This article examines several fatwās by the important Muslim reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā. It treats these fatwās as part of a broader Arabic debate on “materialism” at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In this context, Riḍā's fatwās on materialism illustrate the changing nature of Islamic religious authority in this period, as new kinds of knowledge became available to new kinds of readers.

The corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls and their related texts opens a new approach to the lexicographical study of the Aramaic dialects in Babylonia of late antiquity. Some of these texts were copies of “Vorlagen” that the scribes no longer understood. Nevertheless, they are more reliable text sources than one supposes. Errors, garbled spellings, miscomprehensions and misreadings are always feasible, and are typical phenomena of copied texts. In the case of new text variants one can approach the puzzling words and text passages anew. This study deals first and foremost with words that are obvious corrupted spellings or scribal errors caused by text transmissions. There are also cases of the breakdown of standard spellings and orthographic conventions from the dialect of “Vorlage” that hide the lexical assignment of a word. Since one is dealing here with the earliest text material of the late Aramaic period, they can be taken as a significant contribution to the placing of many lexemes in existing dictionaries.

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 argues 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. The second part (published in a forthcoming issue of BSOAS) 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.

At the end of the second century ah al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) advocated stoning as the sole penalty for adultery instead of an earlier rule that combined flogging with stoning. Al-Shāfiʿī's innovative doctrine was barely noticed by the jurisprudents, exegetes and ḥadīth collectors during the first half of the third century ah, but apparently provoked a legal debate shortly thereafter. This article explores the development of the third-century dual- vs. single-penalty dispute and its implications for the chronology of al-Shāfiʿī's Risāla.

This study examines the treatment of meat in Assyrian state cult of the first millennium bce. To this aim, the administrative and cultic textual evidence about offerings of whole animals, meat cuts, and meat-based culinary preparations are considered here. After an overview of the meat offerings in the ritual action of a series of Assyrian cult ceremonies, the enquiry focuses on the culinary treatment, presentation, and manipulation of the sacrificial meat; the evidence discussed reveals that the culinary treatment of the meat offered differed according to the deity and the cultic occasion.

The work of the late Pierre Hadot has transformed our understanding of the practice of philosophy, especially in the pre-modern world. This article interrogates how we approach the study of later Islamic philosophy, especially the thought of the Safavid sage Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635), and considers whether the method proposed by Hadot is applicable to this intellectual tradition. While there is much to be gained from the application of a cognate hermeneutics of the text, I also suggest that we still do not know enough about the actual practice of philosophy, of philosophical communities in the Safavid period, to consider whether it constitutes a real intellectual and structural continuity with the late antique Neoplatonic past. Nevertheless, the paradigm of approaching philosophy as a way of life propounded by Hadot does seem to be the best way of making sense of philosophy in Safavid Iran.

This article examines the Kashshāf, the Quran commentary of the Muʿtazilite al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144). This involves: (1) the continuous reading of the commentary on two sūras; (2) the study of al-Zamakhsharī's commentary in the Kashshāf on Quranic passages used by him or his teacher Ibn al-Malāḥimī (d. 536/1141) in their theological treatises; and (3) an analysis of a report claiming that al-Zamakhsharī had begun his commentary with the blatantly Muʿtazilite statement: “Praise be to God who created the Quran”. The conclusion is that the results of the study of the commentary on the two sūras reflect the overall theological content of the Kashshāf and that to consider the Kashshāf to be a Muʿtazilite Quran commentary amounts more to looking at the theological school of its author and to accepting medieval hearsay than it does to drawing conclusions based on a detailed examination of the relevant sources.

This article examines the role of petitions to the Sultan concerning private disputes in the legal system of Ottoman Egypt during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Previous studies have seen petitioning as a means for subjects to complain about abuses carried out by Ottoman officials: few scholars have engaged with the many petitions involving private disputes between subjects. Based on both original petitions and Ottoman bureaucratic records, this article consists of two parts and an appendix. Part 1 describes the petitioning process, including the procedure followed by the imperial palace when handling petitions. Part 2 analyses the various ways in which sending a petition could affect the outcome of a dispute. The appendix features a reproduction and transcription of a petition which has been annotated by several palace officials, illustrating its progress through the palace bureaucracy.

This article fits into the general picture of investigations on meta-historical thinking in Antiquity, as well as possible links between Persian apocalyptic literature and early Christian literature. The paper also explores the long-standing debate on the influence of Zoroastrian thought on Jewish–Christian apocalyptic – or whether it was rather the other way round.

Since the sack of Somnath by Maḥmūd of Ghazna in 1025–26, Somnath has been a byword for religious orthodoxy, intolerance and conflict between Muslims and Hindus. Yet looking further than Maḥmūd's greed for the temple's gold and later the Delhi sultans' appetite for territory, Somnath and most other towns of Saurashtra had long-established settlements of Muslims engaged in international maritime trade. The settlers, while adhering to their own values, respected their hosts and their traditions and enjoyed the support of the local rajas. It is only in recent years that Hindu nationalist parties have revived the story of Maḥmūd to evoke resentment against the era of Muslim domination, with the aim of inducing communal tensions and gaining political power. The inscriptions and many mosques and Muslim shrines in this Hindu holy city and its vicinity bear witness to the long history of harmonious co-existence between Hindus and Muslims. This paper explores the Muslim culture of Somnath by studying its major mosques. Through an analytic exploration of the typology of the mosques of Saurashtra, the paper demonstrates that while the old centres of power in Gujarat lay outside Saurashtra it is in Somnath and its neighbouring towns that numerous mosques dating from prior to the sultanate of Gujarat still stand. These monuments help illuminate our understanding of early Muslim architecture in Gujarat and its aesthetic evolution from the time of the peaceful maritime settlements to the establishment of the Gujarat Sultanate.

This article brings together evidence from both documentary texts and royal inscriptions from Susa in order to develop a chronological and historical perspective on the transitional period between the loss of control of the Ur III empire and the institutionalization of the Sukkalmaḫ regime. A study of the archaeological and archival context of the administrative texts resulted in a new chronology for the beginning of the Sukkalmaḫat, the basic argument for which is the early dating of the rule of Atta-ḫušu. Newly discovered inscriptions and new interpretations of existing inscriptions serve not only to adjust this chronology, but also to pave the way for an innovative and coherent socio-economic history of the early Sukkalmaḫat.

This article examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman sources for the Funj sultanate that ruled the Gezira and Nile Valley regions of the modern Sudan. It also aims to elucidate the relationship between the Ottoman empire and the Funj sultanate. In the first part of the article, the sixteenth-century Ottoman sources, largely documents from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, are translated and analysed. In the second part, two seventeenth-century Ottoman accounts of the Funj are examined: that by the famous Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, and that by the geographer Abu Bekr el-Dimaşki. The text of the relevant passage from Dimaşki's work is provided alongside a translation. The article also examines evidence for religious links between the Ottomans and the Funj.

In light of the recent discovery of Warring States period bamboo slips, now in the collection of Tsinghua University, inscribed with texts described as shu, “documents” or “similar to shu”, this article explores the question of “what were shu?” It suggests that shu can be understood as a literary form apart from the history of the Confucian classic, the Shang shu 尚書 (Ancient Documents) or Shu jing 書經 (Book of Documents) and the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書. Formal characteristics include: shu were – or pretended to be – contemporaneous records; and shu include formal speeches by model kings and ministers from ancient times. Many shu include the expression wang ruo yue 王若曰, which is also found in bronze inscriptions, where it indicates that a royal speech was read aloud by an official. Thus, the literary form originated with the practice of composing speeches in writing before they were read out in formal ceremonies, with a bamboo slip copy presented to the officials addressed. Later shu were fictional compositions, written in the style of these ancient documents.

The Archives of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) include a small lot of material relating to the three expeditions to western China organized and financed by Count Ōtani Kozui (1902–14), with the aim of exploring Buddhist sites. Ōtani also recognized the significance of promoting their results outside of Japan and integrating them into the international academic community, primarily Britain. Since his collection was later dispersed, the material in the RGS Archives provides valuable information on the expeditions and clarifies the context for some of the discoveries. In addition, it evidences traces of the interaction between Japanese and British scholarly circles, as an example of the complex international network of scholarship on Central Asia in the early part of the twentieth century. It also shows the efforts invested by the Japanese side in trying to have their results acknowledged as being equal to those of Western explorers.

The Golden Window above the Golden Door of Caukoṭ Darbār, a building on the western side of the (former) Royal Palace complex, is a major attraction in the city of Patan (Nepal). The gilt window panel features a representation of Avalokiteśvara in his form as Sṛṣṭikartā (“creator”) emanating Hindu divinities from his body. The sides, base and tympanum of the window likewise display Hindu divinities. The construction of the window has been ascribed to different kings of the late Malla period (1483–1768) and is said to illustrate their support for the Buddhist practices of their subjects, while providing a Hindu interpretative framework for such practices. In this paper I identify the divinities on the window and examine textual and visual sources that shed light on the date of the window's construction, including the inscriptions above and at the sides of the Golden Door. I show that there is no evidence for such an early dating of the window and that the Golden Window was probably constructed sometime in the nineteenth century in either the Śāh period (1769–1846) or, more likely, the Rāṇā period (1846–1951). I conclude with some thoughts on the possible significance of the peculiar configuration of divinities surrounding the Bodhisattva on the window.

This paper shows the existence of a pretonic assimilation of *y to a following coronal consonant (including *y from proto-Semitic *y and *w) in North-West Semitic languages. This rule, which has been obscured by analogy in each of the North-West Semitic languages, explains three independent sets of facts: the formation of irregular maqtal-s in Hebrew, Phoenician and Aramaic; the irregular conjugations of several verbs in Hebrew; and the plural formation of the irregular noun “house” in Hebrew and Aramaic. This proposal also solves the long-standing problem of the etymology of the verb “to give” in North-West Semitic languages (NTN in Hebrew vs. YTN in Phoenician).