Meaningful Rituals

Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nūrnāma Tradition of Eastern Bengal explores a corpus of texts that centre around the creation of the world by God through his prophet Muḥammad in his primordial form as a luminous entity. These short accounts, which bear the title Nūrnāma (The Book of Light), played two roles: as conveyers of knowledge regarding basic Islamic beliefs and cosmology, and as ritual texts meant to protect and bring prosperity to those who read and preserved the physical artefact of the book that contained that knowledge.