The study of Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years owing to a wave of new publications which have considerably enriched the corpus of texts now at the reader's disposal. In parallel, significant progress has been made in the identification, publication and study of accurate manuscripts of Babylonian Rabbinic literature. Based upon a close reading of recently published magic bowls from the Moussaieff Collection, this article seeks to indicate how the two corpora are mutually enlightening and dependent. An accurate reading and interpretation of the bowls depends upon an intimate knowledge of Babylonian Aramaic grammar, for which much is to be learnt from the best rabbinic manuscripts. At the same time, the magic bowls confirm the antiquity of many linguistic traits found in these rabbinic sources, and accordingly confirm their status as reliable witnesses to the Talmudic language.

This paper discusses Abdullah Cevdet, one of the founding members of the Young Turk ‘Committee of Union and Progress’, who in 1922 caused considerable public commotion by publishing an article favourable to the Baha'i religion in his journal İctihâd. He was prosecuted for attacking Islam and the prophet Mohammad by expressing his thoughts in favour of the Baha'i religion, recommending it as a world religion to replace Islam, which he deemed to be backward. It is argued here, in the context of Cevdet's Weltanschauung, that he did not use ‘Baha'ism’ merely as a tool to educate the Muslims in line with his Positivist ideas but that he identified himself with this new religious creed.

this article examines whether it is possible to trace eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalist thought to earlier ‘medieval’ examples. the discussion is centred on the issue of ijtiha¯d/taqli¯d, which featured prominently in revivalist thought. taking the example of scholars in thirteenth-century damascus, it firstly compares the respective readings of ijtiha¯d/taqli¯d, by focusing on one individual, abu¯ sha¯ma (d. 1267). it secondly asks whether a scholar like abu¯ sha¯ma, who had adopted a reading similar to later revivalists, also took a critical and oppositional stand against large sections of his contemporary society, i.e. a revivalist posture. it is this article's main contention that the example of abu¯ sha¯ma shows the need to study in more detail possible revivalist traditions prior to the ‘grand’ movements. the combination of the history of ideas and social history might allow a deeper understanding of how and in what contexts calls for reform and opposition to the current state of affairs were expressed.

Words which designate both themselves and their opposites can be found in many languages around the world. For the Arabic grammarians of the eighth and ninth centuries the existence of such a class of words was a concern as it was a potential hindrance to intelligibility and clarity of semantic interpretation. This paper seeks to engage one thread of that tradition, to reposition it in the context of more modern linguistic scholarship, and to expand on it implications for an understanding of language, all the while hopefully dispelling some of the more wanton psychological misconceptions it has engendered.

The first part of this article seeks to discuss the development of Islamic architectural calligraphy in Sultanate Bengal in the context of its cultural history. Most early Islamic monuments of the region had some kind of calligraphic embellishment since in Islamic culture inscriptions are considered a powerful medium for conveying visual, cultural and spiritual messages. These inscriptions were rendered in various styles: Ku¯fi¯, thulth, naskh, riqa¯‘, rayha¯ni¯, muhaqqaq, tughra¯‘ and Biha¯ri¯. The second part focuses on some hitherto unpublished inscriptions discovered by the author in Gaur and Pandua, two early capitals of the Sultans of Bengal. Special attention is paid to deciphering and editing these new epigraphic texts, and to the analysis of information derived from them in their historical context, such as the names of the contemporary rulers, local administrative officers, religious figures, military commanders and their titles. These findings help us understand the contemporary political, administrative, social, religious and cultural implications for the region.

scripture has ritual uses aimed at giving religion meaning in daily life. in zoroastrianism, the niya¯yišns, ‘invocations of praise’, and the yašts, ‘devotional poems’ have played fundamental roles in connecting doctrine and theology to praxis and conviction whereby faith and rites have been transmitted and augmented across many generations. this article discusses some of the contents and traditions of each niya¯yišn and yašt plus the functions those religious texts have fulfilled and continue to serve for zoroastrians from ancient through modern times.

For more than a millennium, cow slaughter has been a source of bitter contention in South Asia. Hindus revere the animal; Muslims like to eat it and, until recently, the cow has been the preferred animal of sacrifice at the Islamic festival of ‘Id-ul-Adha¯. This paper looks at how, over the twentieth century, Indian governments of differing type and ideological colour—British and princely during the late colonial period and Congress nationalist after 1947—have tried to mediate this vexed question. It finds that while policies differed widely, there was a tendency for all governments in the early twentieth century to be guided by social custom and local opinion, so that in the small Muslim-ruled state of Mangrol, which had an official ban, the Muslims who killed cows occasionally for food were never prosecuted so long as they kept their activities discreet—but this ‘discretionary’ option became politically unviable once the country embraced democracy.

steering between opposing explanations of religion as either sui generis or sociological construction, this paper argues for an alternative way of conceptualizing the phenomenon called ‘sikh theology’. normally attributed to the interior religious experience of the founder of sikhism, ‘sikh theology’, it will be argued, can more usefully be envisaged as the product of a discursive regime, a regime of colonial translation, which effectively demarcated the conceptual framework of modern sikhism. this regime of translation contains an ideology about religion that made translators such as ernest trumpp imagine the work of translation as providing a remedy for a scripture perceived as lacking conceptual coherence, or in the case of trumpp's non-sikh protagonist m.a. macauliffe, as based on a ‘dialogical interaction’ with sikh native informants. the paper's main focus is to show how key theological concepts passed from trumpp to macauliffe, and were inadvertently imbibed by writers of the exegetical commentaries on scripture such as bha¯i¯ vi¯r singh, even as they were contesting trumpp's odium theologicum.

This article examines the information given in the Quran, as distinct from the exegetical tradition, on the livelihoods pursued by the mushriku¯n to whom the Messenger was preaching. It finds them to be uniformly described as agriculturalists and seafarers. The purpose of their maritime activity is not usually specified, but on one occasion it is said to be for fishing. The believers, too, are agriculturalists in some passages, but they are more commonly described as traders. There is a wealth of passages depicting them as such, and preaching to them in commercial imagery, in the suras classified by the tradition as Medinese.

Plural markers in some languages are quite unlike their Indo-European counterparts in that their use does not depend only on number but also on other considerations (pragmatic, perspective-related and so on). This article gives an insight into how such plurals work, based on a careful analysis of the suffix -men in Mandarin Chinese.

The notion of personal collective is what universally underlies the so-called plural of personal pronouns. Benveniste (1966) has shown that in this case pluralization does not amount to an addition or multiplication of elements, but to what he calls ‘amplification of persons’, that is, a collective. In Chinese it is this pronominal plural that has been extended, under certain conditions, to nouns.

It is claimed that the occurrence of -men is governed by the conjunction of number (n>1) and person (reference to a subject-origin). Grammatical person is taken to refer to the space (and positions within it) organized around a subject-origin, normally the speaker. -Men requires that entities be related to a human locator who performs the role of the deictic centre and acts as the origin of point of view. The required conditions are by definition met with personal pronouns, which is why -men is obligatory, but are seldom satisfied with nouns, which is why the latter take the suffix only rarely. Most remarkably, when nouns are not reducible to pronouns, the occurrence of -men is associated with a shift in perspective. The group is considered from the point of view of a locator distinct from the speaker, not from that of the speaker. The speaker being essentially free to shift his viewpoint or not, this explains why -men is optional (though not arbitrary) with nouns in such contexts. Note that, all else being equal (n>1), the contrast between N and N-men is not one of number but of point of view (external versus internal point of view). In summary, the suffix operates in all cases with reference to a subject-origin, either the speaker or a protagonist whose point of view is provisionally adopted by the narrator.

The case of Chinese, far from being exotic, is a meaningful illustration of the interaction between the grammatical categories of number and person. This study opens up new typological perspectives in terms of grammaticalization of the pronominal versus nominal plural across languages.

many scholars accept that the magistrate under the qing (1644–1911) dealt with land and debt disputes with great discretion. through the investigation of first-hand court records of magistrates' reasons for accepting or rejecting land and debt petitions, this article demonstrates for the first time that the assumption and myth that the magistrate either returned petitions to mediators for settlement or dealt with them in a solomonic fashion does not hold water. the magistrate rejected or accepted petitions on the merits of individual cases in accordance with qing law. it shows that litigation on private matters in the qing was rationally administered even at this stage.

In this article I examini two problems regarding women's participation in shared saint veneration and festivals in the eastern Mediterranean and Iberia. First, I ascertain what women's practices were, whether women participated in or assigned meanings to rituals that were separate from those of men, and finally, whether these shared practices were enough to break down religious barriers between women so that we may speak of ‘women's piety’ or ‘women's religious culture’ as a category that extends beyond the confines of individual religious affiliations. Secondly, I explore the meanings that certain male writers assigned in these practices and their emphasis on the fact that it was women, according to them, who engaged in the rituals. I show that, in contrast to Christian or Jewish authors, many Muslim legalists focused on women as the primary participants in certain types of piety as a polemical strategy to denigrate religious practices of which they disapproved.

tigrinya (t[schwa]gr[schwa]ňňa) is, next to amharic, the most widely spoken semitic language in ethiopia, mainly in the tigre province and in eritrea. in most respects it is closer to the orthodox semitic typology than amharic. in terms of the number of semitic language speakers in general it follows arabic and amharic and surpasses hebrew by those who speak that language indigenously.

This paper attempts a periodization and dialectal attribution of Iranian loan words found in Tocharian A and B, two Indo-European languages attested in c. 10,000 fragments unearthed in Chinese Turkestan since 1892. More than 100 loan words are scritinized and classified in eight sections, according to their origin: Old Iranian (probably issued from the common ancestry of the ‘Sakan’ languages, Khotanese, Tumshuqese and Waxi), three different stages of Khotanese, ‘Śaka’, (the language of the Iranian invaders of northern India), Parthian, Bactrian and Sogdian. Tocharians had dealings with all neighbouring Iranian peoples, but Khotanese and its ancestors clearly exerted the most durable influence. No loan word from more remote dialects (e.g. Persian and Ossetic) can be evidenced. The predominance of war-related and political vocabulary among the loan words and the direction of borrowing, overwhelmingly from Iranian to Tocharian, both point to a political ascendancy of Sakan-speaking tribes, and later of Bactria, on Tocharians.

To judge from one recorded case, the Huichang persecution of Buddhism in China of 840–44 could have brought a number of relics of the Buddha into the hands of the government, and this might further have allowed the succeeding, more pro-Buddhist, emperor to carry out a redistribution of these sacred objects to enhance his own prestige, as had already been done twice by earlier rulers. But while it is clear that he was prepared to send a relic to Korea as part of a diplomatic mission, there would appear to be no surviving records confirming that any systematic large-scale distribution was carried out at this time. We must provisionally conclude therefore that a later systematic distribution in the tenth century was influenced—perhaps indirectly—by the earlier examples, not by any event of the mid ninth century.

The Xuanjie lu has long been recognized as an early recorded example of a printed text. The date of printing given in its preface suggests that its author, Hegan Ji, was about to be or had just been demoted from the governorship of Canton on the grounds of corruption, from where he was sent to Luoyang. This article argues for the latter place of publication, and suggests that the printing of ‘several thousand’ copies of this short work, while a notable achievement in itself, was perhaps primarily intended to recover the author's political fortunes—a goal in which the evidence suggests that he succeeded, to judge from a recently published inscription by one of his sons.