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Contention has surrounded the status of minorities throughout Indonesian history. Two broad polarities are evident: one inclusive of minorities, regarding them as part of the nation's rich complexity and a manifestation of its "Unity in Diversity" motto; the other exclusive, viewing with suspicion or disdain those communities or groups that differ from the perceived majority. State and community attitudes towards minorities have fluctuated over time. Some periods have been notable for the acceptance of minorities and protection of their rights, while others have been marked by anti-minority discrimination, marginalisation and sometimes violence. This book explores the complex historical and contemporary dimensions of Indonesia's religious, ethnic, LGBT and disability minorities from a range of perspectives, including historical, legal, political, cultural, discursive and social. It addresses fundamental questions about Indonesia's tolerance and acceptance of difference, and examines the extent to which diversity is embraced or suppressed.

Interlinear translations from Arabic into Malay and Javanese have been produced in Southeast Asia since at least the sixteenth century. Such translations included an Arabic original with its lines spaced out on the page and a word for word translation appearing between the lines, attempting to replicate the Arabic down to the smallest detail. This essay engages with the theme of World Literature and translation by (1) considering the interlinear text as microcosm: a world of intent and priorities, of a transfer of meaning, of grammar and syntax in translation, of choices and debates, and (2) by thinking of Arabic writing during an earlier period as a world literature sought after in many regions, whose translation in diverse forms and tongues had a vast impact on languages and literary cultures.

The question of Shi'ism in Muslim Southeast Asia is a thorny and complicated one, encompassing broad religious and political implications. Did Shi'ism, for example, exert an influence on a particular writer? Should a certain book be classified as Shi'i or not? Such inquiries , important as they may be, are often too dichotomous or simplistic to answer in the context of our current state of knowledge. This is certainly the case when Javanese manuscript literature, which is the focus of this chapter, is considered.

Indonesia today is the world's second most linguistically diverse country and home to the world's largest population of Muslims. Taken together these two statistics have meant that within the gradual yet profound process of Islamization in Southeast Asia, and in what is currently the nation-state of Indonesia, translation was of pivotal importance. Through ongoing contact and exchange with people and texts from the Middle East and South Asia from the sixteenth century onwards, local literatures written and recited in Javanese and Malay (among other languages) were transformed, introducing to the speakers of these languages new genres, words, stories, and characters as well as a new way of understanding the past. This essay outlines three translation paradigms employed by those translating Arabic texts into Malay and Javanese and explores what they tell us - together and separately - about religious and linguistic change, the transmission of knowledge, and particular translation traditions.

This essay explores how a small diasporic Muslim community in the colonial era-known today as the Sri Lankan Malays-maintained its culture through the preservation of language, the transmission of literary and religious texts, the cultivation of genres and of a script. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) used the island of Ceylon as a site of banishment for those considered rebels in the regions under Company control in the Indonesian archipelago. Criminals from these territories were also sent to Ceylon, as were native troops who served in the Dutch army, and others employed in various capacities. After their takeover of the island in 1796, the British too brought to Ceylon colonial subjects from the archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, primarily to serve in their military. I examine issues of cultural encounter and religious developments through an analysis of a Malay manuscript written in Colombo in the early years of the nineteenth century. I emphasize the referencing of titles and names as well as the texts multilingual character. Through this discussion I question the notion of distinctly defined centres and margins as they pertain to the Sri Lankan Malays-situated physically and figuratively between the Malay and Arab worlds-and suggest that crossroads, connections and movement are more appropriate conceptual categories for considering their case.

Sri Lanka is a land of Asian crossings and contacts, epitomised in the history of the country's Malay community. Within that history the year 1869 was especially momentous. This was when the Suez Canal opened, significantly easing the hajj pilgrimage rout

Literary depictions of central figures in Muslim history offer telling glimpses of gender roles and expectations, however ideal. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and her pious and courageous husband and fourth Caliph Ali are among the most beloved

Gerard Genette’s notion of the paratext as ‘a threshold of interpretation’ is employed in this article to explore a host of paratexts in late nineteenth century Javanese manuscripts from the Pura Pakualaman court library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although paratexts were used in earlier years, especially in the form of illuminated opening pages, verse and metrical markers and some (often very brief ) information about authors and scribes, the fijinal decades of the nineteenth century and fijirst two of the twentieth saw major shifts in the kind of paratexts employed, reflecting, I suggest, wider changes in practices of reading, writing and the transmission of knowledge.

Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, practices of reading, learning, translating, adapting, and transmitting contributed to the shaping of a cosmopolitan sphere that was both closely connected with the broader, universal Muslim community and rooted in local identities. I consider a series of 'citation sites' in an attempt to explore one among many modes of inter-Asian connections, highlighting how citations, simple or brief as they may often seem, are sites of shared memories, history, and narrative traditions and, in the case of Islamic literature, also sites of a common bond to a cosmopolitan and sanctified Arabic.

Despite the almost complete absence of Jews from Java throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish characters figured consistently, and sometimes prominently, in Javanese manuscript literature produced and circulated during this period. In this article

As is now widely accepted, no single, universal meaning to the idea and practice we usually term translation exists: ideas about, and practices of, rewriting texts have varied greatly across time and place. Aiming to bring this multiplicity of translation practices and theories to light and to contextualize them culturally and historically, this paper explores what translation meant in the literary culture of Java, Indonesia, during the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Although Javanese literature contains many works coming from elsewhere, these texts typically do not elaborate on the translation act and often leave out information such as the translator's identity and motives, the source language, and the date and place of translation. I ask why this may have been the case and highlight how, despite this dearth of information, it is possible to begin reconstructing the meanings of translation in Javanese society through a close reading of local translation terminology.

Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as pivotal to understanding interactions among Muslims in various regions of South and Southeast Asia. What if we thought of language and literature as an additional network, one that crisscrossed these