In the focus of this article is the complex problem to validate the deliberate disposal of a Muslim's own life for an Islamically sustained cause – popular modus operandi in the contemporary religiously inspired militant contexts – from a range of religious perspectives. While the general tenor suggest that such an action constitutes deliberate suicide (qatl nafsah) and is to be firmly rejected, the eschatological concept of ‘martyrdom’ (istishhād) adds an alternative interpretation that allows for a positive and even commendable appraisal of such an act.

It is shown here that, from the formative period of Islam onwards, Muslim exegetes, theologians, jurists and philosophers have struggled to come to some kind of agreement over what delineates ‘suicide’ from ‘martyrdom’. Underlying all those attempts is the question what constitutes ‘life’: it appears that the substantial differences in the appraisal of a Muslim's disposal of her or his own life are, in fact, rooted in different conceptions of ‘life’ itself. It is shown how the dismissal of such acts as ‘suicide’ or endorsement as ‘martyrdom’ was, and is, sustained by complex theological and philosophical arguments, including those of volition versus predetermination, as well as such on vegetative growth versus the eudemonistic ‘good life’. Depending on which view is being adopted, one and the same act of disposing one's own life can either be consistently denounced as religiously reprehensible, or equally consistently as religiously commendable.

This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on immigrants from Safavid Iran who travelled back and forth between their home cities and Hind during the early modern period. Intending to better comprehend some of the key mentalities and social practices of these cosmopolitan Persianate communities, I explore the literary strategies by which migrants worked to negotiate their place in rapidly transforming and highly competitive political environments in both Hind and Iran. Focusing on migration narratives that were commonly embedded in Persian historical works, I examine a cluster of local and dynastic histories that were composed in dialogue with one another and that emerged around a particular corridor of migration linking the Iranian city of Yazd with various cities in the Deccan. Previous scholarship has argued that immigrants could acquire social capital in their new environments by commemorating ties to Iranian cities through narratives of migration. I demonstrate that migrants also brought migration stories they had found in the Deccan back to their hometowns in Iran, where they redeployed them for similar political ends in new works of history.

The irruption of the Mongols led to profound changes in the political, cultural and confessional climate of the thirteenth-century Near East. While many did not survive the initial onslaught and the years of turmoil that followed, and rulers that opposed the Mongols were largely swept away, the communities and dynasties that remained were forced to seek some sort of accommodation with the new overlords. While subjection to the Mongol yoke was far from desirable, rulers could seek to make the best of the situation, in the hope that the ambitions of the Mongols might come to match their own, or that the Mongols might be persuaded to support their cause. This paper will consider how certain Christian groups in the Near East sought to reconcile themselves to the Mongol presence, and how they sought to place these alien invaders within a more familiar framework. In particular it will examine the visual evidence for this process by looking at a couple of appearances of recognisably Mongol figures within Christian artwork, dating from the time of the second major Mongol invasion of the region, led by the Ilkhan Hülegü, which by 1260 had extended Mongol power into Syria and to the borders of Egypt.1

The paper discusses the questions of the alleged conversion of Arghun Aqa, the powerful Mongol governor of great parts of Western Asia in the mid-13th century, to Islam, claimed by the famous Armenian historian Kirakos. While in the end dismissing the historicity of this claim, the paper uses a variety of archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic and literary sources in order to highlight the great role the Islamic beliefs and identity of the surrounding Persianised society played in the continuous Islamic acculturation of Arghun Aqa and his family since the earliest phases of their presence in Iran.

Between 1759 and 1800, Surat, still an important trade and financial centre, was under the ultimate rule of the East India Company. Although the EIC justified this as necessary for protecting Surat's inhabitants and, most particularly, the local merchant class, the Company failed not only to protect the Surat merchants against the depredations of Great Britain's European enemies, but also to safeguard the merchants from extortion by local EIC top officials. In fact, the latter imposed what was essentially a protection racket on trade from Surat to the Middle East. This article focuses on the Surat merchants’ long-drawn out and ultimately unsuccessful struggle against what, in the official documents, was dubbed the [British] monopoly of the trade to the “Gulphs”. The episode demonstrates two theses: the first is that the interests of the Surat merchants held little importance to the EIC or its officials, and the second is that, during the period under examination, no mutually beneficial partnership tied the British to the Surat merchants — rather, the relationship was one of naked exploitation by the former of the latter.

This paper revisits the intersection of the 19th and 20th century to bring into focus hitherto unused archival and diplomatic correspondence from the attempts to define and delimit a boundary between India and China. The theoretical point of departure for the paper is to discern how perception (knowledge, beliefs, and norms) relating to the boundary evolved over time to alter the meaning and construction of the material reality i.e. the boundary itself. In doing so it establishes how what each country deems today, as its ‘traditional customary boundary’ was not an unambiguous fixed one, but was mutable across different time periods. The political importance of the selection of these boundary lines did not lie in their being ‘true’, or in the claim being ‘real’ but in their being shared by a process of political selection, and then being reified in the respective countries.

If we were asked to recall a coastal city of early modern China, most of us would choose Shanghai, Canton, Xiamen, or Macau. These port cities became famous for facilitating trans-regional sea trade that linked the Qing Empire to the rest of the world. Attentive observers know that all of these cities are located on the Southeast China coast, by which we mean the coastal areas south of Shanghai. Taking Shanghai as the dividing line between the northeastern and southeastern coastlines, the port cities of the south are far more likely to be familiar to us than are those of the north. I consider this phenomenon (i.e. the focus on the coast of early modern China) to be a “Southeast China centrism.” And although we might all concede that some southeastern seaports were vital to transoceanic interactions, it is shortsighted to ignore the northern port cities and the role they played in connecting China with the maritime world. In this article I investigate the importance of Northeast China's port cities by focusing particular attention on the less familiar coastal seaport of Dengzhou. By detailing and examining the political and economic importance of this port city in the early modern period, I will show that Qing China's northeastern coast was no less important than the southeast. Even if China's northern port cities might not have been as economically vibrant as those in the south, we should not overlook their functions and histories. Indeed, they also attained unique patterns of political and economic development throughout the long eighteenth century.