The debate concerning the Head of the Jews (ra'is al-yahud) in the Fatimid kingdom, which has interested researchers since the late nineteenth century, has yet to reach a final conclusion. Today's researchers usually argue that this position was established in Egypt at the end of the eleventh century with the final fall of the Palestinian Yeshiva; prior to this the Head of the Jews was the gaon of Palestine, appointed by the Fatimid Imam. More recently a new argument has emerged, re-embracing the approach of J. Mann, who argued that the position of the Head of the Jews was established at the beginning of Fatimid rule (late tenth century), and the person to hold the position was a Jewish courtier from the field of finance or medicine, appointed by the Imam to be the supreme leader for all Jews in the Fatimid kingdom: Rabbanites, Karaites and Samaritans. This old–new notion is yet to be clearly proven. Such views are mainly supported by circumstantial analysis of logical arguments that arise from the Geniza documents, without real written proof, but the Geniza is known for surprises and it is possible that we will soon find unequivocal proof to show that the Head of the Jews in the Fatimid kingdom was indeed a Jewish courtier appointed by the Imam, since the beginning of the Fatimid rule over Egypt, Palestine and Syria at the end of the tenth century.

In this article I edit and comment on the Hoernle manuscript IOL Toch 81 (H 149.292) with fragmentary texts in three languages, Sanskrit (6 lines) TocharianB (1 line) and Turkic (15 lines). The primary interest is in the Turkic text, which probably forms part of an upāsaka's vow. Its orthography, morphology and lexis, perceptibly different from standard Uighur, show features which point to high antiquity and perhaps to non-Uighur provenance. Some Buddhist terms seem to be deliberately designed on a Manichaean foil. Thus the Turkic part of the manuscript may date back to the second half of the ninth century, or, if non-Uighur, to an even earlier period.

This study analyses the original waqf documents belonging to Qijmās al-Isḥāqī, an amir who lived in late Mamluk Egypt and Syria, from three perspectives: first, the types of assets possessed or endowed by Qijmās and the creation of these assets; second, the contexts and purposes of establishing waqfs by comparing the data obtained from the documents and the life history of Qijmās, which was reconstructed from literary sources; and third, how his personal relationships reflected the character of his waqfs. Further, this study reveals how he selectively and strategically used the waqf system for personal and/or public benefit at different stages of his life and according to the prevalent social circumstances. This case study proves that the waqf system had multi-dimensional and complex functions: in addition to realizing its universal purpose of enabling the performance of charitable deeds, the waqf system fulfilled the founder's particularistic secular intentions and expectations.

To do honour to my old friend Walter Simon I have put together here five documents from Central Asia. These are: (1) the photograph of the Turkish text in Khotan Saka script; (2) a Tibetan letter in Khotan Saka script; (3) pieces of document from Kuci (Kucha) inscribed with Kharoṣṭhī and Brahml script; (4) a fragment of Khotan Saka containing the word bisīvrai; and (5) three Tibetan documents with Khotan Saka words.

All Semitic languages use a relative marker as at least one strategy of relativization, and all branches show reflexes or relics of reflexes of an interdental relative marker. The wide consensus that the relative pronoun was originally identical to the proximal demonstrative is based on the formal identity between the bases of the two in West Semitic, and on the wide attestation of the process Demonstrative > Relative in world languages. In this paper, we will show that there are a number of significant problems with the reconstruction of the relative pronoun, which, when taken together, make tracing its origin to the demonstrative highly unlikely. Instead we will argue that the opposite is true: the demonstrative in West Semitic is a secondary formation on the basis of the relative marker.

The word blags-pa occurs in line 48 of the Li-yul chos-kyi lo-rgyus. A manu-script of this work, brought back from Tun-huang by Paul Pelliot, has been described by F. W. Thomas in his Tibetan literary texts and documents concerning Chinese Turkestan, London, 1935, p. 303, n. 1, and by Marcelle Lalou in Inventaire des manuscrits tibetains de Touen-houang, n, Paris, 1950, p. 25, No. 960. The text has been translated by F. W. Thomas, op. cit., 305–23. R. E. Emmerick has edited the text in his Tibetan texts concerning Khotan, London, 1967, 78–91. Emmerick's glossary (op. cit., 108–60) has to be consulted for his interpretation of the text. The passage which contains the word blags-pa is the following: thos-pa'i bsod-nams kyaṅ bskal-pa gcig-gi sdig 'byah // blags-pa'i bsod-nams ni / bskal-pa grans myed-pa'i sdig 'byan //. Thomas reads slags-pa'i instead of blags-pa'i and explains in a note that slags = Klags (p. 313, n. 2). His translation is as follows: ‘The merit of even hearing it cleanses the sin of one æon; the merit of reading it cleans the sin of countless æeons’. Emmerick states in his glossary: ‘blags (pf. <blag-pa “to hear”) 48. F. W. Thomas has “reading”, with the note slags = klags (TLT i.313 n. 2). But the reading is blags on my photograph, blag-pa is “to hear“ by itself or with rna-ba. So Das, Russ. D. against Jä’.

One of the most important factors which distinguish the VaibhĀsikaṣika Abhidharma from the TheravĀda Abhidharma is a category called the viprayukta-saṃskĀras. The disputes on the reality of the dharmas included under this category dominate some of the major works on Abhidharma, especially the Abhidharma-kośa-bhĀṣsya of Vasubandhu and the ShpuṭĀarthĀ of Yaśomitra. An analysis of these dharmas is found in a few pioneering works like those of McGovern, Stcherbatsky, and others, but very little is kown about their origin.

Literary languages of Western Europe are national languages as well; there is no divorce between them and the people; there may be a distance, but no gap between them and the ordinary vernaculars, and their growth and vicissitudes reflect those of the vernaculars. So the historians of the language are able to discover when, where, how they came into existence, and call them to give evidence as to its later destinies. For instance, we know the place where French was born, how it asserted itself against Latin, how it turned out provincial speeches; we can make a fairly good evaluation of the distance between written and spoken French, in the past and now. In India conditions are vastly different; our knowledge of its languages, at least in their most ancient stages, is based only, or nearly so, on literary languages, of which we know neither the local basis, nor the degree of connection with the vernaculars. They do not give expression to the thoughts and feelings of the people; at the most, they give an ideal picture of the culture of a small community.

This article examines the attitudes of the Quranic mushrikūn to the resurrection and the afterlife, focusing on those who doubted or denied the reality of both. The first part of the article, published in a previous issue of BSOAS, argued that the doubters and deniers had grown up in a monotheist environment familiar with both concepts and that it was from within the monotheist tradition that they rejected them. This second part relates their thought to intellectual currents in Arabia and the Near East in general, arguing that the role of their pagan heritage in their denial is less direct than normally assumed. It is also noted that mutakallims such as Abū ʿĪsā al-Warrāq and al-Māturīdī anticipated the main conclusions reached in this paper.

In 688/1289 Nawrūz Aqa, a leading Mongol magnate, began a rebellion in Khurasan to resist the Ilkhan Arghun's attempts to centralize power and loosen the Mongol aristocracy's grip on provincial government. The rebellion of Nawrūz was significantly different from any Mongol uprising that had occurred in the Ilkhanate to that date: it was distinguished by the successful fusion of Chinggisid and Islamic traditions of political and spiritual authority to support Nawrūz's challenge against the Hülegüid monarchy. This new hybrid political philosophy allowed Nawrūz to mobilize both the sedentary and nomadic populations of Khurasan to overhaul the power structure of the Ilkhanate. The present study of the early career and rebellion of Amīr Nawrūz will reveal how his movement forced the Turco-Mongolian leadership to reconfigure its political, social and religious relationships, among themselves and with the sedentary Muslim population they ruled.

Over a period of some forty years, 380/990–421/1030, the Fatimids in Egypt exchanged embassies with their Zirid viceroys in Ifrīqiya after these had been recognized as a hereditary dynasty, and to a lesser extent with their Kalbid deputies in Sicily. Sijillāt or official letters of the Fatimid chancery, accompanied by sumptuous presents, invested the Zirids with their authority and favoured them with important announcements, while the Zirids replied in kind. The embassies were ostentatiously welcomed by the Zirids as proof of their legitimacy, while serving to maintain the connection with Cairo on which the Fatimids were similarly dependent for the sake of their imperial standing in the world. The importance of that connection to both dynasties was shown in the 440s/1050s, when it was broken by the Zirids and restored by a Fatimid intervention, celebrated in a fresh series of sijillāt. With their emphasis on the style as much as the substance of the messages, the exchanges are excellent illustrations of mediaeval diplomatic correspondence as described by John Wansbrough in Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean.

Colonel Low mentioned the schemes of Francis Light and James Scott for a British occupation of Thalang or Salang (Junk Ceylon) in Logan's Journal in 1849, and, sincethen, some attention has been paid to the official sources in English on this subject. Gerini comments on ‘the silence of the local annals about such land-grabbing schemes on the part of the British’.

Hadramawt, properly speaking, is the name of the Wadi, a province separated from its coast by an empty stony plateau. Each of these provinces is a distinct entity

Voici une dizaine d'années encore, bien peu de travaux avaient été consacrés à la poésie en Mauritanie ou du moins au ġne, la poésie en dialecte hassāniyya. Nous n'avons toujours pas I'équivalent pour le ġne du fameux al-Wasīt que le mauritanien Sid Ahmed Ould Alamīn publia en Egypte au début du siècle et qui comporte une anthologie du ši'r, la poésie mauritanienne en arabe classique. Cependant, ces dernières années, beaucoup de poésies dialectales ont été recueillies et transcrites, quelques-unes sont publiées, d'autres devraient I'être ou ont fait I'objet de mémoires À I'École Normale Supérieure de Nouakchott (cf. bibliographic).

This article is based on a study of selected utterances in ‘ Lhasa Tibetan’ (LT) as spoken by Mr. Rigẖdzin dBaṅpo (R.) in a particular style (‘ speaking style ’). The term LT is used for the class-dialect spoken by members of the sku-drag class in Lhasa and elsewhere, and also by other Tibetans who associate with members of this class. R.'s utterances may be considered in terms of three styles, ‘ spelling style ’, ‘ reading style ’, and ‘ speaking style ’, each requiring a separate statement at phonetic, grammatical, and lexical levels alike. The material presented below is drawn from utterances in the ‘ speaking style ’; all utterances appropriate to the reading and quoting of written texts, ‘ reading-style ’ utterances, have been excluded from it.

Before proceeding to examine the poetry of the Baḵẖtiāri people, it is desirable to say something about their manner of life and the physical environment which to a large extent has determined it, and which presents those aspects and objects of nature which are familiar to all of them.

The system of mountains which extends from N.W. to S.E. across the south-. western part of Persia is occupied by a series of tribes, all of whom pursue a more or less nomadic form of life. On the west, south of Karmanshah, are the Feili Lurs of what may be called the Kingdom of Pusht i Kūh, with its practically independent ruler, the Wāli. Next, to the east come the large autonomous