Meaningful Rituals

Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nurnama Tradition of Eastern Bengal explores a corpus of texts that centre around the creation of the world by God through his prophet Mu?ammad in his primordial form as a luminous entity. These short accounts, which bear the title Nurnama (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.