This article examines the relations between trade, faith, and textual traditions in early modern Indian Ocean region and the birth of Arabi-Malayalam, a new system of writing which has facilitated the growth of a vernacular Islamic textual tradition in Malabar since the seventeenth century. As a transliterated scriptorial-literary tradition, Arabi-Malayalam emerged out of the polyglossic lingual sphere of the Malabar Coast, and remains as one of the important legacies of social and religious interactions in precolonial south Asia. The first part of this article examines the social, epistemic and normative reasons that led to the scriptorial birth of Arabi-Malayalam, moving beyond a handful of Malayalam writings that locate its origin in the social and economic necessities of Arab traders in the early centuries of Islam. The second part looks at the complex relationship between Muslim scribes and their vernacular audience in the aftermath of Portuguese violence and destruction of Calicut—one of the largest Indian Ocean ports before the sixteenth century. This part focuses on Qadi Muhammed bin Abdul Aziz and his Muhiyuddinmala, the first identifiable text in Arabi-Malayalam, examining how the Muhiyuddinmala represents a transition from classical Arabic theological episteme to the vernacular-popular poetic discourse which changed the pietistic behaviour of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar.

Grenard has said, “it is largely because of human nature's delight in superlatives, that the world's famous captains have always been given perfectly fabulous hosts. Great generals must have huge armies. The names of Genghis Khan (Chinghiz Khan), Timur, Alexander, and Xerxes mount like wine to the brain of the historian. His figures become figures of speech: ‘one hundred thousand’ becomes his minimum. He soon leaps to ‘one million’. He does this with a sense of relish but also because he knows that his reader will tremble with pleasurable awe at the passing of a conqueror who leads countless warriors.”

Hülegü (d. A.D. 1265) and his successors were known by the title īlkhān, which has provided modern scholars with a convenient label for the dynasty. In general, īlkhān has been glossed as “subject” or “submissive” khān. There is less agreement, however, over the circumstances in which īlkhān was adopted by Hülegü. This, in turn, is connected to the more general discussion on the manner in which Hülegü's dynasty was established. Without purporting to resolve these questions, in the following article some evidence is offered which sheds light on these matters.

The following translations are from the texts in my Assyrian Medical Textsfor sick men suffering from ear-trouble.

No. 80. AM. 34, 4 (K. 2422) + 37, 2 (K. 7096 + 9059 + 11916 + 16434) + 35, 4 (K. 10787) + 4, 7 (81–7–27, 61, already translated as a fragment, No. 14, PRSM. 1924, 15); AM. 33, 1, and 34, 1 (K. 3215 + 3666 + 8109 + 10453) + 36, 1 (K. 3696 + 7221 + 10767 + 11788) + 12, 2 (K. 10019) + 34, 5 (S. 379); AM. 97, 6 (K. 3486); AM. 38, 4 (K. 6661) + 37, 10 (K. 10498) + 38, 1 (K. 13492). From an examination of these four pieces of tablets it seems reasonably certain that they form parts of the same original whole. At the same time it should be observed that AM. 37, 2, rev., has three air holes in the body of the text, and that these occur in the others only in the vertical lines whch divide the columns. Three of the above are in KMI. 18, K. 6661, K. 10498, and 19, S. 379.

The revised text of the Charles Beckingham Memorial Lecture, Ibn Battūta and the Mongols, delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society on 13th January 2000 by D. O. Morgan.

This article examines how Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), one of the most prominent scholars of eighteenth-century India whose thought has continued to be influential in many Muslim circles to the present day, conceptualized the interplay of political power and religious authority. Though several of Wali Allah's numerous writings have received considerable scholarly attention, this aspect of his political and religious thought has, oddly, been much neglected. A close reading of Wali Allah's writings reveals him to be keenly interested not just in the immediately relevant issues of the chronic political instability afflicting his age but also in the broader, theoretical, questions of how political power undergirds the moral force of religious norms and institutions. It is his unusually blunt but robust recognition that power is part of what enables a religious tradition to evolve and change that this article explores. That recognition—buried in writings that purport to be about the merits of Islam's first caliphs—has other important implications, too, notably for an understanding of the broad political context in which the sacred law itself undergoes change.

“When Red Pigeons Gathered on Tang's House” (Chi jiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu 赤之集湯之屋) is a Warring States period bamboo manuscript written in the script of the Chu state. It concerns figures that are well known in historical legend: Tang 湯, the founder of the Shang dynasty; his wife; his minister Yi Yin 伊尹, here called by the title xiaochen 小臣 [minor servitor]; and the last king of the Xia dynasty, here called simply the Xia Lord (xia hou 夏后). These figures have their familiar identities, but the tale recorded in the manuscript is unique and has no apparent political or philosophical import. The protagonist, Xiaochen, is Tang's cook, but he does not play the role of founding minister raised up by a future king. Moreover, he is associated with a nexus of motifs associated with shamans, including spirit possession. He acquires clairvoyance after eating a soup of magic red birds (jiu 鳩, [pigeons] or hu 鵠 [cranes]) intended for Tang. After fleeing from an angry Tang, he is possessed by a spirit-medium raven. He then cures the illness of the Xia Lord by having him move his house and kill the yellow snakes and white rabbits under his bed. One rabbit escapes and the story concludes that this is why parapets are placed on houses, suggesting that the context of the story was the construction of a building. Thus, it may have been similar to a historiola, narrated in a ritual to sanctify houses after the placement of the parapet, thus preventing illness among the inhabitants.

The Sunni tradition of the ninth and tenth centuries often reports Muslims from the seventh and eighth centuries so fearful of God and the Last Judgement that they wished they had never been born, wept uncontrollably, and otherwise carried on as we seldom hear of from later centuries. My first object is therefore to make out what these fearers were up to. To look forward, I would characterise the piety on display as being intensely ascetical. It is about insecurity and divine transcendence, not trust and nearness to God. The fearers seem to have cultivated anxiousness to maintain their devotion and prevent complacency. My second object is to make out why such exaggerated fear evidently faded away in the later eighth century. I tend to think that fear had to be moderated with the development of Sunni theology in the ninth century, which made it necessary to stress the prospect of salvation for all Muslims, and of a Sunni piety that eschewed extreme practices unsuitable for everyone to undertake.

The aim of the present paper is to describe the morphosyntactic properties of Iranian Coastal Balochi as spoken by the Afro-Balochi community. The Afro-Baloch have completely switched to Balochi and there are no traces of African languages in their speech. However, in comparison with other Balochi dialects of Iran on the one hand, and with Coastal Balochi dialects of Pakistan on other, Afro-Balochi shows archaic characteristics, particularly in its case system, in the demonstrative pronouns and in the alignment features. This might be due to the persisting social segregation of the Afro-Baloch and their limited access to education and media, resulting in reduced contact with the languages and dialects outside of their community.

MĀWARDI'S chapter on the office of Ḳāḍi in the Aḥkām Sulṭāniyya, ed. Enger, dealt with in JRAS., 1910, p. 761, is followed by that on Walāyat-al-Maẓālivi; the substanceof this chapter is as follows.

Najaf has been the cradle of Shī῾ī learning for many centuries. According to Najaf tradition, it has been so ever since the prominent scholar Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, called shaykh al-tā'ifa or “senior scholar of the the sect”, migrated there shortly after the Saljuq conquest of Baghdad in 447/1055.

We have very little information about the teaching system and curriculum in Najaf before the nineteenth century. In this essay, I will try to present the basic elements of a Najaf ḥawza education as they exist in contemporary Iraq and compare it with a Najaf curriculum of 1913. Quite remarkably, the curriculum, teaching methods and patronage networks have been remarkably stable over the last century. Politics and reform movements have, however, had their effects on the curriculum too, as I shall explain in the course of this essay.

“The recognition as well as interpretation of archaeological evidence will always be biased and incomplete. There can be no archaeologically achieved final truths or wholly objective interpretations. But to recognize such limitation is not to reduce the subject to a set of mere perceptual constructs. Archaeology is a societal activity that embodies both the residues of its past and its changing attitudes towards the past. We call the residues evidence and the attitudes interpretation. The continuing dialogue between the two enables archaeology, always open to new questions, to reveal new knowledge.”

David Gordon White's wide-ranging scholarship on tantra, yoga and alchemy has inspired many students and scholars to undertake research in those fields. White worked as an assistant to Mircea Eliade and his doctorate from the University of Chicago was in History of Religions. His research methodology, true to this scholastic heritage, is not as deeply rooted in textual criticism as that of the current vanguard of scholars working on tantra and yoga, whose philological studies rarely reference his work. The accessibility of his books and articles, however, together with his engaging writing style and the excitement that imbues his scholarship, mean that indologists specialising in other fields, and authors addressing non-scholarly audiences, frequently draw on his publications. White's prominence in the study of yoga and tantra requires all scholars working on those subjects to address his work.

This paper explores some different, interrelated versions of the history of the Pīshdādiyān, the earliest dynasty represented in the Shāhnāmeh, especially the recently edited text of Rashīd al-Dīn's Jāmi‘al-tawārīkh. This is compared with Bal‘amī’s Persian version of the History of al-Ṭabari and Qāḍī Baiḍāwī’s Niẓām al-tawārīkh, of which the latter is shown to provide much the closer basis for Rashīd al-Dīn's work — especially when confronted with the manuscripts of the Jāmi‘al-tawārīkh contemporary with the life of Rashīd al-Dīn. Comparison with both the early Arabic and Persian witnesses of the work suggests that the printed edition does not represent Rashīd al-Dīn's original text, but later reworkings of his chronicle — such as that by the fifteenth-century historian, Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū — which draw more directly on the Shāhnāmeh. In so far as there is discernible subtext to Rashīd al-Dīn's coverage of these earliest periods of Iranian monarchical history, it is more to emphasise the didactic message of the Shāhnāmeh and the justice and constructive achievements of the first kings, than to follow Firdausī’s narrative. Despite the potency of idea of the Shāhnāmeh as expressing Persian kingly traditions, it is suggested that perhaps it was only after the time of Rashīd al-Dīn and the Islamisation of the Mongol rulers that historians appreciated and emulated the literary and narrative aspects of the text for their own sake.

1. Generally speaking, two conditions rule the development of Indo-Aryan consonants, when considered by themselves in contact only with vowels. If initial, they are maintained; if intervocalic, they are voiced, opened, and in many cases altogether disappear.

The period of Mu'āwiya b. Sufyān, as governor over Syria and al-Jazīra under the caliph 'Uthmān from at least 25–6/646–7, and then as Umayyad caliph in Damascus 41–60/661–80, was crucial for the first impetus of Arab expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt had been conquered by 'Amr b. al-'Āṣ during 'Umar's caliphate, and the great port of Alexandria passed definitively into Arab hands by 21/642. Alexandria possessed famed dockyards, and had a Greco-Egyptian population which the Arabs were able to press into service for manning their warships operating out of the Egyptian ports and out of the harbours along the Syrian coast, such as Jaffa, Acre, Beirut and Tripoli.

In 1932 my friend Professor P. Pelliot handed to me eleven photographs of the Persian documents discovered at Bāmiyān. The originals must have been brought to Paris by the French Archæological Mission to Afghanistan, but I understood that they were to be returned to Kabul.

The recognition that the setting of the story related in the Syriac Hymn of the Soul is Iranian is primarily based on the statement in the poem that its chief character, the Prince who “from the far Hyrcanian mountains” was sent down to Egypt to fetch the unique Pearl, was the son of the king of Parthia. Less obvious Iranian reminiscences are also to be found in the Hymn, some of which have lately been discussed by G. Widengren in Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte, iv (1952), Heft 2,1 sqq., where, however, one misses a reference to the relationship of srbwg with the Sogdian word for “tower”, v. W. B. Henning, JRAS. 1944, 139 sq. It is proposed in the present note to explain the Iranian origin of a hitherto obscure title in the Hymn, which from the context appears to designate one of the highest officials of the Arsacid court. This is the title of the Prince's elder brother in verse 48, where the MS. has p'rybn “our p.”.