An edition of Witness to Marvels

Witness to Marvels

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Witness to Marvels
Tony K. Stewart
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Last edited by MARC Bot
December 17, 2022 | History
An edition of Witness to Marvels

Witness to Marvels

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Witness to Marvels traces the development of a unique genre of Sufi-inspired Bengali romances called pir kathas, whose protagonists and plots are wholly fictive. For five centuries these fabulations have parodied indigenous and Hindu textual traditions. Both mimicking and mocking, these parodies adopted a subjunctive tone, exploring a magical world of ?what-if?. They created an Islam-inflected space within a traditional Bengali cultural environment without trying to legislate what ideally ?should be? according to tropes common to Islamic history, theology, and law. The tales? discursive arena, the imaginaire, delineated the realm of possibility for how these tales might exercise the imagination to integrate Hindu and Islamic cosmologies. Tales insinuated themselves into locally relevant discourses through elaborate intertextual connections, subtly shifting presuppositions about the way the world works and what counts as religious authority. As Allah looked on from heaven, the tales routinely assigned Sufi saints, both pirs and bibis, to the pivotal role of avatar, the periodic descent of divinity, equating them to the Hindu god Narayan. Adopting a semiotic strategy to interpret these tales yields a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal and suggests how we need to reimagine conversion in this region.

Language
English
Pages
337

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Edition Availability
Cover of: Witness to Marvels
Witness to Marvels
Publish date unknown, University of California Press
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

English.

Published in
Oakland

Classifications

Library of Congress
PK1701.S74 2019, PK1701 .S74 2019

The Physical Object

Pagination
337
Number of pages
337

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL28353907M
ISBN 13
9780520973688, 9780520306332
LCCN
2019005276
OCLC/WorldCat
1086495903

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History

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December 17, 2022 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
August 13, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
July 21, 2020 Created by MARC Bot import new book