Acknowledgements
The origins of this book date back to a visit to Jakarta in 2010, when the late Amin Sweeney took me to the Perpustakaan Nasional (National Library); this brief preliminary trip hinted at the potential of the Arabic collections, which, with a handful of honourable exceptions, had scarcely been disturbed by research since their accession in the nineteenth century. I am very grateful to Amin Sweeney for this opportunity, which came, as it turned out, only very shortly before his death. A subsequent sabbatical in 2017–18 spent at the Department of History at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur provided further possibilities to explore manuscript collections in the region and start thinking seriously about the links between the Malay and Arabic literary production; my thanks to Prof Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja and other colleagues at University of Malaya for facilitating my stay there. I would like to record my gratitude too to the staff of Institut Alam dan Tamadun Melayu at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia for assisting my studies of Malay and Jawi, in particular Dr Junaini Kasdan.
The possibility of turning this research into the present more comprehensive book was afforded by the generous grant of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, that allowed me release from teaching duties and provided funding for field research. Some aspects of the field research were also supported by the School of History of the University of St Andrews.
I would like to record my particular gratitude to Dr Annabel Teh Gallop of the British Library for her support for this project from its inception, for answering innumerable queries, and for generously commenting on a draft of the complete manuscript. Without her, this book would have considerably more mistakes, although neither she nor anyone else but the author is culpable for those that remain.
I am very grateful to Pak Aditia Gunawan and Pak Agung Kriswanto at the Perpustakaan Nasional in Jakarta for smoothing my access to the collections there and facilitating photography, and to Prof Oman Fathurahman for his help in Indonesia, as well as always interesting exchanges of ideas. I am very much indebted to Ali Akbar, who kindly read numerous Javanese pegon inscriptions in the manuscripts for me and provided transcriptions and translations. Tim Behrend and Dick van der Meij both generously gave their time to read and translate manuscript notes in varieties of the Javanese script. I am much indebted to all of them for rescuing me from the limits of my linguistic competence.
Pedro Pinto in Portugal pointed me to the existence of Arabic documents I would not otherwise have found, while I am grateful to Mark Muehlhaeusler for his help on several occasions in extracting microfilms from the Dār al-Kutub in Cairo when I was running short of time. In the depths of the pandemic, Michael Laffan stepped in to help secure digital copies of some crucial manuscripts in the Garrett Collection at Princeton; I am much indebted for his assistance. Martin van Bruinessen generously made available some of his information about manuscripts in Palembang from his field research, and provided me with a copy of the letter of Yūsuf al-Maqāṣīrī from the apparently lost Dinas Purbakala manuscript of al-Maqāṣīrī’s works. I am extremely grateful for his permission to reproduce the transcription of this document in his possession in this book, which as far as is currently known, is the only surviving copy of the Arabic text.
I would also like to express gratitude to the staff of the Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia for their assistance, as well as all the other institutions on which I have relied for manuscript materials, in particular, the British Library, London, the Dār al-Kutub and al-Azhar Library, Cairo, Leiden University Library, the Perpustakaan Negara in Kuala Lumpur, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul.
As ever I am indebted to my family for their forbearance of the extensive travels and absences such a work inevitably entails, especially my wife Liz.