The Boxer Movement is traditionally treated by Chinese and foreigners alike as a political or military phenomenon. In this study, however, it features as an episode in social history. Moreover, our interest lies in a static picture rather than in the dynamic development of the movement. Questions of political wisdom or foolhardiness are not our main concern. This, of course, does not mean that we shall not take political factors into consideration, but that we shall regard them only as data in the mathematical sense. To us, the movement is neither sublime nor ridiculous. It is a religious uprising—the most important religious uprising in the world as a whole to take place in the present century. Neither Mafia in Europe nor the Tong Hak in Korea, for instance, can be compared with it in either scale or influence.

Current scholarship often describes early Ottoman historiography as a phenomenon initiated and conducted by the Ottoman state. In particular, the unprecedented growth in the number of Ottoman history books composed during the reign of Bayezid II (1481–1512) is viewed as such. Modern historians commonly argue that in the aftermath of the Kilia and Akkerman victories (1484), Bayezid II decided to propagate a new Ottoman ideology and commissioned Ottoman history books to be written for this purpose. This article argues that there is not enough evidence to suggest that Bayezid II orchestrated or directed this upsurge in history production. The premises of Halil İnalcık's earlier studies in particular, upon which much of our understanding of the subject was built, do not hold.

In Japan, since the eleventh or twelfth century, when teachers and students of the tanka (, a short poem) recognized the importance of the teniwoha for expressing thoughts or feelings, its study became a vital part of kagaku (, the study of verse-making). One of the earliest books on the matter, the “ Teniwoha Taigaisyô ” ( ), was said to have been written by Huziwara-Sadaie (, 1162–1241), a well-known poet of the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the study of the teniwoha made further headway, the reason being that the gap between the written and spoken language which had been developing since the eleventh century had widened so much that people found it difficult to understand the tanka of earlier times. There were at this time two groups of people who studied the teniwoha for the art of verse-making; one group was concerned with the tanka, and the other with the renga (, a linked poem) which was then very popular. Although these studies of the teniwoha could be called the origin of the grammatical study of the Japanese language, they were very naive; all that the scholars did was to compile glossaries or reference book for verse-making.

The two fragments here transliterated and interpreted were discovered among the mass of manuscripts brought back by the late Sir Aurel Stein from the cave–shrines of the “Thousand Buddhas” near Tun–huang, in Western Kan–su. These texts are written on the back of two short fragments of the “Diamond” and “Lotus” siitras in Chinese, dating probably from the early ninth century A.D. They are particularized in the note below.

My attention was first focused on the relation of the labial F (P) to the aspirated dental mute when I was translating Ibn Ishaq's Biography of the Prophet Muhammad.There I came across the following statement made by his editor, Ibn Hisham, who died in the year of the Hijra 218, i.e. A.D. 834: ‘ The Arabs say taḥannuth and taḥannuf, meaning the Ḥanafī religion. They change the TH into F as, for example, when they say jadath and jadaf when they mean a grave.’ Though the word that gave rise to the editor's comment does not belong to the TH-F class the principle that TH and F interchange is sound and unassailable. The indefatigable Brockelmann noted this important observation and gave a list of early Arabian authorities for the usage, together with a number of references to dialects in which it existed, or still exists to-day, from which it is clear that the phenomenon is to be met with all over Arabia and in North Africa. Landberg had drawn attention to its prevalence in Hadramaut and ‘Umān, and had often met with it in al-Shahr and Dathīna.

The so-called ‘Anonymous Chronicles’ of the Ottoman dynasty and the closely related texts which pass under the name of Uruj present formidable problems to an editor, for they are not ‘histories’ in the classical sense, handed down in copies made for scholars by professional copyists, but rather storybooks of the genre of the Baṭṭāl-nāme and the Dānishmend-nāme, written for the edification and entertainment of the ordinary man, so that many a ‘copyist’ was in effect a redactor or even an author, freely paraphrasing his model, adding new stories or alternative versions of old ones, and occasionally stitching together two recensions to make a new and fuller version.

MAYYĀFĀRIQĪN, a small town situated on one of the left tributaries of the Tigrīs, at 70 km. to the north-east of Āmid (Diyārbakr), owed its importance to its situation on a short road connecting Armenia (Mush) with Upper Mesopotamia. It is probable that the ancient capital of Armenia, Tigranocerta, built by Tigran II circa 80 B.C., stood in the immediate neighbourhood of MAYYĀFĀRIQĪN.

In Islamic times Mayyāfāriqīn had a historian, Ahmad b. Yusuf b. ‘All ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriql, who wrote shortly after 572/1176. The only two copies of this curious work belong to the British Museum. The detailed description of the work and the first systematic presentation of its contents belong to that accurate British historian H. F. Amedroz, who has so considerably increased our knowledge of the medieval Arabic sources for the Near East. Numerous passages from Ibn al-Azraq are quoted by Amedroz in the footnotes of his edition of Ibn al-Qalanisi (1908). In more recent years M. Canard has published six passages of the history of Mayyāfārīqīn relative to Sayf al-daula and Claude Cahen has summed up its rich information on the early Artuqids.

These preparatory works will greatly help the future editor of the Mayyāfārīqīn chronicle. His task will not be easy, for the two versions are defective and divergent, and the best plan will be to print them in parallel columns. The script of Or. 6310 is very cursive and devoid of dots; that of Or. 5803 is defaced towards the end. The scribes were negligent even in geographical and personal names. The grammar of the author (or of his copyists) is lax and may occupy the attention of some student of vulgar Arabic in Upper Mesopotamia.

Arabs have always had a particular taste for brief, concise and witty idioms and proverbs. Whereas an idiom is a ‘transition point’, a necessary introduction to the forthcoming discussion, a proverb is, instead, the climax of that event, the most important domain for the display and evaluation of verbal art. The view is occasionally expressed that proverbs are in fact a dead trait in the modern world. This view is due, at least in part, to the mistaken assumption that only illiterates use proverbs. It is doubtful whether increased literacy and education have seriously affected the quality and quantity of proverbial speech, at least in Arabic culture. Arabs' gatherings, formal and informal, are marked by highly formalized relationships. A formalized relationship gives rise to highly predictable and normalized language such as idioms and proverbs.

Islamic tradition records many precedents for expulsion of Jews and other non-Muslims. The authors of the two most important collections of ḥadīths, al-Bukhārī and Muslim, have chapters entitled ‘On exiling the Jews from Arabia’ or ‘On exiling the Jews from the Ḥijāz’. Similar chapters exist in other collections of traditions. These statements testify to Muḥammad's expulsion of ‘the Jews of Medina—all of them’, or report his will to expel the Jews—or in variants, the Jews and Christians or the Polytheists—from the Arabian Peninsula. Clearly, the traditions are interpreted with the widest possible reference regarding who is to be exiled: no non-Muslim is allowed to remain. But the geographical extent of the area from which non-Muslims are to be exiled is interpreted in narrow fashion: ‘What is meant by ‘the Arabian Peninsula” in this tradition is the Ḥijāz, not the entire Arabian Peninsula.’ This is so despite ample potential for broad interpretation in the language of the texts. In a tradition which supports a projected exile of the Jews of Medina, Muhammad tells the Jews, ‘Know that the land is the Lord's and his Apostle's.’ The word arḍ ‘land’ in the ḥadīth is understood to refer specifically to the plots of land the Jews had owned, now considered lo be held by them in tenancy. This could easily have been taken out of context by some interpreters and applied to all lands. A tradition used to support the prohibition of dhimmī residence in Ḥijāz reads, in some versions, ‘two religions (sometimes using the term qiblas—directions faced in prayer) may not exist in one land,’ in others, ‘two qiblas may not exist in Arabia’. In practice, this tradition was applied only to Ḥijāz and was not extended to all of Arabia or any other ‘land’. Chapter headings are often our only indication of how traditions were understood by those who collected them; Mālik's chapter heading has this tradition refer only to the expulsion of Jews from Medina.

The story of the exegesis of Q. 2: 106 cannot be told briefly, on account of the quite appaling degree of muddle which has bedevilled the Muslim discusions of this verse. The greatest imaginable confusion regins as the definition of the term naskh and as to its supposed meaning(s). For that reason, it may be convenient first to set out the following formulae which represent the classical theories of naksh. There are, in fact, two such theories.

Taking as a yardstick the number of copies made (and commentaries provoked), there can be little doubt that the most influential of all Arabic treatises on music has been the kitāb al-Adwār (referred to henceforth as KA) by Safi al-Dīn 'Abd al-Mu'min b. Yūsuf b. Fākhir al-Urmawī (d. 693/1294). Nevertheless, despite its obvious historical significance, this seminal work still awaits a satisfactory critical edition, one of the most important tasks of which should be to investigate the complex relationship between the form(s) in which it is now known and the markedly different version found in an Istanbul MS, Süleymaniye Fatih 3662 (referred to henceforth as F). Pending the more thorough analysis that should attend publication, an attempt is made in the present article to provide a general introduction to this hitherto neglected text.

The Museo Civico of Turin possesses an Islamic metal vessel which, so far as I am aware, has not been published but which deserves attention on more than one count. This is a small silver-inlaid bowl (Inv. No. 159) (pis. I-VI, fig. 1). Its circular base measures only 11.1 cm. in diameter, its height 8.3 cm., and its upper aperture 16.5 cm. The walls of the vessel, projecting sharply at about half its height, give it a squat and somewhat unstable appearance.

When King Mindon (reigned 1853–78) transferred his court to Mandalay and began to build his palace there in 1857, many parts of the teak buildings were brought from the old capital of Amarapura. In the hundred years before that, the palace had already been disassembled and moved from Ava to Amarapura and back again before King Shwebo Min finally reassembled the royal buildings at Amarapura in 1837. Each time, complex wood structures covered with gilt carvings were taken apart and transported to the new royal centre. When it was re-erected, embellishments were added, and the whole refurbished with new paint and gilding.

The majority of the Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts from the northern part of the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang (China) were found in an area where the local languages Tocharian A and B were spoken. In this article, the interplay of Sanskrit, the religious language, and Tocharian, the popular language, is investigated based on the example of the relationship between the Sanskrit Udānavarga and the Tocharian B Udānastotra. To this end, a reconstruction of the text of the introduction to the Udānastotra is attempted, which forms the transition from the Udānavarga to the Udānastotra proper. It is argued that this Tocharian B text was found in otherwise Sanskrit manuscripts, which suggests that speakers of Tocharian preferred certain doctrinal texts in Sanskrit.

Almost ninety years have passed since the establishment of the Lebanese state, but it still lacks a consensual and unifying historical narrative. The Druzes of Lebanon, who claim to be the real founders of the historical Lebanese entity, reject the Lebanese historiography elaborated by Christian historians as ideologically motivated, sectarian and fabricated. Furthermore, they claim that their contribution to Lebanon's history has been systematically minimized. The Druze leader, Kamāl Junblāṭ, was the first to raise public awareness of the importance of rewriting Lebanon's history, and the process of doing so has gained momentum among Druze intellectuals since the 1980s. This article discusses the efforts of the Druze intelligentsia to cultivate a historical narrative that presents an alternative to what they call the “Maronite narrative”; it focuses predominantly on the Emirate's history during the Middle Ages and the reciprocal relations between the Druze political experience within modern Lebanon and the intellectual formulation of their narrative.

A folktale current among the inhabitants of Dayr al-Asad, a little village in Western Galiee on the Acre-Safad road, repors that in the early sixteenth century a Ṣufī shaykh named al-Asad was once travelling towards Safad, when he came upon some inhabitants of cha Christian village of al-Bi‘na, which then contained a monastery (dayr) and a Crusader church, and was insulted by them; moreover, while he was praying by the village spring, a lion (asad) appeared and devoured his donkey. Nething daunted, the shaykh put his saddle on the lion's back, mounted and galloped eastward until he suddenly found himself face to face with the Sulṭān Selīm I (or according to others, Süleymān ‘Qānūnī’), The sulṭān, to indemnify him for the insults of the Christians and in recognition of his courage and resourcefulness, permitted him to settle at Dayr al-Bi‘na. Some say that th shaykh returned to the village on the lion’s back after the sulṭān had expelled the Chrisians. Thereupon, so the story continues, Christian Dayr al-Bi‘na became Muslim Dayr al-Asad. The Christian Population established established a new settlement, called al-Bi‘na, about half a kilmetre south of Dayr al-Asad. There is today at al-Bi‘na a smal Christian minority, which in the opinion of the people of Dayr al-Asad originates from Dayr al-Bi‘na.