According to most classical Muslim commentators the Quran teaches that Jesus did not die. On the day of the crucifixion another person – whether his disciple or his betrayer – was miraculously transformed and assumed the appearance of Jesus. He was taken away, crucified, and killed, while Jesus was assumed body and soul into heaven. Most critical scholars accept that this is indeed the Quran's teaching, even if the Quran states explicitly only that the Jews did not kill Jesus. In the present paper I contend that the Quran rather accepts that Jesus died, and indeed alludes to his role as a witness against his murderers in the apocalypse. The paper begins with an analysis of the Quran's references to the death of Jesus, continues with a description of classical Muslim exegesis of those references, and concludes with a presentation of the Quran's conversation with Jewish and Christian tradition on the matter of Jesus' death.

The first part of this paper discussed a large collection of documents from Upper Egypt illustrative of society and economy in the time of Muʿāwiya. Here, further papyri, of pagarchs of Arsinoe, present supplementary information about grain production, taxation, great estates, the postal service and the role of the church in the local economy. Information about Fusṭāṭ and Alexandria depends on literary sources and archaeology. Fusṭāṭ, which started as a camp, became more organized and controlled under Muʿāwiya's governors when the main shipyard was moved there. Alexandria, despite romantic descriptions, was at least partly ruined. Like Fusṭāṭ, it was the seat of a major garrison. Taken together, the evidence from Egypt shows much administrative continuity from Byzantine times, but with important new taxes and requisitions and a tighter central control. It suggests that Muʿāwiya ran a sophisticated and effective state.

The Sāmānid-era drive to Islamize Central Asia led not only to increased Islamic influence within the steppes, but, concomitantly, to the transformation of internal Muslim political life. Developments within the Muslim oecumene that were shaped or influenced by this Drang nach Osten range from the legitimizing of the political fragmentation of the Persianate Dynastic period to changes in Muslim military culture and practice, the successful religious conversion of the Turkic steppe; and growing Turkic influence inside the Sāmānid realms, culminating not only in the downfall of the Sāmānids, but in the end of the era of Iranian political and military dominance and the beginning of a millennium of Turkic political hegemony.

The sanctuary of Shaykh ʿAdī, the only monumental complex of the Yezidis, lies at Lalish, 35 kilometres north of Mosul, in Iraqi Kurdistan. It is dedicated to its founder, Shaykh ʿAdī (d. 1162). Although it has been suggested that it was converted from a Christian monastery, Arabic sources and architectural analysis indicate that it may originally have been the zāwiya where Shaykh ʿAdī and his disciples retired to meditate. After his death, the sanctuary grew up around his tomb and became a centre of pilgrimage. It is a large complex containing buildings of different sizes and functions. It was not conceived as a centrally planned structure and its different parts were added progressively as and when circumstances dictated. The dominant architectural style is derived from that which characterizes the twelfth–thirteenth-century Shiite buildings of Mosul, and was continued by the Yezidis until the present day.

The debt owed to Homer's Iliad by the Meghanādbadha Kābya (1861), Michael Madhusūdan Datta's Bengali epic and masterpiece, has long been recognized but has never been examined with any close or academically sensitive reference to the Greek poem. This study sets out to examine the use of the Homeric epic as a model for the Bengali poem, with particular regard to character correspondences, the figure of the simile and narrative structure. In addition to this close analysis, Datta's response to the Iliad will be set in the context of contemporary (and earlier) British receptions of the Homeric poem: the Bengali poet's reading of the Greek epic, far from being idiosyncratic (“colonial”), in fact bears the marks of a close engagement with contemporary British appreciation of the poem.

This study proposes a reorientation of Ise monogatari's intertextuality beyond an exclusively Japanese perspective. The Ise monogatari text we have today is analysed as a single poetic-prose narrative entity, taking account of narrative patterns, paronomasia and other linguistic or rhetorical features. It is argued that Zhuangzi 荘子 (J. Sōshi) at a general level appears to have been used as an ideological pretext to construct a valorized episteme that grounded knowledge, perception and action in the ultimate immediacy beyond subjective or conventional distinctions. Further, a detailed analysis of six core sections proposes that specific passages in Zhuangzi may plausibly have inspired motifs and material details. The contention is that this approach, which breaks with the tradition that has long given primacy to historicizing methods, captures the philosophical coherence of the text without excluding incremental views of its production.