Overview

The most comprehensive anthology of primary sources on Sri Lanka’s links with the Islamic world ever assembled in English. Sri Lanka is an underappreciated focal point of global history. Known to Persian and Arab traders as Serendib, the island has long been a site of intensive cultural and material exchange, as well as a holy place-Islamic tradition holds that the biblical Adam arrived there after his expulsion from Eden. Assembling centuries of texts, this volume presents an array of sources from the Indian Ocean. Serendipitous Translations gathers travelogues, literary works, commercial records, inscriptions, religious tracts, pilgrim manuals, and more-an unprecedented range of Muslim voices from Sri Lanka between the 1200s and 1990s. These works vividly document medieval pilgrimages, maritime mystics, diplomatic encounters, colonial-era commerce, and the bustling everyday affairs of a cosmopolitan Asian nexus. Expert translations bring Arabic, Malay, Turkish, Urdu, Dhivehi, Sinhala, Arabu-Tamil, and Tamil texts to readers of English for the first time. Editor Nile Green situates these texts in their Indian Ocean contexts by introducing the broad sweep of Sri Lanka’s story. An invaluable collection, Serendipitous Translations is the most comprehensive anthology of primary sources ever assembled on Sri Lanka’s thousand-year links to the Muslim world.

Full Product Details

Author:   Nile Green
Publisher:   University of Texas Press
Imprint:   University of Texas Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781477332894

ISBN 10:   1477332898
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   06 January 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations A Note on Names and Spellings Foreword (B. A. Hussainmiya) Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction. An Island in a Sea of Languages (Nile Green) Chapter 1. Ibn Battuta’s Arabic Travelogue on Sarandib (Christopher Bahl) Chapter 2. A Fragrance from Ceylon: An Arabic Mystical Epistle by Shaykh Yusuf al-Maqasiri (Mahmood Kooria) Chapter 3. From the Seventh Clime to the Jewel Mine: Ottoman Turkish Visions of Lanka from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Michael O’Sullivan) Chapter 4. Muslim Lanka in Malay: A Prophet’s Exile, a Writer’s Recollections, and a Soldier-Saint’s Journey (Teren Sevea) Chapter 5. “A Journey through the Sea”: An Indian Merchant Makes Sense of Ceylon in Urdu (Nile Green) Chapter 6. The Muslim Friend and the “Muslim Revival”: Religious Change in Tamil Muslim Newspapers (Torsten Tschacher) Chapter 7. Daydreams at Dawn: Hussain Salahuddeen’s Dhivehi Novel Numaan and Maryam (Garrett Field) Chapter 8. Weaponizing Identity: The Sinhalese Reaction to Muslim Migration and Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Shamara Wettimuny) Chapter 9. Adam’s Peak and Muslim Identity in Modern Tamil Texts (Alexander McKinley) Contributors Index

Reviews

This volume brings together a singular collection of translated texts that illuminate the entangled histories of Lanka and the Islamic world across the Indian Ocean. Preceded by concise commentaries, these fragments--spanning the medieval to the postcolonial--offer readers snippets of a world rarely assembled in one place. The choice to center Islamic-Lankan interactions is methodologically astute as it allows for an engagement with a multilingual archive--Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Tamil, Malay, Dhivehi, Urdu, and Sinhala--that resists the pull of Eurocentric historical frames. Instead, what emerges is a composite portrait of Lanka, situated within broader oceanic circulations of people, texts, and religious imaginaries. This is a book that invites readers not only to rethink the place of Lanka in Indian Ocean history but also to reflect on the ways in which histories are told, translated, and archived.--Nira Wickramasinghe, Leiden University, author of Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka Serendipitous Translations pushes open a new door onto Sri Lanka's past--and a polyglot array of voices emerge. Building on welcome moves to explore non-European traditions of travel literature, this volume presents the accounts of a succession of Muslim visitors to its shores but also stands as a real contribution to the history of Islam in Sri Lanka. It is also a beautiful sourcebook for the study of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.--Alan Strathern, University of Oxford, author of Converting Rulers: Global Patterns 1450-1850 Serendipitous Translations will significantly assist scholarly work in a burgeoning area--that is, the study of Sri Lanka, namely the island's status in the Islamicate World. It will be of value to those who consider Sri Lanka's connections around trade, migration, and religious ideas in the Indian Ocean region. It will also provide secure source evidence and rigorous scholarship for the consolidation of Muslim communities' sense of deep belonging and rootedness in Sri Lanka today. These were communities which were not singular or homogenous, but rather people demonstrating richly variegated traditions of migration and residence through and on the island.--Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, author of Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire

Author Information

Nile Green is a professor of history at UCLA. He is the author of many award-winning monographs, the editor of eight books, and the host of the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.

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