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.

No game occupies so important a position in the history of the world as that of chess. It is not only at the present day, but has been for many centuries, the most cosmopolitan of pastimes; and though one of the oldest known to civilization, it is yet undoubtedly the most intellectual. Long familiar to all the countries of the East, it has also been played for hundreds of years throughout Europe, whence it has spread to the New World, and wherever else European culture has found a footing. A map indicating the diffusion of chess over the habitable globe would therefore show hardly any blanks. Probably no other pastime of any kind can claim so many periodicals devoted exclusively to its discussion; certainly no other has given rise to so extensive a literature. The influence of chess may be traced in the poetry of the Middle Ages, in the idioms of most modern European languages, in the science of arithmetic, and even in the art of heraldry. An investigation as to its origin, development, and early diffusion therefore forms a not unimportant chapter in the history of civilization.

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.

In the numerous letters and papers which I have addressed during the last two years to the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, and which have been either read at the meetings of the Society, or in some instances published in the Journal, I have explained, in more or less detail, the successive discoveries which I have made in the history of ancient Assyria. Those discoveries have pretty well established the fact that an independent empire was first instituted on the Upper Tigris in the thirteenth century, B.C. They have furnished what may be considered an almost complete list of Assyrian kings from the above-named period to the destruction of Nineveh in B.C. 625, and they have further made us acquainted with the general history of Western Asia, during this interval of above seven centuries.

In 1943, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, whilst browsing in the Historiae Hungaricae Fontes Domestici edited by M. Florianus, I came across a short notice, No. 2 of Adnotationes Historicae seculi XII et XIII, entitled: “Quos Bela rex Hungarorum, velut dominus papa, nuntios ad Thartaros direxit.” An explanatory note states: “Notitia … de electione novi imperatoris Tartarorum, et nuptiis Stephani Belae IV-i filii cum filia regis Cumanorum celebratis descripta ex codice Parisiensi Luxemb. Fol. 22. sec. XIH-i, edita fuit in opere collectitio cui nomen “Thesaurus historicus” Budapestini anno 1878.” It took me some time to establish that the “Thesaurus historicus” mentioned here was in fact the Hungarian periodical Történelmi Tár. Fortunately I had no difficulty in finding the volume referred to by Florianus, and in it I saw reproduced the same Latin text accompanied by a note to the effect that the MS referred to contained also a version of Piano Oarpini's Historia Mongalorum. There was also a reference to the “Zeitschrift für deutsche Literature, XVII”. I had been chasing this reference intermittently for years when, in 1951, Mile. Marie-Thérèse d'Alverny, conservateur adjoint at the Bibliothèque Nationale, told me that Marczali's reference was wrong, and was to be corrected to “Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum”! There I found an article by W. Studemund, in which the note mentioned by Florianus and Marczali had been published, probably for the first time.

Among the few published Central Asian sources of the seventeenth century are two very unusual Persian-language accounts by Central Asians of their stays in Mughal India: the memoirs of Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi, and the travelogue of Mahmud b. Amir Wali. Written in stylistically different but distinctly personal voices untypical for their time, these accounts offer the modern reader valuable first-person insight into the minds and outlooks of their authors and shed light on the nature of how Muslims in Asia thought about their world and its boundaries.

Danodhar is the name applied to a large irregularly shaped and lofty hill, situated on the edge of the Runn of Cutch, about twenty miles NW. from Bhooj; attached to this place is the popular tradition, accounting for the present appearance of the Runn, and which also, at some remote period, appears to have been the means of founding the sect of Jogís, commonly known as Kánphatís.

The famous Kūfic inscription in the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock, which provides the building with a direct dating and an explicit message and which has been discussed for more than a century, once more claims our attention: a recent review of the mosaic decoration maintains that it has lost its original character during the latest restoration; that it has been “entirely redone” and has suffered corrections such as “adding alifs and diacritical points and signs wherever they appear to be missing”. No evidence is given for this disquieting news beyond the statement of a certain (or, as it seems, a rather uncertain) person; this inevitably provokes demand for further information, the more so as it is included in a book renowned for its reliable documentation.

At the beginning of this century shadow plays were sometimes performed in Egypt, but not very often. They had latterly become chiefly an entertainment for the lower classes, and because of the drastic comedy of these plays the Government took steps to suppress them. But we know that these shadow plays had a long history in Egypt, and have been performed also for the higher and highest classes. It is reported,1 for instance, that the well-known Sultan Saladin (died 1193) with his Wazir al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, was present at the performance of those plays; that the Turkish Sultan Selīm I, who in 1517 conquered Egypt, amused himself by seeing a performance of the shadow play. In recent times, the Khedive Taufīq Pasha (1879–1892) liked to see such representations. I myself possess some shadow play figures especially made for performances before him.

This article studies two questions related to al-Khansā'’s mutaqārib poem, rhyming in -ālahā: how was it changed through anthologisation and what is its relation to the Qur'ān and Surah 99? Whereas the six-verse excerpt in al-Mubarrad's Kāmil is full of Qur'ānic echoes, the Dīwān version of the poem has few such echoes. The analysis, however, opens up a possibility that the Qur'ān's first audience may well have recognised in Surah 99 features familiar to them from marthiyas.

The recent unearthing of this thirteenth century collection of notes pertaining to the political history of the early Ilkhanate has thrown some light on events and attitudes of that time. Though the manuscript was actually penned by Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī of the Rasadkhana in Maragha, it is not certain that he was the author of the work. Rather than comprising one continuous narrative of events, the manuscript is a collection of notes and observations, occasionally detailed but other times very sketchy. However stamped with the seal of the Raba’ al-Rashidi there is evidence that this text was used selectively as a source for Rashīd al-Din's Jama’-ye Tavarikh. What is particularly interesting is that some of the events that are quoted in Rashid al-Dīn's chronicles are only partially reported and it is obvious that for whatever reasons parts of “Shīrāzī's” accounts are omitted in the re-telling.

This article studies two generations of the Mahmudabad family, which was one of the largest Muslim landholding families in India: Maharaja Sir Muhammad ‘Ali Muhammad Khan and Raja Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan. The family were Twelver Shi‘as and hailed from Mahmudabad in Awadh. Specifically, it shows how intra-community links of marriage and kinship facilitated a flow of ideas, information and people and therefore created new networks. The article then explores these connections through the example of the Madrasa’t-ul Wa‘izeen, which was founded by the Maharaja and its two main publications, Al-Wa‘iz, an Urdu magazine and the English language The Muslim Review. The founding of the madrasa also demonstrates the importance of ideology, pilgrimage, preaching and their corresponding networks. These relationships are analysed keeping in mind local, national and transnational institutions and the role these played in creating ties between Mahmudabad, Lucknow and the wider Muslim world. This article thus presents a typology of a particular kind of Muslim transnationalism, showing how family, marriage, ideology and the importance of preaching mutually reinforced each other. The larger goal is to show how this family could be both ‘rooted’ in the local while also being part of the transnational Muslim community.

Like other elements of culture, alphabets have both practical and ethnopolitical integrating or differentiating significance. Hence, any alphabet change has serious political implications. This article will briefly consider the process of romanisation undertaken in the six newly independent Muslim states that were part of the Soviet Union (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan); and then evaluate its success or failure and attempt to explain the causes for these phenomena.

I beg leave, in answer to your letter of the 17th instant, to submit it as my opinion to the Council, that the Account of the Constitution of the late Government of the Kingdom of Kandy is of sufficient interest to be published in the Proceedings of the Society.

When set against our knowledge of contemporary Greece and Rome, the whole of Parthian history may be termed a “Dark Age”. Even so, within the four centuries of Arsacid domination, the accidents of discovery and the efforts of scholarship have illuminated some periods more than others. Of the latter, one, running between the death of Mithradates II in about 88 B.C. and the accession of Orodes II some thirty years later, has proved peculiarly impenetrable.

Within the last quarter of a century two serious attempts have been made to explain the fact that the Avesta uses one set of words for beings belonging to the creation of Ahura Mazda and another for those formed by Aura Mainyu. The former of these theories was advanced by Leo Frachtenberg (“Etymological Studies in Ormazdian and Ahrimanian Words in Avestan,” in Spiegel Memorial Volume, Bombay, 1908, pp. 269–89), and the latter by Hermann Güntert (“Ueber die ahurischen und daēvischen Ausdrücke im Avesta, eine semasiologische Studie,” in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philbsophisch-historische Klasse, 1914, Abhandlung 13).

The article offers a survey of religious contacts maintained between Tibet and Russian Buddhists, the ethnic Buryats and Kalmyks, from the late 19th C. to the 1930s. Chronologically, the story falls into two parts, the dividing point being the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The focus in the first portion is on the Russian Buddhist colony in Lhasa centred around the Gomang Datsang (school) of the Drepung monastery, its emergence and growth in the early 20th C., in the wake of Russo-Tibetan rapprochement brought about by a Buryat scholar-monk and adviser of the 13th Dalai Lama, Agvan Dorjiev. The tsarist government tried to use their Buddhist connection with Lhasa to political ends – in January 1904, shortly after the beginning of the British military invasion of Tibet, they sent a secret Kalmyk reconnaissance mission to Lhasa under a Cossack subaltern, Naran Ulanov, assisted by a cleric (bakshi) Dambo Ulianov. The latter part of the article concentrates on the dramatic post-revolutionary period. It begins with the story of the Kalmyk refugees in Turkey and their abortive attempt to emigrate to Tibet. There's also a detailed discussion of the endeavours by Soviet leaders to win the Dalai Lama over, by employing the loyal Buryats and Kalmyks for their secret missions to the Potala. The key figures behind this scheme were the Soviet foreign minister, G. V. Chicherin, and the same Agvan Dorjiev, posing as the Dalai Lama's representative in the USSR. As a result of the Bolshevik propaganda, many of the Buryat and Kalmyk residents in Lhasa began to return to their homeland in the 1920s. The crackdown on Buddhism in Soviet Russia put an end to the Moscow–Lhasa political dialogue. Hence all connections between the Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists and their religious “Mecca” were deliberately cut by the Soviet authorities by 1930.

This paper traces the history and usage of the theory of Sinicisation in western and Chinese scholarship, and discusses the intellectual trends underlying the different discourses in which the theory has been adopted. Since early 20th Century, the theory of “Sinicisation” has evolved and was adopted into three distinct historiographical discourses to construct different arguments. The first discourse is about the historical acculturation of border peoples and assimilation of domestic peoples to Chinese language, culture and economic life; the second one argues an inherent superiority in Chinese culture specifically produced cultural change across eastern Eurasia to promote nationalism; the third discourse emphasizes the diversity and mixture of the people living inside historical and contemporary China to construct and stabilise the polity. Every discourse rooted in its own intellectual trend, and also faces different criticism. Followed with examining criticisms of Sinicisation since the 1950s, this paper concludes by discussing the relationships of the three discourses of Sinicisation.

There was a time, when to treat of the small-pox must have been a task truly painful; when, alas! little more could be done than to trace its devastations and its horrors: but, thanks to heaven and the perseverance of the benevolent, those days are long past, and the subject can at length be viewed in a very different light. Relieved from the distressing office of but too frequently having to offer a vain consolation to a virtuous mother sorrowing for the loss of a darling child, medical men can now speak of the disease with far other feelings; with the same satisfaction, to use a metaphor, that is felt in painting the blessings of an honourable peace, which have succeeded to a long and disastrous war; or the joy of a private family, which has finally risen into comfort and security, through a protracted struggle of domestic affliction.

This paper invites discussion on the proposition of compiling a Palestinian Arabic emotive lexicon that would incorporate in its entries, in addition to cognitive definitions, the emotions, associations, connotations, metaphors, idioms, and non-verbal expressions that are commonly associated with a given word. My main working hypothesis is that semantics must address emotions, i.e., that words, and not only their peripheral elements, carry emotive content. Ignoring these, empathies (temporary term), the manner in which expression is “understood” within a given culture, is partial, at best. Research is to be carried out both quantitatively, in field research, and qualitatively, by literary analysis. The many theoretical, as well as the practical, pitfalls of this suggestion are taken into consideration. The paper's appendices include a sample entry and a sample questionnaire.