A Preliminary Study of Religious Books of the Cham Bani: Kitap Du-A Muk Kei, the Ancestors’ Prayer Book

This volume contains three papers based on the research on kitabs-Islamic books and manuscripts-in Southeast Asia.The research was initiated at the Center for Islamic Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo, and continued as part of the research project on cultural heritage at the Institute of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Studies of the same university.Two papers in the volume deal with countries in mainland Southeast Asia, namely, Vietnam and Myanmar, while another paper focuses on Islamic intellectual thoughts that transcend geographical boundaries, highlighting the impact of the Indian connection among Muslim intellectuals in Malaysia.Hence, the subtitle to this volume is given, rather ambitiously, as "Beyond Insular Southeast Asia."The paper by Shiozaki Yuki examines the transformation of Islamic intellectual connections between Malaysia and other regions in the Islamic world, focusing on the last two decades of the 20th century, and discusses the growing influence of the Deobandi school of thought on Islamic learning in Malaysia.The paper by Yoshimoto Yasuko describes and discusses the religious books of the Cham Bani people in Vietnam, focusing on a certain prayer book handed down from their ancestors, called Kitap Du-A Muk Kei.Through an examination of its text, Yoshimoto argues that the Qur'anic phrases and dua prayers are inserted into the main part of the book as essential elements of the people's local religious rituals of ancestor worship.The third paper is a catalogue of the collection of Islamic books from Myanmar at Sophia University, written by Saito Ayako, Sunaga Emiko, and Yanagiya Ayumi.It lists 82 titles comprising 92 volumes of Islamic books in the collection, which are written in Burmese, Urdu, and Arabic.Despite its limited scale, this catalogue serves as an initial step to illuminate the Islamic knowledge transmitted to and learnt by Muslims in Myanmar.We hope that this book will contribute to furthering our understanding of Muslims in Southeast Asia as well as of their relationship with people from other regions and of other religions.