When the Tagebuch of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) was published in 1978, it was widely expected that the work would prove to be a mine of information on the life and career of its celebrated author. What was not expected was that so much of this information should consist of bitter criticism and empassioned invective directed against leading personalities in the social and intellectual circles of Budapest and Hungary, particularly in the Jewish community of which Goldziher himself was a leading member. The contrast between the image of the dispassionate and meticulous researcher presented to the public in so many of Goldziher's seminal studies on the religion and culture of Islam, and that of the outraged and sorrowing diarist manifest in the Tagebuch, was most striking.

The Yūnusiyya is one of those small-scale, largely family-based Sufi orders which proliferated in the later Middle Ages. Little is known of its growth and development. The eponymous founder, one Yūnus ibn Yusuf Ibn Musā'id al-Shaibānī, was a holy man of the type described as majdhūb, which is explained as meaning that he had no shaikh and was self-initiated into the life of devotion and sanctity. He died in 619 (1222–3), approaching ninety years of age, in the district of the Mesopotamian town of Dara, in a village called al-Qunayya. As our source, Ibn Khallikān, adds, “His tomb there is wellknown and an object of pilgrimage”.

In the year 352/963, according to independent evidence and the author's own testimony, the Samanid ruler Manṣūr b. Nūḥ sent an order via his major-domo and closest confidant, al-Fā'iq al-Khāṣṣa, to his minister Abū 'Alī Bal'amī, commissioning the latter to prepare a translation into court Persian of the famous historical annals written in Arabic by Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī. Bal'amī completed this task, producing a book whose popularity in many ways eclipsed that of the original text throughout the Persian-speaking world and beyond (being translated into various Turkish dialects and even, ironically enough, back into Arabic). Unfortunately, exploitation of this source by modern scholars has been hindered both by its identification as a “translation” of Ṭabarī's work and by the lack of a suitable edition of the Persian text. This article attempts to explore these problems and the extent to which they have been rectified by recent studies and editions of this important work.

The history of Qum exhibits a number of features common to urban and rural life in central Persia over the centuries. It also contains features which differentiate it from other towns. Today it is known as a shrine town, but this has not always been its exclusive character. It has had a complex and varied history. In medieval times it was not distinguished from the countryside around it by the existence of a civic identity, any more than were other cities. It bore the same name as the surrounding region. Qum designated both the city and the province of which it was the centre and from which it was not administratively distinct.

When Muslim forces under the Ghurid sultan, Mu'izz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām, made their first major breakthrough into Hindūstān in the 1190s, they brought with them two institutions that had long since taken root in the Islamic world. One was the iqṭā' or assignment of land or its revenue, in some cases in return for military service (sometimes misrepresented as “fief” on the Western European model). The other was the mamlūk, or military slave. Mamlūk status, it should be stressed, bore none of the degrading connotations associated with other types of slavery: mamlūks – generally Turks from the Eurasian steppelands – were highly prized by their masters, receiving both instruction in the Islamic faith and a rigorous training in the martial arts, and were not employed in any menial capacity. The mamlūk institution, whose origins go back to the first century of Islam, came into vogue from the first half of the third/ninth century, as the ‘Abbasid Caliphs built up a corps of Turkish mamlūk guards and their example was followed, with the disintegration of their empire, by the various autonomous dynasties that sprang up in the provinces. Turkish slave officers themselves went on to found dynasties, as in the case of the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids in Egypt and the Ghaznawids in the eastern Iranian world. The institution surely entered upon its heyday in the seventh/thirteenth century, with the military coup of 648/1250 in Cairo: a group of mamlūk officers overthrew the last Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and inaugurated a regime in which slave status was the essential qualification for high military and administrative office.

Since the time South Asia, together with other Asian and African countries, became an integral part of the British Empire, the significance of manuscripts, published works and other artefacts, relating to those regions has stimulated continued appreciation in the United Kingdom, albeit with varying degrees of interest. It is interesting to note that the factors which have contributed in one way or another to the collecting of South Asian I material for British institutions vary in their nature, and thus illuminate the attitudes of different periods. During the entire nineteenth century, the collectors were primarily administrators; for most of the first half of the twentieth century, it was the interest and the needs of British universities that led to the accumulation of substantial holdings in many academic or specialist libraries.

C. A. Storey's Persian Literature, A Bio-bibliographical Survey is the lifework of a meticulous and dedicated scholar and its hitherto published sections have proved an indispensable reference work for Persian studies. Its first volume, covering Qur'anic Literature, History and Biography, was published in five fascicules between 1927 and 1953 and was followed in 1958 by the first fascicule of Volume II, devoted to Mathematics, Weights and Measures, Astronomy and Astrology and Geography.