The ‘novel of the future’ speculates on the ‘temporal’ utopia/dystopia. Its strange fate in modern China reveals much about the relationship between imagination, ideology and modernity in the Chinese mindset. Prior to the concept of modernity being imported into China there had been no fiction about the future. For, in traditional China, history did not have directionality. Two powerful Western ideologies, both ‘progressive’, took turns to dominate modern China. Social Darwinism led to the great explosion of the novel of the future in the early twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards, with Marxism becoming the dominant ideology, the novel of the future disappeared completely: when the future was predetermined, no speculation was to be tolerated. In the 1990s, there erupted another spectacular flourishing of novels of future in China, although these works are pessimistic in tone, as belief in the future has been thrown into serious doubt.

An early-fourteenth-century capital of the Delhi sultanate, Tughluqabad is a prototype for the planning of many later cities. The ruins of Tughluqabad represent the extent of the architectural design and engineering skills of the time, while the street layout and other urban features remain as the earliest existing example of Indo-Muslim urban planning and its architectural components. In this report the survey of the major fortified gates with their corridors and guard rooms is presented, along with the granaries built to sustain the town in the event of siege or famine. A detailed study of the systems for controlling the water supply also shows how the flood plain was dammed and the water level managed by an ingenious system of sluices to create an artificial lake which supplied the moat and town. The report is part of the project of survey of Tughluqabad initiated in 1986 and complements the two earlier interim reports in BSOAS, 57 (1994) and 62 (1999), in which the architectural remains were studied together with urban planning and the method for construction of the town.

This article is a comprehensive evaluation of the first learned society of the Nahḍa (Renaissance) in Beirut. I argue that Majmaʿ al-Tahdhīb (the Refinement Council, est. 1846) was not a learned society but an ad hoc seminary formed to train converts for itinerant preaching and to build camaraderie among the nascent Protestant confession. In order to unearth the mission of Majmaʿ al-Tahdhīb and amplify the voices of its members – twelve Syrians and two Americans – this essay reconstructs their biographies and the condition of the Protestant community until 1846. This case study explicates the personal and professional entanglements of these fourteen men in terms of social connections, educational opportunities, economic needs, and religious convictions. It contextualizes the early years of several prominent Nahḍa figures by highlighting the material and spiritual aspects of their lives in 1840s Beirut.

For the past fifty years, there has been a debate over whether the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya introduced a short-lived gold coinage in Syria. After reappraising the literary evidence, this study argues that an enigmatic phrase in a papyrus from this period constitutes evidence for state enforcement of the circulation of a new kind of gold coinage issued under Muʿāwiya. A die-study of the extant specimens of a peculiar imitation of Byzantine gold which has had its crosses effaced, and has been attributed to Muʿāwiya on the basis of the testimony of literary sources, confirms them to be the result of a large-scale, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, initiative. This demonstrates that, in addition to the east, there also existed a separate drive towards an expansion of the money supply in Syria-Egypt during the latter half of Muʿāwiya's caliphate, a development which testifies to a relatively substantial programme of state-building by the caliph.