The Translations

Cambridge University Press eBooks, pp. 322–373

Abstract

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

Authors 1

1. Mahmood Kooria corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University · Ashoka University

   Affiliation as printed

   Universiteit Leiden and Ashoka University, India