A study of historical, political and religious thought of the early Mongols undertaken during the last few years has provided a thesis that, during the period of their world domination in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they initiated an original universal concept with the purpose of substantiating and justifying the world's largest land empire. Furthermore, this concept was so developed that it constituted a cohesive theory that can be called Tenggerism or Heavenism.

“An oriental Samuel Pepys”. The phrase has been lodged in my mind for the several decades during which I have been working, on and off, on this early Persian historian Bayhaqī. I am pretty certain that I read it originally in that monument of mid-Victorian Anglo-Indian scholarship, The History of India as told by its own Historians. The Muhammadan period, by Sir Henry Elliott and John Dowson. This multi-volume work consists of translated extracts, many quite lengthy, from texts illustrating the history of the Indian subcontinent, the greater part of them dealing with what was then some eleven centuries of Muslim rule there. In Volume II, the compilers presented several passages from Bayhaqī's work, The History of Sultan Maʿsūd of Ghazna, which had just appeared in a printed edition at Calcutta in the Bibliotheca Indica series, edited by the person who had in fact produced the pioneer catalogue of the Royal Asiatic Society's Arabic and Persian manuscripts, William H. Morley. Elliott made many translations himself, but sometimes employed local munshis, not always with happy results. Although Persian culture was still very much alive in India in the mid-nineteenth century, these munshis were far from being au fait with the early eleventh-century Persian style of Bayhaqī and were at times flummoxed by his idiomatic usages. One of my favourites here is the Persian saying ṭablī zīr-i gilīm mīzadand, translated literally and ludicrously in its context as “they were beating a drum under a carpet”. Why anyone should crawl under a carpet and beat a drum, in the midst of a high-level discussion between Sultan Maʿsūd and his administrators, the equivalent of a cabinet meeting, is rather baffling; the idiom, already used by Firdawsī in the national epic, the Shāh-nāma, means of course “to spread rumours clandestinely”.

Exchange and reciprocity are central concepts in all forms of human society. Based on a system of mutual obligation, they denote any activity in which valuables are circulated between individuals or groups of people. In the religious sphere they include the transfer of both material and immaterial goods between human and spiritual beings. As outlined by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don, the classic work on the total system of reciprocity, such exchange is governed by the principle of the gift entailing the counter-gift.

In his Islam in Modern History, published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable for its insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to the extraordinary energy which had surged through the Muslim world with increasing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talks of:

dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at the level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism…The transmutation of Muslim society from its early nineteenth-century stolidity to its twentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement. The change has been everywhere in evidence.

This surge of energy is closely associated with a shift in the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldly towards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean a devaluing of a faith of contemplation of God's mysteries and of belief in His will to shape human life, and a valuing instead of a faith in which Muslims were increasingly aware that it was they, and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamic society on earth. This shift of emphasis has been closely associated with a new idea of great power, the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslim power, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of a caliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape and protect the community, this awesome task now fell to each individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest that this shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the new responsibilities for Muslims that came with it, is the most important change that Muslims have wrought in the practice of their faith over the past one thousand years. It is a change full of possibilities for the future.

This paper is named and given in memory of Mark Zebrowski, friend and respected colleague, who contributed much to life, art history and the culture of India, including his pioneering Gold, silver and bronze from Mughal India. I will focus on the brass vessels inlaid with silver and gold which were produced for one Mamluk sultan, al-Nāṣir Muhammad (1293–4, 1299–1309, 1310–41), whose name and titles are inscribed on more than forty-six objects (see Appendix).

The Royal Asiatic Society was founded in March 1823. The practice of holding meetings at which papers were given and discussed commenced the following month in April of that year. Throughout the first decade of the Society's existence, these orally delivered papers were later printed and distributed in substantial quarto volumes entitled ‘Transactions’.

Once upon a time twenty nine upper middle-class friends and their wives entered a thicket where the Buddha happened to be and began to play. Another friend had no wife, so a prostitute was brought for him. While they were “disporting themselves” she took his things and ran away. The remainder joined in a search for her. Roaming in that thicket they found the Buddha seated at the root of a tree. They asked, “Lord, has the Blessed One seen a certain woman (ekam itthim)?” “What have you, young men, to do with the woman?”, he exclaimed. They explained. “Now what do you, young men, think?”, he asked, “Which is better for you, to search for a woman or to search for yourselves?” “That, Lord, would be preferable – to search for ourselves.” So he preached and gave them ordination. The story is contrived as a setting for the rhetorical question (like Mark 12:13–17).