In: Asiatische Studien: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft = Etudes asiatiques = Revue de la Société Suisse - Asie, Band 78, Heft 4, S. 811-814
Many scholars have studied the contribution of the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah to Malay Islamic literature. Some of them, including Van Ronkel, Winstedt, Braginsky, and, especially, Brakel, have paid particular attention to the structure and content of the story. These scholars have all suggested that this hikayat was copied from an unidentified Persian manuscript and that the Malay version includes some sections not found in the Persian one. In this study, several manuscript copies of a Persian text, preserved in various libraries around the world, are examined in order to investigate whether this text could be the original source of the Malay version of the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah. In order to follow up on and test some previous scholarly conclusions, this study highlights the similarities and differences between both the content and the structure of the Malay and Persian versions on the basis of Brakel's edition of the text.