Since “visions appear material to spiritual persons only, the vulgar herd of historians and annalists cannot hope to be so favoured by Heaven”. So, in his nineteenth-century account of the sūfīs of Sind, Sir Richard Burton expressed the dilemma of scholars researching Muslim dream and visionary experiences in his characteristic style. But while scholarly discussion of the visionary activities of premodern sūfīs and other Muslims is still no straightforward matter we need no longer be deterred by Burton's sardonic pessimism. Despite the reticence of earlier generations of positivist scholarship, the past two decades have witnessed a flourishing of research into the visionary aspects of Muslim religious and cultural practice, chiefly through the analysis of the extensive literature surrounding the dream and vision in Islam. For, from the very beginning of Islamic history, there has developed a rich and varied discourse on the nature of the imagination and its expression in the form of dreams and waking visions. The theoretical approaches to the imagination developed by early Muslim philosophers and mystical theorists were always accompanied by the activities of a more active sodality of dreamers and vision seekers. For this reason, Islamic tradition is especially rich for its contributions to both theories of the imagination and the description of its expression in dream and visionary experience. The abundant yields from this rich research field in recent years afford new insight into the Muslim past, allowing an often intimate encounter with past individuals and private experiences scarcely granted by the analysis of other kinds of documentation.

Debate and controversy have bedevilled the subject of social banditry. The early writing on social banditry saw it as primitive rebellion, as prepolitical and antithetical to class consciousness. Another approach identified it with weak state formation. The literature on South Asia saw social banditry as absent having been eroded by the institutional structure of caste. This article examines and critiques some of these theses on banditry. It argues, firstly, that social banditry can be simultaneous with a phase of intensified state formation. The specific theme investigated here is the interaction of the king, peasant and bandit in an Indian kingdom under late colonialism. A window to this universe is opened up by a folk epic from the oral tradition of a community of Muslims called the Meos. Far from being prepolitical, banditry raises crucial questions with respect to authority and legitimacy. This narrative not only interrogates the legitimacy of kingship, it also challenges the authority of the colonial state. Secondly, the article challenges the argument of South Asian exceptionalism to banditry that is perhaps easier to refute. Thirdly, as this article demonstrates, banditry need not relate to a pre-industrial capitalist world. Our bandit narrative indicates the reverberations of industrialism and attendant exchange relations and institutions in the colony even though it belongs to an area of ‘indirect’ rule.

Robert Morrison (1782–1834; Chinese name: Maˇ Liˇxùn) was the London Missionary Society's first representative in China and is generally viewed as the father of Protestant missionary work there. Modern scholarly interest in him has in the main focused on his role as a Bible translator (see, for example, Zetzsche 1999, especially Chapter 2). As part of his missionary activities, Morrison studied both written and spoken Chinese; and these researches yielded grammars of both Mandarin (i.e. Guānhuà “the language of the mandarins or officials”; Morrison, 1815) and Cantonese (1815: appendix, pp. 259–280), plus a major dictionary of written Chinese (1815–1823) and a smaller lexicon of Cantonese (1828). In order to transcribe spoken Chinese, Morrison developed romanisations for both Mandarin and Cantonese. These orthographic systems shed light on the pronunciation of the underlying languages as they were spoken two hundred years ago. The purpose of the present paper is to examine Morrison's romanisation of Mandarin for clues about the pronunciation of early nineteenth-century standard Chinese.

A brief glance at any bibliography for a history of Cambodia written in the last hundred years will reveal the immense preoccupation that historians have had with the institution of kingship. Yet nothing has been written on autonomously ruling queens, despite the acceptance by some twentieth-century historians that at least two such queens apparently ruled in pre-classical Cambodia (c. 50-802). These female sovereigns have been considered an anomaly, their reigns evidence that the political and social fabric of pre-classical society was rent asunder by the intrusion of female rulers into a male domain. Such a scenario is at variance with epigraphic evidence. One of the queens accepted by twentieth-century historians as an autonomous female ruler belongs to the eleventh century, not the seventh, as previously determined. Moreover, it appears that in most pre-classical Cambodian polities, women held the power of sovereignty, even if they did not rule independently. This not only raises questions regarding the accepted understanding of gender and power in pre-classical Cambodia, but also calls for a revision of pre-classical Cambodian history.

Annemarie Brigitte Schimmel, who died aged 80 on 26th January 2003, was the West's most outstanding expert on Sufism, classical and folk Islamic poetry, Indo-Pakistani literature, and calligraphy.

A leading Japanese scholar of Chinese history who was based in Kansai, Ôba Osamu (1927–2002) spent a highly productive career, holding appointments from 1953 onwards at Seishin Joshi Daigaku, Ryûkoku Daigaku and Osaka Daigaku. A Professor of Kansai Daigaku in 1965, he later served there as the head of the Faculty of Letters (Bungaku bu) and at one time as Director of the University Library. Outside Japan he held short-term appointments, or was invited to be a visiting scholar, at a number of centres of learning, including some in China (Liaoning, Shandong, Hong Kong and Beijing), the United States of America (Princeton), Belgium (Leuven) and the United Kingdom (Cambridge and London). He held the title of Guest Professor in the Archaeological Research Institute, Gansu, and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing.