The Pand-Nāmah or the “Counsel” of Subuktigīn to his son Maḥmūd is the earliest work of its kind in the Persian language. It not only formulates some important principles of administration, but also furnishes valuable information about an obscure period of history, viz. the early life of Subuktigīn and the origin of his family.

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.

This essay examines the growing crisis of authority in the Muslim world of the past two hundred years. It is a crisis set in motion by the challenges of Western domination, intensified by those of globalisation, and exacerbated by Muslim attempts to resist them. It is a crisis which has pervaded all aspects of Muslim life, but one which has been felt particularly in the religious arena. Focussing initially on how authoritative religious knowledge was established and sustained down to c. 1800, the essay goes on to examine how this system broke down. It demonstrates the fragmentation of authority as new methods of interpretation emerge, as lay interpreters come forward to challenge the ʿulama, and as the individual human conscience comes to be given an increasingly important role. Consideration is also given to the growth of primary and higher education, the emergence of new electronic media, and the transnational movements of Muslims. The outcome has been the growth of a ‘spectacularly wild growth of interpretation’. It remains an open question as to whether this development is a cause for despair or a source of hope.

An outbreak of rabies among silver foxes in Poland in 1939 has led to widespread dissemination of the disease in animals throughout most of the countries of Europe, and has stimulated intensive study of the rabies virus.

The word gōsān is known to occur twice in Persian literature. One passage is in the poem Vīs u Rāmīn, now shown to be of Parthian origin. Here, while the king Mōbad is feasting with his wife and his brother Rāmīn, a gōsān-i navāgar sings to them. His song is of a lofty tree, shading the whole earth. Beneath it is a sparkling spring, with sand in its sweet water. A bull of Gīlān grazes by it, drinking the water and eating the blossoms at its brink. “May this tree continue to cast its shade,” ends the gōsān, “the water ever flowing from the spring, the bull of Gīlān ever grazing at it!” His pretty song was well calculated, however, to frustrate this pious wish; for it was in fact a dangerous and provocative allegory, the tree representing Mōbad himself, the spring his wife Vīs, and the bull his brother Rāmīn, the queen's lover. This meaning the king instantly divined; but his rage flared up, not against the gōsān, but against his brother, on whom he sprang to kill him.

Perhaps one of Muḥammad 'Alī's most remarkable achievements was the new direction he gave to the Arabic language and its literature. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the use of the literary language had been confined to the needs of the mosque and the madrasahs attached thereto and, in a very limited way, to the antiquated scientific pursuits of a few of the 'ulamā' of al-Azhar. The literary language was also used for a certain amount of the popular literature and by the poets. Persian was read by a few, especially those interested in literature. Most educated Turks knew the “three languages”, al-lughāt ath-thalāth as they were called, i.e. Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. The Turk appears to have used Arabic for his faith, Persian for his literary taste, and Turkish for governing. Turkish was used for official purposes and there is ample. evidence in al-Jabartī that there were many in Egypt who knew Turkish, but it was not until the period of Muḥammad 'Alī that Egypt became Ottomanized in spite of the fact that it had been a part of the Turkish Empire for three centuries. One might have supposed that the sudden intensive use of the Turkish language would have ousted Arabic altogether and, normally, this would have occurred but for the scientific needs of the new ruler. Whereas the Turks favoured the purely military achievements of MuḤammad 'Alī, they had very little inclination and no patience for supplying the scientific requirements of a modern army.

“The natives of all unknown countries are commonly called Indians” Maximilian of Transylvania, De molucco (1523)

As is well known, the description of the Saraswatī river, given in the Veda, differs much from that met with in the Mahābhārata and other ancient but later authorities, while neither agrees with the present condition of that sacred stream.

One of the striking differences between the phonetic systems of Indo-Aryan and its parent Indo-European is the existence in the former of the cerebral series of sounds as well as the dental. These appear among the stops, the nasals, the sibilants, and later among the liquids also. Thus opposed to Indo-European t th d dh, n, s z, l r we find in the various Indo-Aryan languages the two series—

t th d dh, n, s *z, l r

ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh, ṇ, ṣ *ẓ, ḷ ṛ ṛh.

Of these, *z *ẓ belong to the prehistoric and ṛ ṛh to the modern period.

The transformation of cities in the Byzantine and early Islamic Near East was discussed by a number of scholars in the last century. Many of them adopted a traditional approach, claiming that the Islamic conquest caused the total collapse of large classical cities, turning them into small medieval towns. The urban landscape was changed dramatically, with the large colonnaded streets of the classical Polis transformed into the narrow allies of the Islamic Madina.

According to Musil, the bedouin of North Arabia know five seasons, distinguished by different types of rain or its absence. The rains within each season are also thought to be governed by particular stars. The following table sets out these five seasons with the associated rains and stars.

From the beginning of Orientalist studies of the Muslim world, it was axiomatic to define certain religious phenomena in terms of their origins. Because of the tendency to view all Eastern doctrines as essentially alike, Orientalist scholars of the Romantic period invariably defined Sufism as a mysticism that was Indian in origin; from the first appearance of the term in European languages, “Sufism” was characterised as essentially Looking back at this early scholarship today, it is surprising that this unanimous belief in the Indian origin of Sufism was almost entirely unconnected to any historical evidence. From the days of Sir William Jones and Sir John Malcolm to relatively recent times, this opinion has had a remarkable longevity, despite the ludicrous appearance of some of these claims today. As an example one may consider the outrageous claim of Max Horten, in a 1928 study that sought to explain Sufism as a pure expression of Vedanta: “No doubt can any longer remain that the teaching of Hallaj (d. 922) and his circle Another pertinent example is found in an observation of William James in his 1902 Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience:

In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have

James's remark illustrates, innocently enough, how widely this opinion was shared at the time by the academic world in Europe and America. It is easier to see from the perspective of the later twentieth century that this opinion was conditioned by nineteenth-century racial attitudes as well as assumptions about the unchanging nature of religions.

There can be few events in history so little known as Chinghiz Khan's wars with Hsi Hsia. Even in works dealing with the conqueror's life, one finds hardly more than a brief sketch of his conquest of this state. Doubtless this is due to the principal records extant on Hsi Hsia being written in Chinese. Many of these must include material originally drawn from Hsi Hsian documents, but to-day the latter are very rare, and until recently there was no one who could read them. Hence most of what has come down to us is from the pens of enemies, and even this is little known to students of Chinese or Mongol history. Yet in its day Hsi Hsia ranked among the great powers of Asia, and next to the empires of Chin and Khwarizm, was the strongest state overthrown by Chinghiz Khan.

Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline emerging from Hellenism, had an ambiguous and disputed role in the theology and apologetics of Islam and continues to be contentious. In this article, I examine the arguments over the legitimacy of philosophy between the philosophical school of Mullā Ṣadrā (d. c. 1635), dominant in the present Shiʿi seminary in Iran, and its detractors in the maktab-i tafkīk who insist that knowledge of reality and the faith only derives from the teachings of the Shiʿi Imams and cannot be contaminated with Aristotelianism. After an introduction to this fideist school of separating religious and ‘foreign’ sciences, three questions are analysed. What is philosophy? How do we know God? How can we demonstrate the Qurʾanic doctrine of the resurrection of bodies? What emerges is a more radical challenge to uṣūlī rationalism than that posed previously from the Akhbāriyya and their insistence upon a ḥadīth-based jurisprudence.

In recent years several important books have discussed aspects of labour in India. Some have been significant in their fields more generally, and the subject as a whole can be seen to be changing. This essay reflects on four works, a three-volume collection of documents published by the Indian Council for Historical Research, and Gyan Prakash's monograph on Bihar, which together might be taken as representing the transition in Indian labour studies.

The introduction to the special issue provides a framework to think about the changing conceptions of Sayyid-ness in various historical contexts in South Asia. First, we review some of the sociological and anthropological literature on caste among South Asian Muslims, to argue for a contextualised and historicised study of Muslim social stratification in Muslims’ own terms. Second, we throw light on the fact that Sayyid-ness, far from being a transhistorical fact, may be conceptualised differently in different socio-political and historical contexts. For instance, Sayyid pedigree was at times downplayed in favour of a more encompassing Ashraf identity in order to project the idea of a single Muslim community. Far from projecting an essentialising image of Sayyid-ness, by focusing on historical change, the articles in this collection de-naturalise Sayyids’ and Ashraf's social superiority as a ‘well-understood and accepted fact’. They further shift attention from the debate on ‘Muslim caste’, often marred by Hindu-centric assumptions, to focus instead on social dynamics among South Asian Muslims ‘in their own terms’. In so doing, these studies highlight the importance of the local, while pointing to possible comparisons with Muslim groups outside South Asia.

The significant changes that were introduced in the organization of Mughal government and the accompanying shifts in Akbar's administrative and religious policies during the period 1560–80 have remained for long a favourite subject of study for a number of modern historians. The existing interpretation of these changes seems largely to run parallel to Abul Fazl's line of argument which seeks to explain the growth of institutions and policies in terms of the unfolding of Akbar' personality. Abul Fazl often tries to ignore, or brush aside as the outcome of “evil advice”, all those measures or decisions which appeared to him inconsistent with Akbar's policy during the last 25 years of his reign. The impression created by Abul Fazl is reinforced by a similar tendency in Badauni, who, from an opposite point of view, quite frequently mixes up his comments on some of Akbar's enlightened measures of the later period with the events of the earlier phase when there was hardly any ground for him to find fault with Akbar from a doctrinal angle. Under the influence of these interpretations modern historians also tend to disregard facts that are inconsistent with Abul Fazl's theory of Akbar's gradual “unveiling” of himself as “the superman”, through the introduction, one after another, of his policies based on the principles of Sulh-i Kul and universal kingship.

At some time towards the middle of the twelfth/eighteenth century, the young Najdī scholar Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1115–1206/1703f–92) experienced something like a conversion. From that point on, his understanding of monotheism seems to have been such that he considered most of the professed Muslims of his day to be polytheists who should be fought till they accepted Islam. The first Wahhābī state (1158–1233/1745f–1818) was the product of the fusion of this radical vision with the political fortunes of the Āl Sa'ūd, until then the petty chiefs of the Najdī oasis of Dir'iyya.