While more famous for its ancient poetry and rich tradition of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist literature, the Tamil language can also boast of a substantial and varied Islamic literature, going back almost five centuries. In contrast to other Islamic literatures of India, such as in Urdu, for example, Tamil Islamic literature is noteworthy for maintaining local aesthetics and literary traditions with regard to vocabulary, imagery, and genre. Thus, Muslims composed puranas about the life of the Prophet Muhammad and other important savants of Islam, sang panegyric poetry replete with the images of Hindu bhakti to God, and drew on Saiva esotericism to express Sufi conceptions of knowledge and the soul. At the same time, Islamic literature in Tamil remained grounded in Arabic texts, often translated word for word in treatises that even employed the Arabic script to write Tamil. With the mercantile activities of Tamil Muslim traders, Islamic Tamil literature also spread to Southeast Asia, and has to this day maintained its international reach. At our Online Talk #ArabuTamil, historian Torsten Tschacher talks about the confluence of the Tamil language with Islam and explains how Allah’s words came to be expressed in the honey-sweet language.
About the speaker
Torsten Tschacher is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and lecturer for Tamil at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research focusses on the history and discursive traditions of Tamil-speaking Muslims around the Bay of Bengal. His book Race, Religion, and the 'Indian Muslim' Predicament in Singapore was published in 2018 with Routledge. He has also translated two novels from Tamil to German.
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