Muḥammad I, the founder of the Naṣrid Sultanate in 629/1232, originated the first dynasty, al–dawla al–ghālibiyya al-nasriyya, as it has been called in modern times from his laqab, al-ghālib bi-llāh (= “the victor through Allāh”). He was succeeded by his son Muḥammad II al-Faqīh and grandsons Muḥammad III al-Makhlū‘ (= “the Dethroned”) and Abū I-Juyūsh Naṣr, with whom the direct masculine line of the al-Aḥmares (= “the Reds”) ended. Naṣr was dethroned by his nephew Ismā‘īl I, the son of their paternal sister Fāṭima and her husband the ra‘īs of Málaga, Abū Sa‘īd Faraj, who was also a member of the royal family.

I shall deal here with the sultans of the second dynasty up to the death of Muḥammad V, and will concentrate on its three main figures: Ismā‘īl I, his second son YūsufI and grandson Muḥammad V, and deal only briefly with Muḥammad IV - the firstborn son of Ismā‘īl I – and Muḥammad VI el Bermejo (the Redhead), a relative and brother-in-law of Ismā‘īl II. However, we should first establish the identity and origins of Ismā‘īl I‘s father, to understand why he did not become the first sultan of the new dynasty.

Dayr Dubbān was a small village, now in ruins, near the modern village of Luzit, situated to the north of the main road about half way from Jerusalem to Ascalon.

On May 21 1863, Victor Guérin the famous French explorer of the Holy Land visited a small village (“seven or eight poor peasant families living in half dilapidated huts”) called Dayr Dubbān (a Monastery of the Flies). On the rugged plateau on which this little village was built, Guérin found many round openings in the rocks which looked like openings of wells. In spite of the fact that the local inhabitants called them al-biyār, these were not wells but round apertures giving access to, and lighting huge underground cavities dug into the white limestone.

Texts stating in plain words the opinions of ancient Mesopotamian scholars concerning the shape of the universe have proved elusive, and consequently the question of whether they believed the sky to be flat or domed has never been settled. In 1975 Professor Lambert summarized the comments of earlier scholars on this topic and noted that textual support for the concept of a vault of heaven was lacking in cuneiform sources known to him at that time. Since then, the topic has elicited comment, but no serious attempt to assemble evidence in support of one view or another. In this paper I propose to bring together evidence from a range of sources and argue that in ancient Mesopotamia the sky was thought to be a rotating sphere with a polar axis.

Writing in the Supplement to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 1938, Gibb began his article on “Ta’rikh” by volunteering that the “[t]he problem of the origins of Arabic historiography is not yet finally solved.” It was an astonishing thing to write. For equipped as he was with al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādi, Ibn al-Nadīm, Ḥajjī Khalifa, Yāqūt's Irshād, the first volume of al-Ṣafadī, with Wiüstenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke, as well as with all but Supplementband III of Brockelmann, Gibb certainly knewhow little of the early historical tradition had survived. He was very much working in the dark. It may be hard to imagine now, but of al-Balādhurī's Ansāb al-ashrāf he was probably then familiar only with Ahlwardt's slim volume, and the final volume of Ibn Sa‘d had not yet appeared. Meanwhile al-Wāqidī's Maghāzī (which he knew of), Ibn A‘tham's Futūḥ, ‘Abd al-Malik b. Ḥab7īb's Ta’rikh, ‘Umar b. Shabba's Ta’rikh al-madīna al-munauwara, Ya‘qūb b. Sufyān al-Fasawī's al-Ma‘rifa wa’l-ta’rikh, Abū Zur’a al-Dimashqī's Ta’rikh, and finally Khalifa b. Khayyāṭ's Ta’rikh and Tabaqāt (all of which he did not), remained inaccessible – and this is just to mention some third-century examples.

At the beginning of the eighth century A.D. a new town was built in Palestine, called al- Ramla (Ramlah of today). It was founded by the then provincial governor, Sulaymān b. ‘Abd al-Malik (d. 717) in order to serve as the capital of Jund Filasṭīn, the southern province of Palestine. The building of a new town, and especially of a capital city, constituted a significant departure in the Palestine environment, for two main reasons. First, it was the first city to be founded after a period of 350 years, i.e., for most of the Byzantine epoch. Second, though the Muslims ruled the country for 1100 years, al-Ramla remained the sole example of a new town in the whole of Palestine.

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.

On an October day in 1869 Lord Houghton, friend of Thackeray and Tennyson, appeared in the cemetery at Kensal Green, in West London. He was there to unveil a tomb memorial to the poet Leigh Hunt; this was surmounted by a bust, and bore the legend:

It is not really surprising that place of honour on Leigh Hunt's tomb is taken by a quotation from “his exquisite little fable ‘Abou ben Adhem’” which “has assured him a permanent place in the records of the English language”,1 and whose “touch of glory, like a sacred flame on a clear and graceful altar, has captured the succeeding generations”.2 The poet himself, Leigh Hunt, regarded this poem as one of his best.3 It is recorded that a friend presented to him an illuminated copy of it, which he hung above his writing table.4

The letter book on which this article is based was brought to my attention by postal history dealers Argyll Etkin; I am most grateful to them for giving me generous access to such interesting material. The letter book is for the year 1840, a critical year in the wider political sense and more specifically for one of the chief instigators of the mail route between Britain and India overland through Egypt, Thomas Waghorn. The letters are from Waghom's office in Alexandria, mostly by him to his London office at 39 Cornhill but some to Waghorn during a brief visit he made in mid-year, first to Malta, the halfway station to Alexandria, and subsequently to London. They reveal many aspects of the organisation: details of financing; handling of mail and passengers; means of transport and the preferred route; difficulties with timetables; competition within and without Egypt; as well as the character of Waghorn himself. And all this against a background of the evolving “Eastern Question” – the transfer of European rivalries to the Ottoman Empire that was to obsess the governments of the main European powers for much of the nineteenth century.

This article provides an historical review of the Arabic rendering of Swahili, while Appendix A (Parts I and II) contains proposals for the development of Arabic script to yield a phonologically adequate writing system for a variety of Swahili spoken on the East African coast – the variety known as kiMvita (central Swahili), and spoken from just north of T’akaungu to Mombasa, and thence as far south as Gasi. Parallel possibilities for the refinement of romanised script are not considered in any detail.

It should be stressed that kiMvita, the variety of Swahili here described, is not the standardised language. For a number of reasons, the Swahili speech of Zanzibar town, together with the Swahili spoken by Africans from the interior of the continent but resident in Zanzibar, were the varieties of Swahili with which the pioneering standardises of Swahili were familiar.

Pātaka marks the site of a Buddhist establishment that lies about two miles to the west from Chindākhwara village, situated on the main Kabal–Parrai road, in the Kabal Tehsīl of the Swāt District. The site is situated in the midst of cultivated fields, at the foothills of the mountains that stretch between Koṭlai and Khiamdara. On the way, from the main road to the site, one encounters four dry beds of hill torrents, khwars. Immediately to the north of the site, there is a seasonal stream called Pātaka khwargai, descending from the nearby hills to the west of the site and forming the only source of water in this far flung area.

The Persian inscriptions of India, which constitute an important source, particularly for the local history of a region, a district, a tehsil, a town and a village, have received inadequate if not scant attention from our historians. Worse and far more regrettable is the neglect of visitors' or travellers' records on the walls of sarais, tombs or mosques, and similar buildings which they passed and where they made a halt, overnight and otherwise. Against the commemorative stone tablets set in a monument to perpetuate the name of the builder, visitors' or travellers' records or graffiti, as they are also called, were written usually in ink and hence were of comparatively much less durable nature. Many of these graffiti have disappeared in the natural course with the passage of time.

In examining the development of colonial capitalism in India historians have increasingly recognized the importance of specific cultural contexts in determining the character of the emergent industrial sector. In particular, the impact of pre-capitalist mores on the recruitment, organization and supervision of industrial workers has been an important concern. In the Calcutta jute industry, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty has concluded that the authority of factory sardars was derived largely from a pre-capitalist culture with “a strong emphasis on religion, community, kinship, language, and other similar loyalties”. Similarly, Ranajit Das Gupta's exploration of the industrial labour market in north eastern India has revealed that “indebtedness, primordial loyalties and relations of personal dependency were extensively used to keep labour under control”. Studies of trade union development have also acknowledged the enduring importance of the cultural milieu carried by workers to the mills, mines and plantations of colonial India.

It has been well established in modern scholarship that the Mongol successors to Chinggis Qan (1162–1227), who launched the campaign against the Chin state in 1213 that led to its extinction in 1234, were heavily indebted to the counsel and support of the Chinese grandees of Jurchen rule in their consolidation of north China. This passed through different stages, beginning with Ögödei Qa’an (r. 1229–41) and continued by Möngke (r. 1251–9), through trial and error amid factional strifes and political bickering among different Mongol rulers and their supporters and dissenters.

In the course of my research into the character, role and influence of the British officials in Tibet during the 1904–47 period, it became apparent that previous scholarship had failed fully to confront an issue which would explain the clear decline in Anglo-Tibetan relations during the latter half of the 1920s. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the British officer then in immediate charge of Anglo-Tibetan relations attempted to promote a coup d'état in Tibet, in order to transfer secular power from the Dalai Lama and his court to Tsarong Shape, the forward-thinking Commander-in-Chief of the Tibetan Army. This possibility has been rejected by the leading European historians of the period, but their conclusions are, I will argue, in need of reassessment.

In the final chapter of his novel, The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn extols the virtues of the felt boot: “A pair of felt boots are the two best friends a prisoner will ever have … Woe then to anyone whose feet are not shod in felt boots! … But the prisoner wearing his own felt boots has not a care in the world.” Solzhenitsyn writes for those unfamiliar with the extremes faced by the society he is describing. Similarly, but far removed in time, we are accustomed to learning a great deal more about the uses of felt among nomadic peoples from travellers who have purportedly visited them than we do from such rare accounts as The Secret History of the Mongols (SH) which emanate from sources close to the nomads themselves.

The development of the Prester John legend and matters associated with it are complex, and no significant work of book length in English has appeared on the subject since V. Slessarev's Prester John. The Letter and the Legend (1959). The recent publication of a collection of texts and interpretive essays will therefore be warmly welcomed. The texts are among those published by Zarncke in the Abhandlungen der königlichen sāchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vii (1879), and include the famous “letter” of Prester John, together with a note by Hamilton on additional Latin manuscripts that have since come to light. The essays comprise both reprints of work that has appeared over the past five decades and six fresh studies that now see the light of day for the first time.