to share on writing? And the second one is in the tradition of New Books Network. What can we look forward to next? What's currently in the pipeline for you?
- [54:45]
C
I'm off and off ask this question and I think that the fallback reply always give, which is true, true is a mixture of two things really. One is just get on with it. Early in my career I decided that I cannot afford the luxury of writer's block. So I, I, from, well, I suppose from my writing of the PhD, but particularly my postdoc onwards, I tried to get into the, the discipline of, of writing every day, even if it's only half an hour or whatever, I can steal whatever time I can steal. So I think that, that, that, you know, writerly discipline of just making habits, I think is really important. But nonetheless, by the same point, you know, kind of the importance too of, of rewriting and revising, you know, kind of everything I write I'll be printing out and crossing out and trying to rework and revise as well. But I think the bottom line is, is, you know, kind of family motto or the region. I come from the uk just on with it and, and, and have that, that rightly discipline. I'm also fortunate that I'm, I'm an enthusiast and an amateur in the, in the, in the sense of, you know, kind of I love what I do and I'm very curious about things and, and for better and worse, I think perhaps have a grasshopper that leads me on to the next place beyond where, where, where I've been to in terms of what, what I Have coming up next, as I mentioned, there's a monograph which might be out perhaps hopefully around this time next year with a work entitled titled Sea of Difference in which as I mentioned, I'm asking the question and trying to empirically investigate the question of does cross cultural trade lead to cross cultural understanding across the Indian Ocean in which I'm looking at Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Zanzibar and what's now Kenya and Tanzania in the period of sort of higher high British so to speak Empire free trade period. So maximum trade relations. Do those trade relations lead to cross cultural knowledge, cross cultural understanding and also another edited book called the Arabicate World, which is sort of the long planned partner to my edited book on the Persianate world. So the Arabicate then using that as a term, trying to coin a term there then based on Marshall Hodgson's term Persianate in which if Persianate then means languages, literary traditions, wider cultural traditions based upon Persian but not necessarily Persian itself. So then Arabicate would mean not Arabic but literary or wider intellectual and cultural traditions modeled upon Arabic. So that's a book then that looks at in a sense an Arabicate world which includes substantial parts of Africa. So of course Swahili is the most widely known in the very commas Arabicate language. But the cross course a huge number of other Arabic script based Islamic languages of Africa across the south. So there are four chapters on these Arabic script languages of Africa and then several on Arabic script or Arabic or Arabic influenced languages and literature of the Indian Ocean such as Harabin, Malayalam and Divehi as well. And the question of the impact of Arabic vis a vis Persian on Malay and German are we. And also looking at the the Mediterranean as well, whether through Arabic script Spanish Alhamiado it's usually known from the late medieval Spain and Arabic script Berber languages from the southern Mediterranean from North Africa and the question of the Arabesque. So you know as it were fake Arabic in medieval European Christian context then and the question of the Arabicate as art via the Arabesque. Yeah. So he shot two books, one on the Indian Ocean and one on a bit on the Indian Ocean. But also joining up Indian Ocean, Africa and the Mediterranean then thinking about different regions where Arabic has its impact on the the development of other written languages and literatures.
- [58:59]
B
That sounds honestly amazing and I can't wait to read these works and have you again and again and again on the New Works Network. Thank you for sharing with us serendipitous translations and to the listeners, if this conversation has piqued your interest. Serendipitous Translations is a rewarding book to live with, whether you are teaching or simply reading for pleasure. Each chapter offers a substantial translated source, carefully introduced and annotated by the experts, that opens a window onto a different corner of Lenka's Muslim past for teaching. The volume is ready made for courses on Indian Ocean history, Global Islam Empire, or the modern Middle east and South Asia, where the texts are short enough to assign in a week, yet rich enough to spark seminar debate about language, identity, trade and conflict in the Muslim world. And for the general readers, this is also simply a fascinating collection of stories of shipwrecks and shrines, gyms and coffee shops, states, religious rivalries and unexpected solidarities that shows how a small island can illuminate some very large questions about how people have lived together, argued and imagined each other across the seas. Until next time, stay tuned for another episode of New Books, New Books in the Indian Ocean World. And in the meantime, enjoy the latest episode of Akbar's Chamber on Islam in China and Chinese thank you for listening and and see you next time.
- [60:27]
C
Thank you again, Ahmad. You've been a brilliant interviewer and for any extremely patient listeners who have listened to me speaking this long, thank you for your forbearance and and your interest. I really appreciate. Yeah, you're listening in. Thank you so much. Thank you again.
- [60:42]
B
Thank you.