Acre is situated on the northern Mediterranean coast of Israel, about 13 km to the north of Haifa. Its history since the twentieth century bce has been well-documented. Until the third century bce it stood on a mound called Tel al-Fukhar. From the Hellenistic period the city developed on the plain to the west of this mound. Acre experienced two important phases during its long existence. The first was during the Hellenistic era, when it occupied the mound, the plain, and the rocky peninsula to the south of the western sector of the plain. The second was during the Crusader period, when it occupied an even larger area. Between these two periods, the city declined, although it was still repeatedly referred to in historical sources.

Following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and the consolidation of the Kemalist regime in 1926, the President of the new republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk launched a reform process which aimed at changing Turkey's laws, administration, culture and, most significantly, its image. One facet of this process of transformation was the language reform that commenced with romanisation of the Turkish script in late 1928 and reached its zenith later on in the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1934, the Türk Dil Kurumu – the Turkish Language Institute, a radical reformist institution founded by Atatürk in 1932 – banished thousands of Arabic and Persian words from spoken and written Turkish and fabricated new, ‘authentically’ Turkish, words to replace them. The radical-reformist zeal subsided in 1935 as a result of the linguistic chaos of the previous years and came to a halt in 1936 with the proclamation of the so-called Sun-Language Theory. However, so much had changed during those few years and has done since, that even secondary school and university graduates in contemporary Turkey are not able to read and understand, for instance, Atatürk's famous Speech of 1926 from its original, and hence feel the need to consult ‘modernised’ or simplified versions. In this respect, the legacy of the language reform in early republican Turkey remains a matter of bitter controversy and pits the reformist Kemalists against an array of Islamists, conservatives and even liberals. The current debate on what proper Turkish is neatly overlaps with the major fault line that still divides Turkish society.

With the exception of a minor mention, which Sharaf Khān (b.1543) made in the Sharafnāma, the first information about the most southern group of Kurdish tribes in Iranian Kurdistan, the Lek, first became available to modern readers in Bustān al-Sīyāḥa, a geographical and historical Persian text by Shīrwānī (1773–1832). These hitherto unknown Lek communities, were probably settled in north-western and northern Luristan, known as Lekistan, by order of Shāh ‘Abbās, who wished in this way to create some support for Ḥusayn Khān, the wālī of Luristan. Many of the centres of Lekî intellectual life in the late Afshārīd and early Zand period, which is also of much importance in that the Zand dynasty arose from it, are located in this geographical area. One has only to call to mind the names of such places as Alishtar (Silsila), Kūhdasht, Khāwa, Nūr Ābād, Uthmānwand and Jalālwand in the most southern districts of Kirmānshāh, and also the Lek tribes of eastern Īlām. The very mention of these cities and villages already sets in motion in one's imagination the parade of Twelver Shiites, Ahl-i Haqq heretics, and non-religious oral literary councils which constitutes the history of Lekî new era. But unfortunately little of this is known in the West and Lekî literature remains one of the neglected subjects of literary and linguistic Kurdish studies. This important oral literature and also some written manuscripts are unpublished and untranslated into western languages. The subject of this article is the translation of Zîn-ə Hördemîr, as an example of a genre of Lekî written literature which also provides linguistic data for the Lekî dialect of southern Kurdish.

§1: AVP 2.19. §2.Dṛtiin the Vedas and Later2a. AVP 2.19.3: Hoffmann's Correction ofdṛtyṃTOdhṛtyṃ. 2b. The Meanings ofdṛti2c. the Irregular Feminine Gender2d.The Shape of thedṛti. 2e.Inflateddṛtis as Floats. Abbreviations and Bibliography. Picture of a dṛti in use.

There has appeared a new trend in recent scholarship on the early modern Islamic world that analyzes the role of gender and sexuality in society and culture. Ruby Lal and Rosalind O'Hanlon have investigated women and gender roles in the sixteenth-century Mughal harem and the broader imperial court respectively. Mehmed Kalpaklı, Walter Andrews, and Khaled El-Rouayheb have studied the nature or the implications of sexual relationship among men in Istanbul as well as the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi have read Safavid and Qajar literature and visual arts through the lens of gender and power politics. Together these scholars have successfully highlighted the relevance of this methodology particularly in its application to the narrative sources that comprise the bulk of our documentations for the period (except for the Ottoman case of course), and it is to subject to such an approach a brief, but crucial, period in early Mughal history and historiography that the present article now proceeds.

The publication of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles's The History of Java in 1817 marked a new sophistication in the recording of British experiences of the island. Providing a depth of analysis and breadth of subject matter, Raffles's publication was not the fairly simplistic diaristic account of adventure and opinion that had characterised many earlier British publications on Southeast Asia, but a highly detailed, minutely observed and handsomely illustrated study.