Public opinion is formed by the information that the public consumes. The state, whether democratic or authoritarian, employs various media of communication to influence people's opinions and behaviours. In the nineteenth century, Afghan rulers would traditionally use force and religion to gain popular support and strengthen their authority. In the second half of the century, they started to use print technology to build their relationships with the public. The state's print, however, had to compete with the institution of the bazaar that had long served as the central place where information circulated in public. This article, drawing mostly on unexamined Afghan sources, offers an account of how the bazaar operated as a source of information and how the Afghan state tried to suppress it. The history of this information conflict uncovers new aspects in the troublesome relationship between the government and the governed in Afghanistan.

After Aden came under British rule (1839) its Jewish community was reinforced by Jewish immigrants from inland Yemen and also from other Middle Eastern countries. Some of the Adeni Jews, most of them British subjects, entered the Indian-British commercial network and expanded it to East Africa, mainly to Ethiopia, founding commercial strongholds there. From the late nineteenth century, Jews coming from Yemen joined the existing Adeni settlements.

This paper compares the reasons for the emigration to Ethiopia of Adeni Jews and Yemeni Jews, and their economic and social status under Italian colonial regime (established in Eritrea in the 1880s). It discusses relations between these Jews, which it argues, were determined by the position of each group in the colonial hierarchy, and by the necessity of sustaining religious-communal life. Thus, in spite of their shared Yemeni origin and attendance at the same communal institutions, ethnicity and religion proved weaker than social and economic considerations, and the two groups cultivated a separate identity.

This article presents and analyses two previously unknown sources on Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia (1710–83). While the raja has long been famed in Bengal as a patron of brahmans, scholarship on him has had to contend with a lack of evidence. The two new sources, reports of conversations between Krishnachandra and Europeans, furnish insights into his mind and milieu. They support recent arguments that he used brahmanical patronage to buttress his authority, and deception to deal with the ascendant East India Company. Their greatest contribution, however, is to reveal that the raja sought an active engagement with foreign intellectual traditions. They suggest that eighteenth-century Hindu learning, far from being inherently hidebound or insular, was amenable to outside influences.

As a case study of the changing mentalities that emerged in colonial India, this article analyses a discussion that took place among several munshis (secretaries trained in Persian to run the affairs of princely states), and also provides a translation and edition of the text. The subject was a short polemical letter refuting the immortality of the soul, published around 1850 in the Simla Akhbār (Simla News). The main question entertained in this correspondence was not the merit of the sceptical argument, based in part on modern medical findings, but the potential public impact of dismissing a religious doctrine that sustains morality. Two of the participants in this conversation, Shivaprasad and Sital Singh, displayed the full range of changes that made the nineteenth century so extraordinary, and the way they responded illustrates some of the salient features and stages of this process, including the difficulty of foreseeing the elimination of much of the system for which munshis were trained.

Literary sources of the classical era (first-fifth centuries), both Greco-Roman and Jewish, indicate that snakes were used for different purposes, such as for medicine, as raw materials for manufacturing objects, and as pets. This article discusses the use of snakes to deal with pests in the ancient homes as reflected in the Talmudic sources as well as in classical literature. The Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi) brings a story of how a house snake helped a family locate a wild snake that entered the house and left its venom in the food. The impression is that the origin of the story is from a non-Jewish environment, and not necessarily from Eretz Israel. It is not impossible that the story is one version of stories about Aesculapian snakes that helped exterminate and drive away pests, as related by Pliny. This narrative variation was absorbed by the sages from their own non-Jewish environment, who adapted the story to the religious-educational messages that they sought to convey. It seems that the practice of using snakes to exterminate domestic pests was relatively limited and less common than that of small predators, such as cats, mongooses or weasels.

In the introduction to his article, entitled “The Murder of Ibn abī l-Ḥuqayq: On the Origin and Reliability of Some Maghāzī Reports”, Harald Motzki summarises “special biases” by which western scholars deal with the Muslim sources concerning the life of the Prophet. For Motzki, one of the most important biases held against the Muslim sources is that “The background is theological, in that the traditions tried to create a specific theology of history, or in that the Muslims simply tended to put a halo around the founder of their religion”.2

The conquest of the Persian and half of the Byzantine Empire by the Arabs, under the banner of Islam in the seventh century, was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world. On the one side were ranged the forces of two highly-organized military powers, Imperial New Rome and Imperial Persia, which for over three centuries had been engaged in constant conflict with each other. Although this necessarily tended to exhaust the material resources of the combatants, it would naturally be supposed that it must have given them military experience, and their leaders a training in generalship, adequate to enable them to face with confidence of victory enemies hitherto regarded with contempt as mere barbarians. On the other side we see hosts of men, reared in a country where the conditions of life have always been of the hardest and most precarious, divided by tribal feuds and secular hatreds, poorly armed, with no practice in warfare against disciplined foes, and with no allies to swell their legions. Yet from the beginning the progress of the Arabs was one of almost uninterrupted success.

Among the royal titles used by the early Sinhalese kings there are two which, as royal titles, were not adopted by any of the dynasties known to us in India, and were therefore peculiar to Ceylon. An investigation into the history of these two titles is likely to throw some light on the origin of kingship in ancient Ceylon, and I therefore propose in this paper to pursue this line of study so far as the material available at present allows us to do so. The conclusions at which I have arrived by a study of the available data on this may not, in the present state of our knowledge, be taken as definitely established; but they might, nevertheless, be worthy of consideration by scholars interested in the early history of the Sinhalese people.

One of the most complete and entertaining accounts of the instruments of music of Turkey is that given by the chatty and voluble, though highly imaginative writer, Ewliyā Chelebī 1611– ca. 1669. Although his family held high appointments at the Ottoman court, yet young Ewliyā yearned for a literary career and, like many such Parnassian aspirants, began his public life as a ḥāfiẓ in Aya Sofia on the Lailat al-kaḍr of 1045 (=A.D. 1636), whenhe attracted the notice of Sultan Murād IV, who took him into the royal household. Here he was specially favoured, mainly on account of his musical and literary gifts. He had been taught music and singing by one of the best masters of the day, the Khalwatī dervish 'Umar Gulshanī, who lived to the great age of 140 years, himself having been taught by the eminent shaikh Ibrāhīm Gulshanī (d. 1533–4) of Cairo. After two years' service as a muṣāḥib, Ewliyā began his travels which have made him famous.

This study is based on the Weber-Macartney MS., which was edited by Hoernle, with a facsimile reproduction of the MS., transcription of the texts in Roman characters, and an index. (JASB., vol. lxx, pt. i, Extra Number 1, 1901.) Hoernle's text was pioneer work in the decipherment of Kuchean recently known as Tocharian B. Since then a few letters have been proved to have different values.

Like the invasion of the Danes in England, the incursions of the Bargi in Bengal, were characterized by murder and rapine and every species of atrocity. There is, however, a good deal of difference between the two, for we have nothing comparable to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle to record the latter, and in the matter of other materials, we are sadly lacking. The Nagpur Marhattas have left no historical records. Consequently there are no Marhatta sources. Neither are there any letters in Marathi, at least to my knowledge, on the subject, as these raids were undertaken by the now defunct house of Nagpur. Mr. Hill in his Bengal in 1756–7, has given us a brief summary of the English Factory Records of Fort William, and the old records of the East India Company might, if thoroughly searched, yield good material. The time, however, demanded for this is beyond our power to afford. Besides the above and occasional references here and there, there are, of course, three ether books which can be profitably consulted for the purpose—Salimulla's Tarikh-i-Bangla, Riyazu-s-salatin, and the Seir Mutaherin. This practically exhausts our list of authorities for studying the subject, so far as they are available to the general student.

Scarcely ever has Islām experienced more tragical times and more hardships than during the Mongol invasion in the course of the thirteenth century a.d. With the despite of the nomads, practitioners of the open-air life, for sedentary occupations, the people of Jengis Khān turned against and mercilessly destroyed the towns and works of civilization everywhere. Their disastrous campaign was only facilitated by the decomposition of the political unity of Islām at that time. In Baghdād the 'Abbāsid caliphate still subsisted, but its splendour was on the wane; to the west of Baghdād, in Egypt, Palestine, and a part of Syria, the Ayyūbids reigned, and in Asia Minor the Seljūqs, while to the east of Baghdād the Turkish princes from Khiva had, a rather insecure hold on the vast stretch of the Khwārizmian empire from the Ganges to the Tigris and from Turkestān to the Indian Ocean. This state of affairs was inviting to an enterprising invader of the sort of Jengis Khān who, in 1218, crushed the Khwārizmian empire, while his grandson, Hūlāghū Khān, put an end to the 'Abbāsid caliphate in 1258. The western provinces of Islām, including Egypt, were, however, spared from the devastating fury of the Mongols by the Mamlūk Sulṭān's victory over Ketbogha, Hūlāghū's general, at 'Ayn Jālūt, Palestine, in 1260. When in 1299–1301 his grandson Qāzān failed in conquering Syria Islām was definitely safe from further Mongol attacks.