Tracing the migration of Muslims from India to South Africa's Natal colony in the late nineteenth century, the article focuses on the missionary activities of Ghulām Muhammad “Sūfī Sāhib” (d. 1329/1911). Placing Ghulām Muhammad in a new religious marketplace of competing religions, and versions thereof, the article examines the strategies through which he successfully established his form of Islam among Natal's indentured and merchant Muslim classes and used the fabric of religion to bind together a distinctly “Muslim” community from the heterogeneous individuals and groups brought from India by commerce and the plantation economy. As a founder of shrines no less than madrasas, Ghulām Muhammad demonstrated the ways in which a customary Islam of holy men, festivities and hagiographies flourished and responded to the demands and opportunities of modernity. Building on the popular appeal of customary piety, Ghulām Muhammad consolidated his success by providing a range of social services (education, healthcare, burial) for the Indian poor of Natal, to create an effective public platform for the norms of Sharia in South Africa.

Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is India's leading comic book series, featuring hundreds of mythological titles about the Hindu gods. Founder Anant Pai initially eliminated all miracles, believing them to be unscientific interpolations. But while producing Tales of Durga (no. 176, 1978), he declared that the comic must be an “authentic” recreation of the Devī Māhātmya scripture, and that all miracles in the classical Sanskrit text must be faithfully rendered in the comic. This article examines the discourse of authenticity that surrounds the production of Tales of Durga in particular and this comic book series more generally. Through a careful reading of the Devī Māhātmya, content analysis of Tales of Durga, a consideration of the unique characteristics of the comic book medium, and interviews with comic book producers, this study provides insight into modern interpretations of the Devī Māhātmya and evolving Hindu attitudes towards the martial goddess Durga.

The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aśvaghoṣa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.

Korean Confucianism has been described as “the enemy of feminism”: feminists often argue that Confucianism is the source of the patriarchal society. Feminist scholars have produced significant works about Confucianism's role in preserving the idea of women's subordination to men; they argue that the idea of men's superiority to women is embedded in Confucian philosophy. In this article I will examine whether Confucian philosophy is responsible for women's subordination to men in such Confucian texts as Naehun, The Book of Change, The Book of Poetry, and The Analects. Naehun was written by the mother of King Sǒngjong in 1475, for the purpose of the Confucian education of Korean women; I will look also at other, related, Confucian texts used for Korean women's education. Confucian classics such as The Book of Change, The Book of Poetry and Confucian Analects will be included in the analysis to investigate whether Confucianism legitimizes women's subordination tomen. In the analysis of these Confucian classics, I will focus on the ongoing debate between scholars of Confucianism and feminism in Korea today.