Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia

2019 ◽  
pp. 75-112
Author(s):  
Su Fang Ng
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
East And West ◽  
Alexander Romance

This chapter explores the ways in which Malay Alexander romances redeploy a medieval discourse of holy war to frame contemporary conflicts. The discussion focuses on the Malay Alexander Romance, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain (Romance of Alexander the Two-Horned), which features a universal sovereign who united East and West. The chapter reads Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain in the context of the Portuguese conquest of Melaka and considers how it represents global Islam—and its dominant theme of strangers converted to kin. It also examines how a religious empire is gained by technology in the novel, along with the text’s moral critiques of empire. Finally, it analyses the chronicle of Melaka, Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), its emphasis on the assimilability of outsiders in translatio imperii, its appropriation of Alexander the Great, and how it defines empire as translated from elsewhere by Alexandrian figures embodying “stranger sovereignty.”

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 333-342
Author(s):  
Su Fang Ng
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Holy War ◽  
The Status ◽  
Alexander Romance

This Epilogue narrates an incident in which the Islamic Alexander became a rallying cry for the anti-kafir (infidel) movement in Sumatra. It considers how Ahmad Shah bin Iskandar, a claimant to Sumatra’s Minangkabau throne in Palembang, professed the status of a saint to wage holy war against the Dutch, and turned to the legend of Alexander the Great to inspire his resistance. As a leader of the anti-kafir movement, Ahmad Shah garnered support from various chiefs in the region and sought to build an archipelagic alliance. An analysis of Ahmad Shah’s uses of the Alexander legend reveals how the Alexander Romance was turned to religiously motived politics in European encounters with Southeast Asia. Ahmad Shah’s exegesis of Iskandar Zulkarnain’s name emphasizes the latter’s dual role as king and prophet, and in laying claim to an Alexandrian descent of Palembang provenance, Ahmad Shah pretended to sacral kingship.

Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Su Fang Ng
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
Alexander Romance ◽  
Literary Networks

No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. This book examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain and Southeast Asia, demonstrating how rival Alexanders—one Christian, the other Islamic—became central figures in their respective literatures. In the early modern age of exploration, both Britain and Southeast Asia turned to literary imitations of Alexander to imagine their own empires and international relations, defining themselves as peripheries against the Ottoman Empire’s imperial center: this shared classical inheritance became part of an intensifying cross-cultural engagement in the encounter between the two, allowing a revealing examination of their cultural convergences and imperial rivalries and a remapping of the global literary networks of the early modern world. Rather than absolute alterity or strangeness, the narrative of these parallel traditions is one of contact—familiarity and proximity, unexpected affinity and intimate strangers.

Scottish Alexanders and Stuart Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-148
Author(s):  
Su Fang Ng
Keyword(s):  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Economic Basis ◽  
Spice Trade ◽  
James Iv ◽  
Alexander Romance

This chapter examines how the Scottish Alexander Romance, Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, raises issues that are important to the ambitions of James IV of Scotland: religious crusade and dynastic expansion through marriage. Composed in 1460 and attributed to Gilbert Hay, Buik features a crusading Alexander the Great fighting Muslim enemies. The novel’s representation of Alexander’s enemies as Muslims references European fears of the growing power of the Ottomans. James IV wanted both to unite England and Scotland through his marriage and to unite Christendom against the Turks. The chapter discusses Alexander’s transformation from crusader into a merchant in the East, suggesting that it points to the underlying economic basis of the revival of crusading rhetoric—Ottoman control of the spice trade. These two themes—union and crusade—were continuing preoccupations of later Stuarts, including James VI of Scotland.

Review Article: Recent Travels in Alexanderland

2014 ◽  
Vol 134 ◽  
pp. 136-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Bowden
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Alexander Romance

Abstract:This review of recent books about Alexander the Great and related topics focuses in particular on how much attention scholars have paid to the eastern aspects of the history and historiography of the period. It traces the identification of Alexander as an essentially ‘western’ figure back to the period of the Enlightenment, and shows how the work of scholars in the 18th century set the terms of the subsequent debate. It goes on to show how work on the Alexander Romance displays a far broader and inclusive range of intellectual approaches than traditional Alexander historiography, and suggests that the study of the historical Alexander would benefit from seeing Alexander as belonging in a Near Eastern context as well as a Greek or Macedonian one.

Alexander the Great: The Meeting of East and West in World Government and Brotherhood

1949 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Paul MacKendrick ◽  
Charles Alexander Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Alexander The Great ◽  
World Government ◽  
East And West

scholarly journals Modals as Carriers of Ideology in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Gibreel Sadeq Alaghbary ◽  
Ohood Ali Al-Nakeeb
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The Novel ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
East And West ◽  
Newspaper Articles ◽  
Ideological Assumptions

Modality encodes speakers or writers’ attitudes towards, and evaluations of, people and states of affairs. These evaluative attitudes are often ideologically motivated. This paper investigates ideology as carried by modal expressions in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Of the ten genres constituting the narrative, the newspaper articles have been selected for analysis. The paper adopts Simpson’s (1993) analytical framework, aka Critical Linguistics, in order to achieve three objectives. It aims to identify the modal expressions employed in the selected newspaper articles, classify the relevant modalized, and modally unmarked, statements, and explore the ideological assumptions and evaluations generated by the modal expressions, or their absence, in relation to the characters’ attitudes towards each other and towards the thematic developments in the novel. Analysis uncovers a dichotomy constructed between the East and West. The East, represented by the salmon project, Sheikh Muhammad and the Yemeni government, is projected as submissive and inferior.

Wordsworth in the Himalayas: Indian Narratology and Sacred Space in William Delafield Arnold’s Oakfield: Fellowship in the East

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 34-58
Author(s):  
Diana Louise Gander Ostrander
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
East And West

AbstractWilliam Delafield Arnold’s single novel, Oakfield: Fellowship in the East, is a transparently autobiographical account of what happens when the earnestness of a son and pupil of Dr. Thomas Arnold encounters the ancient world of India in the decade of the Sepoy Rebellion. This essay explores what has been far less apparent to Western readers and critics: the presence of Indian philosophy at the heart of the novel. Following in the tradition of the Wordsworthian Romantic prophet, W. D. Arnold relates Oakfield’s spiritual search and enlightenment to present the novel itself as the spiritual common ground that the hero seeks. The use of Indian narratological devices produces variegation by ancient spiritual design, merging the myths of enlightened beings East and West, including Brahmins, Buddha, Wordsworth, and Oakfield, on epiphanic mountains. The novel celebrates the potential for Western enlightenment discovered in the Himalayas, but also warns Britain that the colonizing effort is responsible for the loss of England’s best and brightest.

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