This talk will consider the process of translating the well-known Islamic Book of One Thousand Questions from Javanese, Malay and Tamil into English. Originally composed in Arabic by the tenth century, the Book of One Thousand Questions was translated widely between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries across vast geographic and cultural space. Framed by a question and answer debate between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish leader Abdullah Ibnu Salam in seventh century Arabia, its narrative portrays a journey from doubt to conviction that ultimately leads the Jew to embrace Islam. The discussion will focus three themes arising from the Book of One Thousand Questions translation history: what its translations into different South and Southeast Asian languages at different periods and places reveal about particular agendas, emphases and beliefs across Muslim communities; the clues such translations offer to how ”˜translation' was understood and practiced in these societies; and how script change, or transliteration, may be viewed as a form of translation. Ronit Ricci earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan (2006), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and the Asia Research Institute in Singapore. She has recently joined the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, and her book, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, is forthcoming with Chicago University Press in 2011.