Like many other religions, Zoroastrianism frequently restructured its priestly organization during its long history, largely because of the environmental changes to which it was exposed. A major shift in status – from being the state religion in the Sasanian Empire to holding only a minor position in the early Islamic period – challenged the Zoroastrian hierarchy of authority. The Abbasid state provided Zoroastrianism with an opportunity to initiate a new office, which was called hu-dēnān pēšōbāy “Leader of the Zoroastrians”. This article is the first to deal with this office in detail and scrutinizes the concept of leadership (pēšōbāyīh) in Sasanian and Abbasid Zoroastrianism. It sheds some light on the priestly structure of Zoroastrianism in this period and investigates the position of the office within the overall religious organization. It re-examines, moreover, evidence for the officiating Zoroastrian theologians in this office at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. Finally, it searches for the parallels between this office and that of the East-Syrian catholicos and the Jewish exilarch.

The Geniza fragment T-S AS 161.50 contains three poems, all in Judaeo-Arabic, attributed to the Egyptian Sufi poet Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Abū ʿAbd Allāh, known as Ibn al-Kīzānī (d. 562/1167). None of the texts are present in his published dīwān. In the Egyptian section of his anthology Kharīdat al-qaṣr, Saladin's secretary ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 597/1201) testifies to the interest of Saladin in Ibn al-Kīzānī. We are thus in a unique position to evaluate the readership of this poet; while his followers called Kīzāniyya were already known, his popularity evidently extended not only across confessional lines to be read in a Jewish milieu, but also reached elite levels, despite his (according to ʿImād al-Dīn) “heterodox” beliefs. These new texts accordingly throw light on inter-religious and unorthodox currents normally not understood to have been promoted by Saladin and his avowedly Sunni successors.

This paper undertakes a close linguistic study of a unique translation of the gospels into Arabic as attested in three manuscript witnesses. The translation is unique insofar as it imitates the Quran, especially in lexicon and rhyme. Linguistically it mixes numerous features specific to the Quran with features from both the Classical Arabic (ClAr) tradition, including poetic archaisms not typical of standard ClAr, as well as from Christian Middle Arabic. I argue that the regnant framework for Middle Arabic – that it exists on a spectrum from dialects to standard Classical Arabic – is insufficient for understanding this text. Instead, we need to conceptualize the high register for at least some communities as encompassing distinctively Christian features, which originated as living features and had achieved prestige, along with ones from Classical Arabic and Quranic recitation traditions, and even Old Hijazi.

One cannot speak of the nineteenth-century Beirut Nahḍa and not mention Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–83). This article examines how al-Bustānī utilized the Arabic oratorical tradition and the innovative medium of print to create the Muʿallim brand. The first section analyses his Khuṭba fī Ādāb al-ʿArab (An Oration on the Culture of the Arabs, 1859) to illustrate how he operationalized the Arabic rhetorical style to position himself as an eloquent public intellectual. This article next discusses how he built parts of this lecture on sariqāt (literary thefts/legitimate borrowings) from his contemporaries and participated in the collective practice of knowledge production. Lastly, al-Bustānī's advertising tactics in print to promote his public persona are explored. This article demonstrates that al-Bustānī successfully established himself as the Muʿallim by coupling the enduring cultural power of Arabic oration with the modern might of print.

The Dürr-i meknūn (The Hidden Pearl) is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic works of fifteenth-century Ottoman literature. It consists of a digest of Islamic cosmology and cosmography engaging with a wide array of subjects, beginning with the Creation and concluding with the Last Judgement. The Dürr-i meknūn has long been attributed to the mystic and scholar Ahmed Bīcān and has accordingly been dated to between 1453 and 1466. However, building on the most recent research, which shows that Ahmed Bīcān could not possibly have penned the Dürr and that the text is in fact anonymous, this article provides a critical reading and new dating of the text by focusing on the apocalyptic prophecies found in Chapter 16. Using a novel methodology that integrates contextual and historical reading, with computations of Arabic gematria, my analysis demonstrates that the Dürr was composed in 1472–73, in anticipation of the Ottoman–Akkoyunlu confrontation at the Battle of Başkent, when fears were running high that the end of Ottoman rule was at hand.

This article presents an examination of the parallelism between the Mishnah and Tosefta in one discourse unit – the halakhic give-and-take conversation. It aims to show that a description of discourse units found in both compilations can contribute to the discussion of the relationship between the two compilations and the status of the Tosefta in regard to Mishnah. In the examined corpus of halakhic give-and-take conversations from the Mishnah and Tosefta from three orders, for only 16 conversations in the Tosefta (14%) was there found a parallel conversation in the Mishnah, and in most cases the parallels are not identical. The structural and linguistic comparison between these 16 parallel conversations showed that the conversations in the Tosefta contain more exchanges as well as more complete exchanges, and that the language in the Tosefta seems less redacted and earlier compared with the language in the parallel conversations in the Mishnah.

Since the 1990s several caches of New Persian documents have come to light in Afghanistan. These documents, written on paper, are now the most significant sources for understanding how New Persian in Arabic script was used as an administrative and legal language in the eastern Islamic lands between the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries before the Mongol conquest of Khurāsān. After a brief survey of the three main collections in which these New Persian paper documents are preserved today, this article presents a preliminary edition, translation and commentary on one of the New Persian documents held in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. The document, dated ah 608/1212 ce, is a record of court proceedings and the decision of a judge (qāḍī) in a lawsuit over water rights initiated by a woman.

This article looks at the history of jesters affiliated with the Iranian court during the Safavid and Zand periods. I present several case studies of jesters (dalqak), featuring Kal ʿEnāyat and Dalāleh Qezī from the Safavid period and Lūṭī Ṣāleḥ from the Zand period. From various primary resources including memoirs, European travelogues, and court-associated chronicles, I relate several accounts associated with these personalities and describe their unique relationship with the ruling shāh of their time. Through various staged and spontaneous performances involving irony, subterfuge, and satire, jesters – as embodied “mirrors for princes” – demonstrate the inherent precarity of the shāh's rule and the need to be accountable to his subjects. In comparing the Safavid jester to others across time and place, the performative simulation of transcending the status quo's gender, class, political, and moralistic boundaries will be shown to help preserve them.

The famous Moroccan traveller Muḥammad b. Baṭṭūṭa, who left Tangier in 1325, claims to have made a journey that took him across most of the then Islamicate world. The country in which he recounts having stayed the longest was India, where he says he remained from 1333 to 1341/1342, mostly in the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi. A long section of his Riḥla is dedicated to the sub-continent and modern historians of this region ascribe to it an important documentary value, although it has been argued that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may have borrowed – not to imply copied – information from other sources in other parts of the work. As concerns India, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa speaks of two epidemics and one deadly disease that occurred in 1334–5 and 1344. Some scholars have referred to them as cholera, while others have suggested it was the plague – thus supporting the hypothesis that the medieval plague pandemic had struck India before reaching the Middle East. How did this confusion arise? What exactly does Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla relate? Do Indo-Persian sources confirm these epidemics? Do they and/or Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla allow us to discount the presence of the Medieval Plague in India, or rather do they assert it?

In order to answer these questions, this paper analyses the information on the Indian epidemics in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla and compares the text with its translations in the principal European languages and with Indo-Persian chronicles. These analyses reveal something of a lexical muddle which, in my opinion, has contributed to some errors and misunderstandings regarding the diseases in question. But another question arises: is it possible to read the information provided by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Indian chronicles in a consilient way, that is, taking into account not only the analysis of written documents, but also the recent and current findings in genetics of plague, and in particular on the Black Death? Finally, an attempt is made to answer a question that has to be asked, particularly in light of the criticism often levelled at Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Considering that in one of these events he claims to have witnessed the epidemic, is there any reason to suppose that he did not? Regarding the other two events that he did not claim to witness firsthand, is there any cause to doubt his claims?

This paper examines a pattern in Sanskrit literature, labelled for convenience the “eropolitical compound”. This is a formula whereby a male protagonist's claiming of a feminine figure is made instrumental to, or tied indissociably with, a political victory or reclamation of control over a public domain. This paper first reviews a number of examples of the motif in well-known works of drama, poetry, and eulogistic inscriptions largely of the fourth–seventh centuries ce, setting these against the particular historical and social contexts in which they occur. In a second step, the motif is identified at work in other genre and historic contexts of Sanskrit tradition, suggesting thereby that the figure also requires treatment at a broader level of analysis. The paper's third and final step is to adopt from Simone de Beauvoir the constructs of immanence, transcendence, and the woman as Other, in order to argue that the eropolitical compound is indeed a kind of formula or persisting theme that cuts across multiple historic and genre contexts, and that it should be seen as a normative construct reflecting and enacting a common strategy of patriarchal cultures.

With the exception of legal texts, surviving records of rape in early China have been the subject of little academic study to date. This is the result of a number of factors, including the criminalization of both consensual and non-consensual sex outside of marriage in ancient China, the tradition of using euphemistic vocabulary to refer to such topics, considerable variation, depending on time and place, as to what constitutes rape and discomfort that some very famous men are said to have committed crimes of rape and sexual violence. This article examines two famous and well-documented incidents – one concerning the rape of a woman in peacetime, the other an instance of mass gang rape during war – to explore the specific challenges of studying sexual violence in ancient civilizations. Ignoring early accounts of rape serves to significantly distort our understanding of some key events in Chinese history and perverts the textual record.

The Qaŋlï (Qangli) Turks were a numerous people, active in Eurasia in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, but their ultimate origins remain a matter of debate. Often considered by modern scholars to be a part of the Kipchaks (Cumans), others have different opinions. One of these links them to cart-riding early medieval Turkic tribes called Tägräks, known in Chinese sources as Tiele 鐵勒, among other forms. This article examines the earliest possible (eighth-century) references to the Qaŋlïs in the historical sources, and points to the potential links between them and various tribes seen among Turko-Mongol groupings of the ninth to tenth centuries mentioned in the Chinese sources, such as the Black Carts (Heichezi 黑車子). Another aspect that this article focuses on is how both historical and mythological texts of the Mongol period show the Qaŋlïs to be a people distinct from the Kipchaks. Ultimately, this study, which is based on both historical sources and modern research, proposes to locate the origins of the Qaŋlï Turks among Tägräk tribes.

This article explores the political crisis before Wu Ding. The accession of king Wu Ding to the throne was not a given but the result of a political move by his father Xiao Yi. It must be seen as one of the consequences of an earlier political crisis named the “nine generations chaos” by Sima Qian, during which an attempt to share royal power between two royal lines finally collapsed and led to a move by Pan Geng to a new capital. This new city has recently been discovered north of the Huai river. The political crisis of the time led Shang kings to try to implement a unilineal system of succession. Other steps, ritual in particular, were involved after the reign of the king Zu Jia, one of the reigning sons of Wu Ding, in order to ensure the primacy of the unilineal system of royal succession.

This paper reviews the evidence and arguments for reconstructing a person–number agreement paradigm for the Proto-Trans-Himalayan (=Sino-Tibetan) verb, and assesses the counter-arguments which have been presented in the literature. We demonstrate the cognacy of verb agreement paradigms across the family, and show that there is no plausible subclassification of the family which would place all the attesting languages in a single branch of the family, and no case for a “Rung” branch. The agreement systems of Jinghpaw and Northern Naga and the archaic postverbal paradigms of South Central/Kuki-Chin are demonstrably cognate to those of Rgyalrongic and Kiranti, and these languages have no common ancestor more recent than PTH.

This article proposes a new etymology for the Nuristani word family of Katë lod ~ lot, Nuristani Kalasha lād, etc. It is argued that these are best understood as early borrowings from Bactrian λαδο “law”.

This article deals with the identification and interpretation of two rare Middle Persian words. Firstly, some attestations of the as yet unrecognized word <hs’lyh> hassārīh are discussed, showing that it means “direction”. Then, a semantic analysis of its underived counterpart hassār is carried out, as a basis for an etymological proposal. Finally, it is argued that hassār descends from Old Persian *haçā-sāra- “(having the head) in the same direction”, and a possible reconstruction of the semantic development of the word is provided.

By focusing on a controversial figure in Northern Song China (960–1127), namely Xing Shu 邢恕, this paper traces the historiographical construction of particular scholar-officials in Chinese historical accounts. Xing Shu, one of the best students of the Daoxue 道學 master Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), was depicted in most historical writings as a betrayer of his teacher and a political opportunist, including in his biography in the official Song dynastic history. This article demonstrates how the testimonies of Xing Shu's contemporaries offered rich materials for the construction of his treacherous character in later written records. Through a careful examination of these testimonies, the article reveals various historiographical operations through which contemporary testimonies were modified and transformed into seemingly reliable documents of historical figures and thus passed to later generations.

The paper surveys the distribution of the titles bcan po and khri in historical and non-historical documents of the Tibetan Empire. Their patterns of usage suggest the existence of strict rules that governed the bestowal of the titles within the royal family. In the second part of the paper a new chronology of succession to the throne in the Tibetan imperial dynasty is put forward, based not only on Tibetan imperial documents and post-imperial historiographical works but also on Chinese written sources.

This paper analyses the intricate and extraordinary style of the influential prose writer Han Yu (768–824). It uncovers his innovative use of grammar and rhetoric and explores how this works to emphasize his theme through an in-depth analysis of his “Miscellaneous Discourses” series. The series, named for what was a budding literary genre in Tang times, later became a popular anthology selection. It showcases the linguistic intricacy of Han's renowned “long sentences” and “reverse writing”, while also demonstrating the use of various rhetorical devices, all employed to create visual effects befitting the themes. The seamless match of style and theme strengthens the persuasive power of each essay and realizes the great potential of ancient-style prose. The findings speak broadly to linguistic and rhetorical development in ways that are relevant to literary studies in general.

With a view to the necessities as well as the possible problems of a document-based administration, this paper approaches the area of conflict between standardization and flexibility in the production of administrative documents in ancient China. Recently published sources from the imperial Qin period (221–207 bce) have provided the opportunity to compare administrative documents excavated at Liye with standards regulating their production. With the help of two case studies, the paper explores to what extent official document standards were implemented in everyday practice or purposefully neglected in ancient Qianling county. It also discusses which standards were followed more closely than others, and what might be the reasons behind this. Shedding light on the large grey zone between faithful adherence and complete neglect, the paper suggests that officials chose a pragmatic way influenced by both economic considerations informed by the local circumstances and the requirements imposed by the central government.