This article examines the relations between trade, faith, and textual traditions in early modern Indian Ocean region and the birth of Arabi-Malayalam, a new system of writing which has facilitated the growth of a vernacular Islamic textual tradition in Malabar since the seventeenth century. As a transliterated scriptorial-literary tradition, Arabi-Malayalam emerged out of the polyglossic lingual sphere of the Malabar Coast, and remains as one of the important legacies of social and religious interactions in precolonial south Asia. The first part of this article examines the social, epistemic and normative reasons that led to the scriptorial birth of Arabi-Malayalam, moving beyond a handful of Malayalam writings that locate its origin in the social and economic necessities of Arab traders in the early centuries of Islam. The second part looks at the complex relationship between Muslim scribes and their vernacular audience in the aftermath of Portuguese violence and destruction of Calicut—one of the largest Indian Ocean ports before the sixteenth century. This part focuses on Qadi Muhammed bin Abdul Aziz and his Muhiyuddinmala, the first identifiable text in Arabi-Malayalam, examining how the Muhiyuddinmala represents a transition from classical Arabic theological episteme to the vernacular-popular poetic discourse which changed the pietistic behaviour of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar.

This article explores the continuing linguistic impact of the Mandarin Union Version by investigating and contrasting two Chinese translations of William Paul Young's global bestseller The Shack (2007): the Traditional Chinese version Xiaowu (《小屋》, 2009) and the Simplified Chinese version Pengwu (《棚屋》, 2010). Ever since its publication, the Mandarin Union Version has served as the predominant Bible within Mandarin-speaking Protestant communities across the world. This has brought about the standardisation of terminology in Chinese Protestantism. The Shack, though widely marked as a Christian novel, is also known for its unconventional fictional representations of Christianity that some Christians think depart from orthodoxy. Both Xiaowu and Pengwu were published by non-Christian publishing houses for a general readership. However, Xiaowu, translated by a Christian, exhibits a significant number of phrases that specifically belong to Chinese Christian terminology shaped by the Mandarin Union Version. Pengwu is a contrast in this regard. By comparing extracts from these two Chinese versions, this article highlights how far the Mandarin Union Version has contributed to the formation of the linguistic repertoire of Mandarin-speaking Christian translators as well as linguistic norms for translated Christian-themed texts into Chinese.

The importance of the Mandarin Union Version for the Protestant Churches in China can be compared to the relevance acquired by the Sigao Shengjing 思高聖經 for Chinese speaking Catholics soon after its publication. The 1919 Union Version was the result of a collaboration among Protestants after a century of separation and many lone translations, while the 1968 Sigao Bible was the first version of the Bible in Chinese completed by Catholics.1 This translation project was undertaken in 1935 by the Franciscan missionary Gabriele Allegra.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare these two noteworthy versions. A brief introduction will present the translation process of the Union Version and of the Sigao Bible. Subsequently, some handwritten documents of Gabriele Allegra will be analyzed, to outline his attitude towards the missionary activity and the translations of the Protestants. Thereafter, some passages from the Gospel of John in the two versions will be examined and compared to analyze the features of the two translations.

Rawḍat al-murīdīn of Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥusayn Ibn Yazdānyār al-Hamadhānī is a distinguished Sufi manual of the early fifth/eleventh century. Though an early Sufi textbook, this work is relatively unknown when compared with other Sufi textbooks written prior to and after it. This article draws on Williams’ edition from 1957 in addition to two manuscripts held in Princeton and Istanbul, in order to examine this early Sufi work and to appraise its contribution to the development of early Sufism. Rawḍat al-murīdīn presents us a unique formula of taṣawwuf that differs essentially from the famous manuals of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries which concerned themselves with Sufi rules of conduct. There is strong evidence to suggest that its author, if not formally a member of Karrāmiyya, was a pro-Karrāmī writer who operated in a historical context where the renunciatory-Karrāmī mode of piety was widely condemned. Unlike the early character of Abū Bakr Ibn Yazdānyār, who lived in the fourth/tenth century and was generally known as an opponent of ecstatic Sufism, the author of Rawḍa seeks to present a comprehensive umbrella of Sufism under which the teachings of al-Junayd co-exist side by side with those of al-Ḥallāj.

One of the longest Hismaic inscriptions yet discovered comes from the region of Madaba, Jordan. It was published first in an Arabic article by Khraysheh in 2000 and was re-edited by Graf and Zwettler four years later. Both editions remark on the striking similarity in language and style between this text and Classical Arabic. Indeed, this inscription and a closely related text from Uraynibah West, also published by Graf and Zwettler in the same article, are among the best witnesses to the Arabic of this region during the Nabataean period. This article will offer a few remarks on the language of the Hismaic inscriptions and then provide a new reading of line 4 of the Madaba inscription, which had previously evaded satisfactory interpretation.

Coinciding with the May Fourth new cultural and literary movement, the publication of the Mandarin Union Version, the vernacular Chinese translation of the Bible, in 1919 had a profound impact on the formation of modern Chinese literature. This paper examines the ways in which the Union Version provided a novel source of imageries, poetic genres and worldviews for the experimentation of modern Chinese poetry during the Republican period, particularly between the 1920s and 1940s. Revering the Bible as the Holy Scripture, young Christian poetess Bing Xin (1900–99) spontaneously expressed her religious sentiments and commitment by composing a series of “sacred poems” as her own poetic response to the striking beauty of biblical images. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), a renowned May Fourth Chinese writer and intellectual, regarded the Bible as a treasured anthology of Jewish literature and appreciated the humanistic values embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Placing the biblical references of the wilderness, Jesus's universal love and Moses's legalistic position in the forefront, Zhou Zuoren's poem “Qilu,” or “Crossroads,” captured the perplexity of his contemporary intellectuals, Zhou himself included, in their sabbathless search for cultural rejuvenation and national salvation during the transitional and tumultuous Republican era. An ardent admirer of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Chinese modernist poet Mu Dan (1918–77) studied their poetry at the Southwest United University in Kunming during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Imbued with biblical allusions, for instance, the fall of humankind and the loss of paradise, Mu Dan's poems, like “She de youhuo,” or “The Temptation of the Serpent,” articulate his penetrating critique of modernity. These works of poetry represent the multiple voices and diverse reactions of the early twentieth-century Chinese poets towards the Union Version which had not only firmly established its canonical status as the predominant Chinese translation of the Bible used by the Protestant Church, but also emerged as a literary tour-de-force to propel the evolution of modern Chinese poetry.