The Imāmī Shī'ī theory of the imāmate evolved gradually during the first Islamic century and was given a definitive shape in the middle of the second/eighth century by Hishām b. al-Ḥakam. For the next 100 years or so, until the death in 260/874 of the eleventh Imām, al-Ḥasan al-'Askarī, no significant changes seem to have been introduced. Only in the mid-fourth/tenth century does a major addition appear in the form of a doctrine: it is the belief that there are 12 Imāms, the last of whom remains in a state of concealment (ghayba) until his ultimate return as Mahdī, or Qā'im. This ghayba is divided into two periods: a shorter, ‘lesser’ ghayba (al-ghayba al-ṣughrā), lasting from 260/874 to 329/941, during which the Imām was represented on earth by four successive safīrs; and a longer, ‘greater’ ghayba (al-ghayba al-kubrā), whose duration is known only to God. It is this doctrine which distinguishes Twelver Shī'ism from the earlier Imāmiyya, and it io worth examining in some detail ite origina and the-main-stages of its development.

Any attempt to write about the Ibāḍī imāma is faced with the same kind of problem which besets all efforts to provide a generalized account of an Islamic institution: how far to concentrate on the abstract theory and how far to describe the actual practices observed in different places at various times. In this paper the writer has tried to strike a balance between these two approaches by taking as his theme an aspect of the Ibāḍi imāmate that involves basic principles about the nature of the contract which the Ibadi community enters into when it elects an Imām, and to study it specifically from the Omani point of view, through the writings of the local ‘ulamā’ and the way elections have been conducted in that country from the second/eighth down to the fourteenth/twentieth centuries. No attempts will be made to compare this material with the parallel sources from the Maghrib, nor to contrast the Ibāḍī concepts of the imāma with those of other Islamic systems.

The generalization that it was during the Mamlūk period that the Copts were reduced to a small minority in Egypt is a familiar one which has been frequently repeated since Gaston Wiet broached it some 50 years ago. Using this generalization as a point of departure, I intend to review the evidence in the Arabic sources which touches upon the actual process of conversion which occurred during the period 692–755/1293–1354, attempting to discover, if possible, the extent of conversion during those years and the causes which lay behind it. The dates that I have chosen are not altogether arbitrary since they correspond, as we shall see, to certain demarcations in the history of conversion noted by Mamlūk historians themselves; furthermore, I have deliberately excluded the period of the Crusades from consideration in the belief that this period should be studied separately in order to determine whether the Mamlūks' involvement in the Crusades affected their policy toward the indigenous Christians of Egypt to any appreciable extent. Although my findings in this article tend to support Wiet's generalization, I hope to offer richer, more detailed documentation for it than has been offered heretofore and, in so doing, to contribute to our understanding of Mamlūk social history.

It is now some years since Professor Halil İnalcik expressed the hope that a ‘systematic investigation in the library collections of Turkey’ might bring to light, in their original independent form, the fifteenth-century Ottoman ‘calendars’ (taḳvīm) or ‘chronological lists’ whose existence is to be postulated from the analysis of the style and content of the chronicle-texts into which they have evidently been incorporated. The subject of these lists was then much in my mind, so that while I was in Turkey in 1958–91 was on the look-out for such a text. My search, if not ‘systematic’, was fairly thorough; all the same, it was fruitless: I came upon several late examples, to indicate that the chronological list remained a favourite form of compilation beyond the fifteenth century, but no early self-contained text, relating the events of two or three decades, of the type whose existence the chronicles indicated. The kindness of a colleague, however, has now led me in London to what I believe to be the copy of such a text.

The Mahānubhāvas are a Hindu sect whose members are largely concentrated in northern and eastern Maharashtra, between the old districts of Khandesh and Nagpur, while they are strongest of all in Berar. In many respects they have a rather marginal place in the culture of Maharashtra today. Unlike the Vārkarī pantha, the much more celebrated and popular Vaiṣṇava sect, they are centred on a backwoods area. They tend to gather in maṭhas (monasteries) in decayed villages that are a day's journey from the nearest railway or main road. Instead of Alandi, which is on Poona's doorstep, or Pandharpur, their holy places are Ritpur, a crumbling dusty village in the rolling country north of Amraoti, and Mahur, on a mountainside on the borders of Berar and the Adilabad district of Andhra. Like the Vārkarīs their followers are almost all non-Brahmans, but unlike the Vārkarīs they have, until recently at least, acquired few Brahman champions to lend them ethical and religious respectability, and indeed they are chiefly known in Marathi folk-lore as typifying a virulent brand of hypocrisy—the stereotype of a sweet tongue and professions of virtue that cover up all sorts of unseemly and unspecified ‘goings-on’. Their numbers are relatively small. Enthoven, whose section on them in The tribes and castes of Bombay is one of the few references to the sect in English, gives it an estimated membership of about 22,000 in 1901, and it is hard to judge what relation this figure would bear to the number of professed Mahānubhāvas today. The modern census figures are of course no help, since Mahānubhāvas are included under the general heading of Hindus.

The purpose of this paper is to present to scholars of Tibetan and Himalayan culture a document which is recited annually to an assembled militia organization during the New Year festival observed in the old winter capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan at Punakha. Apart from attempting to disclose the origin of this custom, which can be traced with some accuracy to the middle years of the seventeenth century, it is intended to relate it briefly to the wider context of the New Year celebrations as they used to be held in Tibet and as they continue to be held with considerable variance in Bhutan and other places on the periphery of Tibetan culture. In certain areas an ancient and fundamental distinction between the ‘King's New Year’ (rgyal-po lo-gsar) and the ‘Agricultural New Year’ (so-nam lo-gsar) has survived and my remarks on the relevant Bhutanese traditions are made on the basis of these two categories.