The double-page frontispiece to the manuscript of Saʿdi's Būstān transcribed for the penultimate Timurid ruler Sultan Husayn (r. 1469–1506) and now in the National Library of Egypt (Adab Farisi 22) is well-known and oft-published. Reproduced repeatedly since the turn of the twentieth century, it has become part of the canons of Persian painting, Timurid art, the oeuvre of Bihzad and his circle, masterpieces of the Cairo Library, and more. Connoisseurs and scholars have repeatedly discussed its period details. Barbara Brend, the scholar we honour in this volume, who has written so mellifluously about Persianate painting, analysed the identity and pose of several figures in it. Here I should like to continue the lengthy isnād, suggesting three ways of examining the frontispiece in the context of the manuscript to which it belongs, first structurally as the opening spread in a codex, then literarily as the introduction to a specific text, and finally, historically as a pictorial encomium to the princely patron for whom the manuscript was produced. Altogether, the article looks at three different ways of reading this and other pictorial frontispieces.

Using sources in Arabic, Gujarati, Ottoman, Persian and Urdu, this article examines the foundation of Bohra and Khoja pilgrimage institutions straddling western India and Iraq's Shīʿī shrine cities between 1897 and 1932. As manifestations of ‘locative piety’, these institutions were an outgrowth of the commercial capital Bohra and Khoja merchants had acquired in Indian Ocean trade over the previous half century, and the distinct caste and sectarian identities this wealth augmented. The Bohra and Khoja (both Twelver and Ismāʿīlī) mercantile and religious elites supplied their constituents with a well-ordered pilgrimage to Iraq, certainly by the standards of contemporary Hajj. To achieve this, community-run institutional nodes in Karachi, Bombay and the Shīʿī shrine cities were integrated into wider transport, administrative, and financial infrastructures connecting India and Iraq. Yet at a time when Najaf and Karbala's economic and religious fortunes were plagued by sectarianism, political upheavals and divisions among the mujtahids, the growing presence of western Indian Shīʿīs in the shrine cities was fiercely condemned by some Twelver Shīʿī clerics. One of their number, Muḥammad Karīm Khurāsānī, published a substantial polemic against the Bohras and Khojas in 1932, signalling how these pilgrimage infrastructures worked to exacerbate intra-Shīʿī disputes.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the process of community-centric awakening was producing the politics of religious identity, mobilisations, and mutual cultural contests between different communities. Punjab being a province that was inhabited mostly by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs witnessed an identity based triangular contest between these religious communities where the political leadership of each community picked up cultural symbols to mobilise, organise, and consolidate their respective constituencies. While presenting an account of the symbolic manoeuvrings around jhatka and tobacco in the politics of Sikh identity during the colonial and post-colonial contexts respectively, this article examines the role of symbols in community-centric discourses wherein cultural differences are transformed into cultural discord or antagonism. Here, it is argued that the meanings communicated and deciphered through such symbols need to be comprehended by locating their articulations in the field of inter-community power relations.

This article re-examines the theology of Egyptian ʿalim Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) through the writing of Late Ottoman sheikh ül-Islam Mustafa Sabri (1869–1954) and his radical critique of the Muslim reform (tajdīd) movement. One of Mustafa Kemal's most implacable foes, Sabri was alarmed to find Egyptian ʿulamaʾ and intellectuals advancing the positivist-materialist agenda he had challenged in Istanbul before fleeing in 1922 from Ankara's victorious nationalist forces. Debating the leading lights of the modernist movement in Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s, Sabri came to see its reform theology as little more than a calque on Enlightenment notions of religion; his ideas became influential through his close relationship with Hasan al-Banna and other figures from the Muslim Brotherhood. Examining Sabri's work in Istanbul and Cairo, ʿAbduh's early and later writing, and texts such as ʿAbduh's famous debate with Farah Antun, the islāmiyyāt literature of Egypt's liberal age, and material by Sayyid Qutb, I argue that Sabri was instrumental in formulating the hostile discourse that came to dominate Muslim views of ʿAbduh in the later twentieth century once the ideologies of Salafism and Brotherhood Islamism had eclipsed that of the reformers.

The celebrated universal Islamic history, Mīrkhwānd's Tārīkh-i Rauḍat al-ṣafā, written in Herat in the late Timurid period, became a model for later Persian histories, but has not yet been the subject of any substantial critical analysis as a work of historical literature, or in terms of its manuscript transmission. Although numerous copies exist of different volumes of the text, only a handful have been illustrated, providing another dimension to the reception and ‘reading' of the chronicle. This paper focuses on the fourth volume of Mīrkhwānd's history, on the Persian dynasties up to the rise of Timur, four copies of which have been illustrated, among them the Royal Asiatic Society’s manuscript no. P. 38. After detailing the ten pictures in the manuscript, the article concludes with a discussion of their character and purpose.

This article1 suggests that some works in the muraqqa' of Bahram Mirza (Shah Tahmasp's brother) in 951/1544-45 (Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Library, H. 2154) may have come from the well-known album compiled and decorated by Bihzad, from which only the preface by Khvandamir remains. Dust Muhammad (the calligrapher) thus included the works of Bihzad that had previously been part of Bihzad's album, together with their captions, in Bahram Mirza's muraqqa'. In working on his album, Dust Muhammad followed the style of Bihzad, adding the inscriptions to the unsigned works in the same handwriting in similarly decorated panels. It suggests that Bahram Mirza's muraqqa' follows the same arrangement as that compiled earlier by Bihzad, which was probably one of Bihzad's most important works of the Safavid period when he worked in the court workshop of Shah Tahmasp in Tabriz.

This article will focus on a Persian manuscript of Central Asian origin of exceptional literary, historical, and artistic importance. It is a selection of poetry, which was composed in Herat and written in 1531–32 in Bukhara and now belongs to King's College, Cambridge (King's Pote 186). It is the second part of my research on this manuscript, and I shall concentrate mainly on its textual and artistic peculiarities. The first part, which was published recently, was dedicated to its provenance as well as its historical and religious setting.1 The studies also reflect the political, social, and cultural processes in a contemporary turbulent world. Among these are the Shaybanid and Safavid conquests of sixteenth-century Central Asia, Shah Jahan's literary preferences, the colonial ambitions of the former Cambridge graduate Ephraim Pote, East India Company agent-turned-scholar Antoine Polier, and expertise of the crème de la crème of Victorian Cambridge academia.

The Rare Books department at the Free Library of Philadelphia owns a deluxe manuscript of Sa'di's Kulliyat, originally produced in mid-sixteenth century Shiraz and substantially modified in more modern times. Among the alterations was the insertion of a copy of the famous Timurid painting “Humay and Humayun in a garden”, belonging to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. The Philadelphia version of the Paris painting was likely based on either a published reproduction or a photograph taken of the original composition when it was on view at the ground-breaking 1910 exhibition “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst” in Munich. That photographic reproductions could result in pictorial replicas reveals once again the market forces behind the great interest in, demand for, and production of classical Persian painting during the early twentieth century.