The Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat preserved dozens of petitions addressed to the Fatimid and Ayyubid chanceries in Cairo and decrees that they issued in response. This article provides an edition, translation, and discussion of a petition housed among the Genizah documents of the Bodleian Library directed to Sitt al-Mulk, half-sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021) and head of the Fatimid state between his death and her own in 414/1023. Geoffrey Khan had previously identified two petitions to a Fatimid princess housed in Cambridge and New York; it is likely that they, too, were addressed to Sitt al-Mulk. Such documents elucidate Sitt al-Mulk's role in government after her brother's death and provide evidence for the chronicler al-Musabbiḥī's claim that she received and responded to petitions from subjects. The article offers possible explanations as to why petitions such as this one, which concerns an Ismaili mosque, should have found their way to the Jewish community of Fustat whose members reused and preserved them. It also suggests some broader conclusions about the dispersal, survival, or disappearance of pre-Ottoman Middle Eastern archives and documents.

Khargushi (d. Nishapur, 407/1016?), Tahdhīb al-asrār, is a fairly large collection of sayings in the renunciant/Sufi tradition, comprising over twice as many items as Sarrāj, al-Lumaʿ and Sulamī, Ṭabaqāt al-sufiyya. A first printed edition appeared in 1999. Examination of the Tahdhīb confirms that Khargūshī was Shāfiʿi in law, Ashʿari in theology, but mainly a preacher devoted to piety. It also tends to confirm current common wisdom about the history of Sufism: that it developed out of the earlier renunciant tradition, that Malāmatism was a distinctive Nishapuran school of mystical piety with such affinities to Baghdadi Sufism as make it easily assimilable to it, and that Khargūshī's time was still that of the teaching master, the training master not appearing till half a century later. Its similarities to Sarrāj, al-Lumaʿ and Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyat al-awliyā’ make both of those appear more mainstream than has sometimes been feared.

The role of language and linguistic-philological studies in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century received much attention. The aim of this article is to focus on the language factor in Zionism and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the Yishuv between 1904 and 1914. Founded in 1904, the Hebrew Language Council was expected to enhance the process of revival and, from the very beginning, an unmistakably nationalist attitude to its subject matter marked the Council's agenda. However, the authority of the Council to make binding decisions on linguistic matters was contested by a number of other Zionist institutions, a development which ruined the prestige and effectiveness of the Council. The controversy resulted less from a turf war or quarrels over scarce resources than a deeper question of which institution represented the “true” Hebraic spirit. The World Zionist Organization's decision to de-align from cultural matters, including the revival of Hebrew, worsened the conditions under which the Council operated. From a comparative perspective, thus, the Hebrew case provides an unusual case of linguistic nationalism, which should be of interest to students of both nationalism and sociolinguistics.

It is generally assumed that, throughout the Qing dynasty, there was only translated literature in the Manchu language and that, by the nineteenth century, the Manchu literati had become too “sinicized” to unleash literary creativity in their native language. Nevertheless the discovery of a mid-nineteenth-century manuscript of Manchu literary verse, penned by the well-known prose translator Jakdan, points to the fact that Manchu belles-lettres existed even at a time when the role of Manchu in practical arenas was much in decline within the Qing empire in China. In addition to a preliminary account of the poetic forms found in Jakdan's Manju gisun i yobo maktara sarkiyan (“Transcript of bantering in Manchu language”), a supplementary volume to the Jabduha ucuri amtanggai baita (“Leisurely delights”), two intricate poems from the collection of Manchu verse are here presented (in transcription), translated and annotated for the first time.

At the time of its decipherment by Griffith (1911), the Meroitic writing system was considered an alphabet. This alphabet was found to have a rather limited vowel notation. It was not until 1970 that the system was understood to have a more complex vowel notation. This system of vowel notation is comparable to what is found in an alpha-syllabary, a term used to describe the scripts of the Indian sub-continent, such as Brahmi and Devanagari. Since alpha-syllabaries were rare when the Meroitic writing system was in use (c. 200 bce–c. 500 ad), it is tempting to suggest a possible historical connection between the Meroitic kingdom in Sudan and the then existent scripts in India. A systematic analysis, as opposed to a description of alpha-syllabic writing, indicates that the structure of this type of script is less regionally confined. Rather, it places Meroitic writing among scripts that were created in the presence of alphabetic writing both in modern and in ancient times.