What did the Muslim citizen of the classical Islamic world mean by Islam? In what sense was it operative in his life? To what extent did an Islamic slogan signify religious commitment? The difficulty in treating these questions consists in the fact of the variety, not the dearth of answers to them. Rather than develop alternative perspectives, however, we would, in what follows, focus our study on one aspect of the life of the Muslim Umma. This is the problem of the dynamics underlying revolt, rebellion, social protest and revolution in early Islam; with reference to this aspect we would ask our basic questions. In a sense, the three questions could be resolved into one: to what extent, in what sense, and why, was Islam a factor in Muslim revolts during the first centuries? Two propositions would help treat this question, and in the course of the study, we would see if a third may also be legitimately articulated. They are as follows: first, it is possible that the disaffected Muslims in classical and medieval Islam may have tended to translate their mundane grievances into religous terms so that, for instance, the perceived threat to a particular dispensation, or the actual destruction of such a dispensation may have been interpreted as a threat to religion itself; and second, Islam may have been interpreted as the best form of propriety and justice so that those who felt themselves deprived considered it incumbent to fight for such justice, not necessarily because it would benefit them but because this was what Islam was, it being considered obligatory to strengthen, save, or reestablish Islam.

This verse comes at the end of the 2nd Act of Kālidāsa's Vikramorvaśīya (hereafter V). It is spoken by the royal hero Purūravas moments after his wife Auśīnarī has left the scene in a jealous pique, refusing to accept his anunaya, his attempt at conciliation. Auśīnarī had confronted him with evidence of his affair with the apsaras Urvaśī, a love-verse that the nymph had inscribed on a piece of birch-bark. Urvaśī had by then already left the lovely palace garden where she had appeared to him beyond his hopes (for how can a mortal expect a liaison with a divinity?), called back to Indra's palace to act the principal role in a play called Lakṣmī's Svayaṃvara. The King had entrusted the piece of bark to the Vidūṣaka's safekeeping, but of course the latter—true to his name of “spoiler”—had dropped it, leaving it to be discovered by Auśīnarī and her maid. At first the hero tries to deny that the inscribed message has anything to do with him, but this is hardly convincing. Furthermore, the Vidūṣaka's attempts at camouflage only succeeded in underscoring his friend's guilt. But “No,” Ausmari responds, “you haven't transgressed. It is I who transgress with my disagreeable presence. I'll go!” With this she plays her trump card, and Purūravas can only play his. He admits his guilt, but only formulaically, only by invoking a gallant convention: he is and has always been her slave, and when the mistress is angry then surely the slave is guilty. Saying this, he falls at her feet, but she turns her back on him and leaves. The Vidūṣaka remarks that this is all to his favour since he will no longer have to camouflage his affair, but Purūravas rejects this callous notion. His respect (bahumāna) for Auśīnarī is genuine. He does not want to hurt her and regrets that his gallantry cannot soothe her. Thus he utters the lines I have quoted above.

Every schoolboy and schoolgirl in India, figuratively speaking, is taught the Myth of Macaulay's Minute. According to this myth, attitudes of lofty condescension towards India's peoples and their inferior cultures, combined with practical needs for a cheap labour force to supply the manpower requirements of an enormous bureaucratic machine, prompted alien rulers to impose an English language educational system upon the subcontinent and, thereby, to neglect and stifle the natural growth of indigenous educational institutions. Moreover, in its more extreme forms, this myth assumes that these rulers were also either racially arrogant or wilfully ignorant, or both. Finally, this myth assumes that the disastrous consequences of this “colonialist” fiat were a major factor inhibiting the progress and well-being of a large proportion of India's peoples.

Most students of Middle Eastern history in the West will probably recognize the title of this paper as an allusion to Bernard Lewis's well-known article “Ottoman observers of Ottoman decline”. The allusion is meant to be more than a mere play on words, however, for Professor Lewis's discussion of the reactions of Ottoman statesmen to the crises that rocked their society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries contains much that is relevant to an understanding of Chinese reactions to similar crises in the Ming (1368–1644) empire at about the same time. Indeed, whether or not one accepts the still controversial notion that there was a “general crisis” in seventeenth-century world economic and political history, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that during the period from approximately 1550 to 1680, a revolution in world monetary history, sharp fluctuations in the levels of international and domestic trade, dramatic increases in governmental expenditure, significant changes in the growth rates and geographical distribution of population, deteriorating climatic conditions, and outbreaks of epidemic disease affected many economies, including those of the Ming, Ottoman, and Spanish empires, in ways that rulers, officials, clerics, and political commentators from London to Edo found deeply disturbing.

The path followed by Protestant Christianity in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) has frequently been viewed as an index to the general process of Japanese development up to World War II. The beginnings seemed promising. According to the accepted picture, the early converts included a significant number of young ex-samurai whose clan had not supported the winning side in the Meiji Restoration. The new regime dismantled the feudal order which had given their lives purpose and meaning, and they felt alienated and rejected as a result. They first came into contact with Christianity from a desire to study Western learning and thus make a new start in life; they were indifferent, or even hostile, to the Western religion itself. The early missionaries and foreign teachers who led them to Christianity in spite of such initial attitudes seem to have been, if not men with actual military experience, people of strong personality and puritanical ideals. Matching samurai stereotypes of courage and single-minded determination as they therefore did, they attracted the admiration and loyalty of their lordless pupils, who pledged themselves, through their teachers, to Christ. Conversion was often accompanied by the discovery of a new purpose in life, the task of spreading the new religion. This was a restatement of the samurai obligation to set a spiritual example to others, and also represented a patriotic mission to save the nation both morally and materially, through providing the proper basis for the adoption of Western civilization.

In a magisterial article in Middle Eastern Studies of January 1976 Dr Gwynne Dyer wrote “The majority of Turkish and Armenian historians remain frozen on this issue (the events of 1915–16) in the attitudes their predecessors had already adopted by 1916 … The barrage of accusation and counter-accusation rolls on … Most of the historiography on this subject is biased and unreliable”. Eleven years have passed since that was published but matters have hardly improved. The continued production of works of advocacy rather than history is the more disappointing because the broad pattern of Turkish-Armenian relations is hardly in doubt.

These two volumes are the first of a major series of catalogues planned to cover the Balinese manuscripts in the Leiden University Library and other Dutch collections. They run on from the four volumes of Th.G.Th. Pigeaud's Literature of Java, (1967–1980), but in view of the very distinctive character of the materials described here by Dr. Hinzler, the presentation is quite different. Part 1 contains full-page illustrations of each of the 483 Balinese drawings in the Van der Tuuk Collection, together with a gallery of 50 photographs, mostly of temples and dancers for comparison with certain of the items in the collection. Part 2 begins with an historical, critical and technical introduction, followed by a detailed, self-contained description of each drawing, and where required, its literary background and reference, each entry running to one, two or more pages. The Collection is numbered Cod. Or. 3390.1–307 and 17994.1–3.

After the publication of the translations and accompanying notes of the last two letters of Emperor Tewodros in JRAS1987/1, the authors were made aware of a number of unfortunate errors in the translations and of differences between their versions and the “official” translations produced not long after the originals. As several of these errors of translation have direct repercussion on the annotation of the letters, it has seemed expedient to publish the corrections as soon as possible. Accordingly, we are grateful to the Publications Committee of the JRAS for allowing these revised translations to appear so soon after the original article. We are also deeply grateful to Prof. E. Ullendorff for drawing our attention to the corrections and improvements that have needed to be made.

In order to facilitate the presentation of the corrections, it seems preferable to reproduce here in full the revised translations of the letters, though these should of course be read in conjunction with the original article.