The development of the Prester John legend and matters associated with it are complex, and no significant work of book length in English has appeared on the subject since V. Slessarev's Prester John. The Letter and the Legend (1959). The recent publication of a collection of texts and interpretive essays will therefore be warmly welcomed. The texts are among those published by Zarncke in the Abhandlungen der königlichen sāchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vii (1879), and include the famous “letter” of Prester John, together with a note by Hamilton on additional Latin manuscripts that have since come to light. The essays comprise both reprints of work that has appeared over the past five decades and six fresh studies that now see the light of day for the first time.

IN the year 1405 (a.d. 1098, a.h. 472), fifty-one years after the Turks had conquered these lands, when Alexius was emperor in Constantinople, the Turk Yághí-Siyán (Aksin) had been made governor of Antioch by Abu 'l Fatḥ, the Egyptian Afḍal was in Jerusalem, which he had taken from the Turks Suqmán and his brothers, the sons of Ortuk, two years before, and all the sea-coast was subject to the Egyptians, Theodore Kurbalát the son of Hátim was in Edessa, which he had saved from the Turks, expecting to hand it over to the emperor. At this time many kings and chiefs of the Franks with a big army and workmen of all sorts, thousands and tens of thousands without end, got ready. There were four kings, leaders of armies, Bohemund, Godfrey (Gufra, Gundafra), Saint Gilles, and Tancred (Tangri) with many bishops and monks. They set their faces to go by land through Greek territory, and to cross by the Hellespont, where is Constantinople, and the two seas are joined by a narrow strait. They sent ambassadors to Alexius to prepare and go out with them, to get ready what was needful, and to arrange throughout his land stores of food and fodder for the use of the army. Alexius promised to help them in all they needed.

Eleven years ago I had the honour to read a paper before this Society, entitled “Five Hundred Questions on the Social Condition of the People of India.” That paper has been widely circulated, and has excited some interest on the subject. Since then, I have prosecuted one department of it—Oriental Proverbs in Relation to the Life and History of the People in India.

I have the honour to return you Sir James Mackintosh's interesting memoir. It possesses (like every thing which comes from the pen of that gifted and ingenious writer) the highest interest; and the ideas which are so luminously developed in it have the more merit, if we consider, that, at the period when this memoir was published, philosophical notions on the study and nature of languages were rarer and more novel than they are at present.

Luri is an Indo-Iranian language cluster with over four million speakers. The Luri ethnic area is found in southwestern Iran and southeastern Iraq, although smaller numbers of speakers have emigrated to elsewhere in Asia and a number of cities in the West.

Man's moral responsibility for his actions is a tenet of Islamic revelation which no Muslim has ever tried to reject. Likewise, the notion of God's omnipotence, which the Qur'ān teaches, has never been challenged by Muslims. However, there is a great difficulty in explaining how true moral responsibility coincides with God's omnipotence; if God creates all things, He also creates man's actions, and this being the case, man cannot be responsible for them. As is well known, the Mu'tazilite solution to the antinomy of God's omnipotence and man's responsibility consists in affirming man's capability, granted to him by God, of creating his own works. Adhering to their principle of God's justice, the Mu'tazilites asserted that if God were to create a man's unbelief while commanding him to believe, He would be unjust in punishing him for unbelief, since the man could not, in this situation, help but disbelieve. According to them, ought implies can. In upholding man's responsibility for his own actions, the Mu'tazilites saved God's justice, but according to the Ash'arites, detracted from God's omnipotence. The Ash'arites taught that since God is the sole creator, He creates human actions. In order to safeguard both God's omnipotence and man's responsibility, al-Ash'arī, having been influenced by the teaching of al-Najjār, developed a theory of kasb (lit. acquisition) according to which God creates man's actions while man appropriates them and thus becomes responsible for them.

It is unfortunate that I have no copy of this interesting book that is complete or in good condition. I possess a broken remnant (D.C. 45 of my collection of MSS.), blotted, dog-eared, and often illegible, and a book of excerpts copied by a priest in Baghdad. The latter (D.C. 46) is extremely incorrect. Besides these, I have borrowed and transliterated pages from another fragmentary loose-leaved copy, brittle with age. All these manuscripts were illiterate and corrupt, each talisman displayed variations due to miscopying or miscomprehension, so that originally identical texts showed considerable differences. A dictionary-maker, however, may neglect no text, however corrupt, and although the illiteracy of scribes has led me on many a wildgoose chase, the labour has been amply compensated.

On the 1st of June 1823, I visited the “Pinjra Pol,” at Surat; a place which is appropriated for the reception of old, worn-out, lame, or disabled animals. At that time, they chiefly consisted of buffaloes and cows; but there were also goats and sheep, and even cocks and hens; some of which latter had lost their feathers, and here, shorn of their plumes, walked about the courts without molestation.

This article explores Islamic networks, as constituted by migration of people, movement of saints and philanthropic institutional links, across the Indian Ocean. Linking Bombay, Hyderabad and the Muslim diasporas of East Africa, these transnational Shi‘i networks forge a print-based public sphere and determine routes for the circulation of media technology. Moreover, this article argues, that they deploy this technology to enable Islamic reformism in ways that are distinct to the local urban cultures in which they are set. The article examines two initiatives that apply technology towards different conceptions of Shi‘i reformism: while one reform initiative attempts to situate itself within a secular liberal public, another seeks to interrogate secular liberal assumptions by establishing an authentic Islamic society; both then, are underpinned by different goals, internal contestations and diverse trajectories. This article seeks to emphasize the ongoing impact of historically shaped networks of community migration and organisation: both the use of technology in mediating Islamic reform, and attempts to articulate a moral Islamic universalism, which have in practice been determined by these existing transnational networks.

While Islamic scriptures like the Quran and Hadith are often quoted to negate the existence of social stratification among Muslims, authors of genealogical texts rely on the very same scriptures to foreground and legitimise discussions on descent and lineage. In the South Asian context, several conceptions of hierarchy as practised by Muslims in north India evolved over the course of colonial rule and were deployed interchangeably by Sayyids. These were based on notions of race, ethnicity, respectability and nobility, and occupational distinctions as well as narratives that referred to the history of early Islam. This article contributes to the study of social stratification among South Asian Muslims by exploring the evolution of Urdu tarikh (historical texts) produced by Sayyid men in the qasbah of Amroha in the Rohilkhand region of the United Provinces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sayyid authors narrated the past through the medium of nasab (genealogy). While their texts place emphasis on lineage and descent to legitimise a superior social status for Sayyids, they also shed light on the changing social and material context of the local qasbah politics with the discourse on genealogy evolving into a form that engaged with social contestations.

Although the religion founded by Mohammed is called by strangers after his name, its followers designate it differently. There is indeed a name which rarely occurs, ḥammādūna, which is applied to them, and which indirectly, at least, is connected with the name of the Prophet. That word signifies “Those who utter the formula ‘Praise be to God,’” and this formula (al-ḥamdu lillāhi) has some connection with the Prophet's name, which was interpreted by his contemporaries as ‘the greatly to be praised.’

To examine a piece of literature bearing a great name and find that it has been wrongly ascribed may be profitable if the work is interesting. Unfortunately, the collection of letters described in Professor Browne's Literary History of Persia (vol. iii, pp. 80 ff.) and the Catalogue of Oriental MSS. belonging to E. G. Browne (pp. 146 f.) would only have had interest and significance if they had indeed been a transcript of the vizier Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl-Allah's own correspondence or despatches.

There are a number of journeys made, or alleged to have been made, in Arabia between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century of which there is no mention, or at least no adequate account, in Hogarth's Penetration of Arabia or in R. H. Kiernan's Unveiling of Arabia. Many of these omissions are due to the little use they made of the Portuguese historians.

With the Tatar tribe which inhabits the north-eastern region of Poland there is connected a little known page not only of Polish history, but of history in general. Whereas all other Muslim peoples established themselves in Europe as conquerors (omitting the majority of Muslims in Yugoslavia, who are of Serb origin and were converted to Islam by their Turkish conquerors), the Polish Tatars inhabit a region never touched by a Muslim invader, and history teaches us that they began to settle in Poland from the middle of the fourteenth century and already professed the religion of Islam.

Poverty in medieval Islam is an enormous topic. It is worth considering from a historian's point of view, especially in the light of what has been accomplished by historians of Rome, Byzantium, and the medieval and modern West who have dealt with poverty and the poor. But as always, the sources for Islamic history, especially for the formative early centuries, present difficulties. Here I wish to make a preliminary attempt at dealing with part of this problem. I shall begin by considering an event which represents a turning point in the history of the Muslim poor, or more accurately, in the way poverty and the poor have been represented in modern historical scholarship on medieval Islam. Then I shall suggest a way in which this event may be set in context, and a possible strategy for handling some of the relevant sources. This strategy involves the identification of different, competing ways in which the poor were defined in the first centuries of Islam.

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.

The following joint article is a departure from standard studies, in that historical research is put side-by-side with numismatic evidence. It reflects the growing awareness of the underlying concepts of steppe society that significantly shaped the formation and endurance of the Mongol Empire. With new analysis, it is apparent that the society was clear about these concepts and expressed them in very public pronouncements. They are most evident in the early period of the empire; during the formation of the state by Chinggis Khan and his first two successors, Ögödei (r. 1229–41) and Güyük (r.1246-48). However, the cataclysmic civil war in the middle of the thirteenth century between the Ögödeyids and Toluids removed direct acknowledgment of such a social ethos. Indeed, after 1250 khans strongly focused on pragmatic issues and relied less on philosophical theories of legitimacy, at least Mongolian ones. By contrast, the first three rulers were keenly aware of the theory of the state and the way society functioned within it. They developed this ethos into a fairly cohesive form that provided moral strength to a nascent regime. The evidence for this development emerges from the study of two particular words, tengri, “Heaven”, and especially töre, “grand principle”. Töre in this usage was the equivalent of the ‘binding and unbinding’ and the sunna of the messenger, Muḥammad, in medieval Islamic societies and of democracy in modern times. Tengri and töre are culturally defined theories closely related to the Aristotelian sense of positive law. In all cases, reality required various approaches to them at a given period of time. As a result, the concept of töre had existed before the empire and continues to this day, always implying the correct order of good governance.

South of Arṣūf-Apollonia, on the western edge of the modern city of Herzliya (Israel), at the top of a limestone hill overlooking the sea, stands a rectangular fortress-like building (Fig. 1), commonly known as Mashhad Sayyidnā ‘Alī – a name derived from that of ‘Alī b. ‘Alīm, who lies buried there. The story of Sayyidnā ‘Alī, which I would like to set forth in this article, combines three intertwined aspects that shed light on Muslim Palestine and Syria (bilād al-shām) in the Middle Ages.

This article begins with the premise that nostalgia haunts histories of Indian Muslim cultural and social life but remains curiously underspecified with relation to Muslim political life. By looking at the figure of Mohamed Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) and a constellation of transnational initiatives around the year 1913 in particular, it suggests ways in which we might redeploy nostalgia in order to look for temporal and spatial ambivalence in historical moments. In turn, that ambivalence points to the limitations of understanding nostalgia as purely a longing for another place and a past time.

It is well-known that Maimonides (1135–1204), one of the greatest philosophers and experts in Jewish law (Halakhah), was an eminent physician as well. He probably studied medicine during his sojourn in Fez (Morocco) between 1158 and 1165, after he and his family had fled from his native city Cordoba, because of the persecutions by the fanatical Muslim regime of the Almohades.