This article draws on a wide range of Shiʽi periodicals and monographs from the 1950s until the present day to investigate debates on the status of Sayyids in Pakistan. I argue that the discussion by reformist and traditionalist Shiʽi scholars (ʽulama) and popular preachers has remained remarkably stable over this time period. Both ‘camps’ have avoided talking about any theological or miracle-working role of the Prophet's kin. This phenomenon is remarkable, given the fact that Sayyids share their pedigree with the Shiʽi Imams, who are credited with superhuman qualities. Instead, Shiʽi reformists and traditionalists have discussed Sayyids predominantly as a specific legal category. They are merely entitled to a distinct treatment as far as their claims to charity, patterns of marriage, and deference in daily life is concerned. I hold that this reductionist and largely legalising reading of Sayyids has to do with the intense competition over religious authority in post-Partition Pakistan. For both traditionalist and reformist Shiʽi authors, ʽulama, and preachers, there was no room to acknowledge Sayyids as potential further competitors in their efforts to convince the Shiʽi public about the proper ‘orthodoxy’ of their specific views.

Javanese literature can boast a distinct genre of works about the adventures of wandering students/scholars, who travel about the countryside in pursuit of esoteric knowledge. Journeying and undergoing various trials and tribulations on the way is regarded in Javanese culture as an ascetic practice, preparatory to ultimate enlightenment. An early, pre-Islamic representative of this genre is the Kidung Subrata, dated 1541. The best-know examples, at least by name, i.e. the Cĕnṭini and Jatiswara, probably originate from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the course of time these two stories were constantly reworked until by the beginning of the nineteenth century they reached massive proportions and were made into storehouses of encyclopaedic knowledge of all kinds of things Javanese. The so-called Major Cěntini, compiled in 1814 at the Surakarta Crown Prince's court, has hitherto received most attention. Quite a few scholars, guided by Pigeaud's table of contents, have tapped this source for information on many topics.

In 1076, some twenty years before the First Crusade was launched, Pope Gregory VII wrote to al-Nāşir, Sultan of Bougie in what is now Algeria:

For there is nothing which Almighty God, who wishes that all men should be saved and that no man should perish, more approves in our conduct, than that a man should first love God and then his fellow men … Most certainly you and we ought to love each other in this way more than other races of men, because we believe and confess one God, albeit in different ways, whom each day we praise and reverence as the creator of all ages and the governor of this world. For, as the Apostle says: “He is our peace, who hath made both one”.

This enlightened view of Islam was not widely shared in Latin Christendom at that time, nor was it rooted in any very profound knowledge of the Muslim religion. B. Z. Kedar is, I think, correct in his view that a good deal of information about Islam was available in the West before the crusades, both in written and oral sources, but because there was a general lack of interest in the subject, no attempt had been made to coordinate this knowledge.

Among the languages of the Austronesian stock, formerly called the Malayo-Polynesian family, several are entitled to the name of literary languages, languages with a literature of their own in refined prose and poetry.

Tanjore in South India during the reign of Raja Serfoji II (1798–1832), is a hitherto unexamined episode of both colonial science and of ‘Enlightenment’ in the non-western context. If Joseph Banks, a product of the English Enlightenment, was a metropolitan ‘centre of calculation’ directing and controlling a collecting network in India between the 1770s and 1820, it is argued that Raja Serfoji was his native counterpart, exhibiting similar formal properties, and drawing on those very same ideas and networks of metropolitan practice to systematically produce useful knowledge. This case study demonstrates strongly (among other things) the weaknesses of the centre-periphery model of scientific practice. It shows how the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are not determined by virtue of the geographical location, but by the nature of practice, which is a combined effect of social, scientific and power relations. Thus, this article examines the ways in which it became possible for a small quasi-Indian state in early nineteenth-century South India to leap onto the threshold of modernity, by generating an intellectual ferment of the kind that it did, as a unique native response to the western encounter.

The Trade Routes. If the prehistoric tracks ran as outlined above, it would be logical to find some of them developing into trade-routes and also into modern roads except where settlements moved down into the valley, by the riverside, as land-clearing progressed. Such movement makes definitive proof rather difficult. But there is enough in common between old tracks and new, particularly the passes, to show the development. The great Buddhist cave monasteries (all near mountain passes) at Karsambḷe, Ṭhāṇālā, Bhājā, āarle, Beḍsā, and Junnar outline main trade routes without any doubt, particularly when smaller intermediate caves are linked up. It is logical to expect merchants to use the tracks most frequented by whatever people lived there before there were ploughusing villages. The Buddhist monks who penetrated the wilderness to preach ahiṃsā and peaceful social behaviour would naturally follow the same tracks in order to reach the greatest number of savages. Their religion insisted upon the cessation of bloodsacrifices, and the cult-spots were the most likely places for their preaching. So these cults and the major Buddhist caves which are obviously at the junctions of great trade-routes should have some demonstrable connection. In fact, this is just what we find.

In the month of June, 1837, the Managing Directors of the Indian Iron and Steel Company received a letter from Robert Clerk, Esq., Secretary to the Madras Governor, forwarding a copy of your letter of the 17th of February, 1837, addressed to the Governor of Madras, requesting information on the subject of wootz*, or Indian steel: the purport of Mr. Clerk's letter was to ask us to furnish the information and specimens required by you, provided we could do so without inconvenience or detriment to our own interests.

In post-revolution Iran, the sacred notion of martyrdom has been transformed into a routine act of government – a moral sign of order and state sovereignty. Moving beyond the debates of the secularisation of the sacred and the making sacred of the secular, this article argues that the moment of sacralisation is realised through co-production within a social setting when the object of sacralisation is recognised as such by others. In contemporary Iran, however, the moment of sacralising bodies by the state is also the moment of its own subversion as the political-theological field of martyrdom is contested and challenged from within. This article traces the genealogy of martyrdom in contemporary Iran in order to explore its institutionalised forms and governmental practices. During the revolution, the Shi'a tradition of martyrdom and its dramatic performances of ritual mourning and self-sacrifice became central to the mass mobilisation against the monarchy. Once the revolutionary government came into existence, this sacred tradition was regulated to create ‘martyrs’ as a fixed category, in order to consolidate the legacy of the revolution. In this political theatre, the dead body is a site of transformation and performance upon which the original narrative of martyrdom takes place even as it displaces it and gives new meanings to the act.

It is now generally agreed by most authorities on the subject that the Aryan linguistic vestiges in the Near East are to be connected specifically with Indo-Aryan, and not with Iranian, and also that they do not represent a third, independent Aryan group, and are not to be ascribed to the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Aryan. This conclusion is incorporated in the title of M. Mayrhofer's bibliography of the subject, Die Indo-Arier im alten Vorderasien (Wiesbaden, 1966), and it can now be taken as the commonly accepted view. It is based on the fact that where there is divergence between Iranian and Indo-Aryan, and where such elements appear in the Near Eastern record, the latter always agrees with Indo-Aryan. Such items are aika “one” and šuriyaš “sun”, and the colour names parita-nnu and pinkara-nnu which correspond to Sanskrit palita- “grey” and piṅgala- “reddish”. The evidence of vocabulary is supported by that of the four names of gods appearing in the Hittite-Mitanni treaty, where the Vedic gods Mitra and Varuṇa, Indra, and the Nāsatyas can be clearly recognized. This combined evidence is sufficient to establish the conclusions of Mayrhofer and others beyond reasonable doubt, and the arguments of A. Kammenhuber, who later attempted to resuscitate the theory that the Aryans of the Near East were Proto-Aryans, cannot be said to have been successful.

THE origin of this note is to be found in a passage in Mr. C. N. Parkinson's Trade in the Eastern Seas (Cambridge, 1937), where, in connection with the Portuguese enterprise in the East, the suggestion is made that Asiatic seamen were deterred from rounding the Cape by want of courage rather than technical equipment. The passage is as follows (p. 6).

It might be thought that geography would have opened the Malay archipelago predominantly to the influence of China, but oddly enough the impact of her great civilization on the Malay world has been slight. As early as the seventh century a.d. Chinese monks sailed down to Sumatra to study the Buddhist canon, and eight centuries later the Sultans of Malacca and other Malay princes were still sending envoys to China as Malay rulers had done for hundreds of years. But China's difficult language and intricate ideographs, and her want of missionary zeal and of continuous overseas imperialism were barriers to other than trade relations. To the western half of the Malay archipelago India was nearer, and India got first into the field. With little exaggeration it has been said of Europe that it owes its theology, its literature, its science, and its art to Greece: with no greater exaggeration it may be said of the Malayan races that till the nineteenth century they owed everything to India: religions, a political system, medieval astrology and medicine, literature, arts and crafts.

The year 1260 marks the beginning of a sixty year conflict between the Mongols of Persia and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria. Over this period several large-scale battles were fought in north and central Syria in the course of Mongol invasions of that country. In addition, throughout most of this period, a more or less continuous border war raged on both sides of the Euphrates River, in north Syria and south-west Anatolia. Twice the Mongols were successful in occupying most of Syria: in 658/1260 and 699/1299–1300. In both cases the Mongol conquest lasted for only a few months, but in each instance this was more than enough time to launch raids into what was then south-west Syria, also variously known as the Holy Land, Palestine and the Land of Israel. In the absence of any other central authority over the ma jority of this territory, it can be said that in a sense Palestine twice also enjoyed the “benefits,” again temporary, of Mongol occupation.

The foundation of history's recent ‘emotional turn’ is that emotions matter in shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational “economic subjects in trousers and skirts”— or, as it may be, dhotis and saris.

Though Ibn Bājjah (Avempace) is by common consent one of the representative Arab philosophers, our knowledge of his views has rested on a narrow basis. Carra de Vaux in France and Sarton in the United States stressed that he is little more than a name—though a famous one—and pointed to the desirability of getting to know more of his work. Students had, when Carra de Vaux and Sarton wrote, been confined for knowledge of Ibn Bājjah's writings to the Hebrew extracts from his Tadbīru'l-Mutawaḥḥid, translated into French by Munk eighty years ago and later dealt with by others. Though at least two MSS. were known to exist in Europe no work of Ibn Bājjah had appeared in the original.

The letter which is about to be read, not having been prepared for submission to the Society, may require a few introductory explanations.

Bámíán, a site of considerable fame in the travels and expeditions of the last sixty or seventy years, stands at a height of some 8500 feet, in a valley of the region occupied by Hazára tribes, on the chief road between Kabul and Turkestan, and almost close to the northern base of that part of the Indian Caucasus which is known, from one of its prominent peaks, as Koh-i-bábá.

“Fifty years ago, the name of Chin Peng was feared almost as much as Osama bin Laden is today”. So wrote the Hong Kong-based journalist, Philip Bowring, in 2003. Fifty years ago the British empire, in the view of Field Marshal Montgomery, was locked in a struggle “between the East and West, between Communism and Democracy, between evil and Christianity”. It was a time when Chin Peng was Britain's enemy number one in Southeast Asia. A measure of his importance is the size of the reward offered in May 1952 for his capture: M$250,000 was equivalent to first prize in the Social Welfare Lottery and a huge sum compared with the wage rates of Malayan workers. Chin Peng is Malaya's Ho Chi Minh, but a Ho Chih Minh manqué. Like Ho Chi Minh, Chin Peng was a communist who, having played a key part in local resistance to the Japanese occupation, led the struggle against the post-war restoration of European colonialism. Yet, whereas Ho Chi Minh established the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Chin Peng was thwarted in his attempt to create a socialist state in Malaya. Consequently, while the one became a national hero, the other has been cast out from the land of his birth and until recently has been without a voice in its history. The publication of his memoirs in 2003, however, enables us to reappraise Chin Peng's part in the achievement of Malayan independence.

Perfumes have been known as utilizable but exclusive products since antiquity. Use of aromatic substances was first mentioned in archaic sources of the ancient world. The origin of such fragrant substances was mainly vegetable and animal. Throughout history, the use of subtle perfumes increased and some of the exotic materials became expensive and valuable commodities. They were the source of wealth for cultures and rulers. The contribution of the Arabs to the distribution of new crops, knowledge, industrial techniques and substances is a well-known phenomenon. In our article we intend to focus on the new perfumes that were distributed throughout the world thanks to the Arab conquests and the knowledge of their other uses, mainly medicinal, that was handed down along with the products themselves. About 20 common perfumes are known to have been used in the medieval world, though half of them were not mentioned in earlier sources.

These phenomena will be dealt with and presented in a profile we built up for four perfumes: agarwood, camphor, musk and ambergris. The theoretical and practical uses of these perfumes that are presented in detail (based on various sources including traders’ documents, medical literature and practical Genizah fragments, dealing mainly with medicine) will serve as case studies for the understanding of new trends in the uses of perfumes after the Muslim conquest. Arab perfumes can be divided into three groups, according to their level of importance:

A. New perfumes, mainly from the vast region named “India”; most of which (such as camphor, ambergris and sandalwood and a compound made out of them known as nadd and ghāliya) were not known in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region until the Muslim conquests.

B. Perfumes that kept their popularity including: a variety of cinnamon, costus, spikenard, frankincense, saffron and rose.

C. Perfumes that lost their worth like balsam and myrrh.

It seems that camphor was the best and most cherished perfume that substituted balsam. Like balsam, the importance of myrrh that was imported from Arabia and East Africa also declined and it seems that its substitute was musk. Transformations in perfume fashion were in fact only part of a wider revolution of the Arabic material culture which the Middle East, the Mediterranean region and even many European countries experienced due to the Arab conquests.

Notwithstanding a recent resurgence of scholarly interest in what one may call “Mappila Studies”—the body of scholarship on the Muslims of Malabar in the Malayalam-speaking South Indian state of Kerala—research on this community still leaves too much to be desired. As for the fate of Mappila literary culture within this incipient field of study, scholars have either given short shrift to or painted in broad brushstrokes the impressive literary legacy of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar despite its enormous historic/al and socio-cultural value.2 That said, even the tiny array of scholarly works, mostly by Malayali scholars, that seeks to treat of Mappila literature has largely approached the subject, I argue, from a provincialised “literary” vantage point, thereby reducing the whole of Mappila narratives to mere aesthetic artifacts having no bearing upon the lives of Mappilas. I call this dominant paradigm of doing Mappila literature “literarisation”—that is, fetishising the “literariness” of text by privileging its formal, stylistic, and aesthetic features over its social tone and life. This view assumes text to be a domain of symbols separable from a domain of practice and disregards the social production of text which cannot be abstracted out from the materialities giving shape to it.3

[The Royal Asiatic Society having- determined to reprint occasionally papers which may be considered of interest, or may contain useful information, and which, although in print, are not generally procurable in this country, have been pleased to select in the present instance a translation made by me many years ago, and published anonymously in one of the periodical publications of the Calcutta press. At the time of its publication, the subject was entirely new. It has lost something of the gloss of novelty by the more comprehensive journals which have since appeared; but it still contains information regarding parts of Turkestan and Central Asia, which is not derivable from any better source, as the countries have not been visited in modern times by European travellers. In what has also ceased to be novel, the observations of the traveller are not without interest, as they relate to a political state of the countries traversed, which had undergone a change for the worse even when Izzet Ullah's steps were; followed by Moorcroft and Trebeck, and which has become still further deteriorated by the anarchy that has so long distracted Afghanistan. The journal of Izzet Ullah is in most places little more than a mere itinerary, and it is so far more serviceable to geography than to history; but he occasionally extends his notes so as to furnish materials for the latter.

The Mughal Empire is paradigmatic in many of its formulations, and it is epitomised in the persons of its first six padshahs or emperors. The Great Mughals, Grao Mogor, Grand Mogul, Großmogul or Groote Mogul, as the padshahs were known in Europe, have been considered as paragons of rulership. In critical appraisals, which were the prevailing view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were the quintessential Oriental despots, held up as a warning to those rulers in Europe with similar aspirations. One thinks here especially of Francois Bernier's letters of the Mughal court to his French contacts which included Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). In more sympathetic (and more recent) eyes, such as those of the world-traveller, philosopher and enthusiastic inter-culturalist Count Hermann Keyserling, who was in India in 1911, they were “the grandest rulers brought forth by mankind”. Keyserling came to this conclusion because the Mughals “combined in their personalities so many divers talents: they were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche, and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers”. He felt that such a “superior human synthesis” (grossartige Menscheitsynthese) had not shown itself in any European king. Here I discuss to what extent the emperor Jahangir fulfilled Francis Bacon's ideal of the perfect ruler.