Professor Athar Ali (born 18 January 1925) studied at Aligarh Muslim University 1948–53. His PhD studies were supervised by Professor Satish Chandra. In 1953 he was appointed research assistant at the university and became a Professor in 1978. He was Wilson Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute in 1986, Smuts Fellow, Cambridge, 1974–5 a nd President of the Indian History Congress in 1989. His major publications are The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Aligarh, 1966) and The Apparatus of Empire (Delhi, 1985). Sadly he died not long after this article was accepted for publication and was therefore unable to see it in print.

In his influential work, Max Weber argued that the Middle East was fatally hampered in the development of a modern civil society by the existence of arbitrary Qadi justice, based on the personalized decisions of a judiciary reliant only on case law for precedent and lacking any form of rational organization. This individualistic judicial structure (or lack of structure) allowed authoritarian regimes to subvert the courts for their own purposes, destroying the possibility of the development of an autonomous citizenry; meanwhile, in Europe the evolution of a rationally codified legal system acted as a check on governmental tyranny and provided a space for the evolution of independent civic organizations.

Five manuscripts from the collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg contain compositions which are connected in one way or another with the name of the outstanding medieval astronomer and astrologer Abū Ma‘shar Balī (born in Bali on AH 20 Safar 171/10 August 787 AD, died at Wasef on AH 29 Ramazan 272/9 March 886 AD).2 According to existing catalogues these five manuscripts are the only ones among those kept in the city collections that contain Abū Ma‘shar's works.

Arjuna is in many ways the central character of the Mahābhārata, the great Sanskrit epic. By order of birth he is the third among the Pāṇḍavas, the five sons of Pānḍu, who represent the forces of cosmic order. When, after humiliation and exile, the Pānḍ;avas finally triumph, primogeniture prevails, and it is the eldest brother, Yudhisfhira, who takes the throne; but in other respects, Arjuna is usually a more salient figure than his dutiful eldest brother. Thus it is to Arjuna that Krishna addresses his teaching in the Bhagavad Gitā (part of Book 6 of the Epic). Moreover although Pānḍu is pater to the five brothers, each has his own divine genitor, and the genitor of Arjuna is Indra, king of the gods in the classical pantheon. A paper about Arjuna is a paper about a major figure in Hindu tradition.